The Web site ctpost.com is running an article by "Peter H. Stone and Michael Isikoff, The Center for Public Integrity and NBC News," under the headline, "Hedge-fund execs bankrolled GOP victory campaigns." The article makes hay out of some campaign contributions to Republicans by hedge fund managers, but it entirely omits the many hedge fund managers who gave thousands of dollars to Democrats.

A few observations on the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others and the reaction to it:

The New York Post has an editorial blaming the Internet and anonymity: "To be sure, contemporary political rhetoric is often ugly; Internet anonymity encourages bad behavior -- and that, in turn, debases discourse generally." This is the same New York Post that has been known, maybe once or twice (a page) to use anonymous sources itself.

Paul Krugman has a column quoting an Arizona sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, blaming, "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business."

The New York Times has an editorial about the news that "2010 was the fourth year in a row that individual investors withdrew more money than they added to funds that invest in American stocks. Some $80 billion was withdrawn in 2010, on top of nearly $240 billion in the three years before that." The paper attributes the news to "doubt about the economy" and "a loss of faith in financial markets."

There's no evidence that vaccines cause autism. Yet a "self-indulgent and irresponsible" press corps following a "he said, she said" paradigm has spread that unsubstantiated claim to the point that once-rare, deadly diseases are coming back because parents swayed by these false reports are deciding not to vaccinate their children.

That's the core argument of Seth Mnookin's new book The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. Mr. Mnookin is a smooth writer and a hardworking reporter, and The Panic Virus puts both his writing and reporting talents on fine display.

For a journalist, Mr. Mnookin is unusually direct in naming the names of other journalists he thinks did a poor job of covering the vaccine story. He's particularly hard on NBC's Lea Thompson and New York Times contributor David Kirby, but Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, Oprah Winfrey, Tim Russert, Don Imus, Larry King, Joe Scarborough, the BBC, and Greta Van Susteren all come in for criticism.

The Wall Street Journal has an article that appears under the headline "Apple's Jobs Grows Richer Despite $1 Salary." It reports, "Apple Inc. chief Steve Jobs again took an annual salary of $1 in 2010, representing his total compensation for the year, the technology giant said Friday in a regulatory filing." It goes on, "Mr. Jobs is widely known for taking the $1 salary, which has been his practice since rejoining the company as chief executive officer in 1997."

If you actually take a look at the 2011 Apple proxy statement, though, you'll see that, "In 2001, the Company entered into a Reimbursement Agreement with Mr. Jobs for the reimbursement of expenses incurred by Mr. Jobs in the operation of his private plane when used for the Company's business. The Company recognized a total of approximately $248,000, $4,000 and $871,000 in expenses pursuant to the Reimbursement Agreement during 2010, 2009 and 2008, respectively."

It's easy to forget at times here amid the celebration of private enterprise and the condemnation of excessive government interventions that there are some noble government employees out there and that the work they do in enforcing the rule of law makes America what it is.

I was reminded of that personally this morning at the funeral of David Trager, who in a long career served as both a federal prosecutor and a federal district court judge in Brooklyn.

Eulogies were offered by one of Trager's colleagues on the bench, Edward Korman, and by two of Judge Trager's children. Two stories particularly struck me.

The first was told by the judge's son, who reported that in addition to his father's many other roles, he served as "self-appointed Turtle Warden of East Hampton." This was a job that involved, upon sighting a turtle attempting to cross a road, parking the car at roadside and then directing traffic around the turtle, at some physical risk to the turtle warden, for the ten minutes or so that it took for the turtle to cross the road.

A professor at the University of Chicago, Raghuram Rajan, has a piece up about the jobs numbers:

the history of recent recessions suggests that we should not be surprised that the job recovery is taking time. There is, however, an aspect of the problem that is different this time: layoffs in construction....

In the last boom, construction jobs expanded significantly, with investment in housing as a share of GDP increasing by 50% from 1997 to 2006. As my colleague Erik Hurst and his co-authors have shown, states that had the largest rise in construction as a share of GDP in 2000-2006 tended to have the greatest contraction in that industry in 2006-2009. These states also tended to have the largest rise in unemployment rates between 2006 and 2009.

For a sense of where President Obama's new director of the National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, is coming from, this 2007 article from the journal Democracy is a good place to look:

Unfortunately, what people most want from government–a plan to save specific jobs or to pinpoint where new ones are coming from–is where government is not the most competent. After all, it was not long ago that the U.S. government was convinced that one of the fastest-growing occupations in the new economy would be travel agents.

More:

Writing at National Review, the Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas calls for the SEC to, in essence, step in and shut down Goldman Sachs's plan to let its clients invest in Facebook by counting each Goldman client as an individual investor for the purpose of the 500-investor limit, rather than counting them all as one:

At first glance, this arrangement appears to be none of our business. Goldman's rich clients often have their own high-priced advisers, and they should know what they're doing. If they want to pay hefty fees — "a 4 percent initial fee plus 5 percent of any profits," says Cohan – to run the risk of losing their own money in an opaque venture underwritten by an opaque investment firm, let 'em.

The problem is, though, that we're inching toward a financial world comprised not of public exchanges but of private agreements like this one.

The New York Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Paul Krugman, has a new article out about Texas's budget issues. At least two sentences are worth mentioning. The first:

Texas has a rapidly growing population — largely, suggests Harvard's Edward Glaeser, because its liberal land-use and zoning policies have kept housing cheap.

That Glaeser analysis was the topic of a post here back on December 30. In it, the word Professor Glaeser used to describe the land-use and zoning policies wasn't "liberal" but "laissez-faire." The policies are liberal in the sense of classical liberalism — free-market — not "liberal" in the Paul Krugman/Upper West Side sense. Anyway, it's nice to see Professor Krugman and the Times restoring the meaning of the word "liberal" to its original one.

Four days after President Obama signed into law the Zadroga bill providing no-cost health care to people who were near ground zero on September 11, 2001, or afterward, a law firm is already advertising for clients. The Web site sept11-zadroga-act.com, maintained by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, advises visitors: "The assistance of a lawyer is not required, but it is recommended." I got to the site via a paid Google text ad.

Federal Election Commission records show that a lawyer at the firm, James P. Kreindler, contributed a total of $4,800 in September of 2010 to the campaign of the senator who championed the September 11 health bill, Kirsten Gillibrand. In the same month, Mr. Kreindler gave $2,400 to the campaign of Senator Harry Reid.

Other Kreindler & Kreindler lawyers donating to Senator Gillibrand in September 2010:

Michel Baumeister, $1,000 on September 2.

Andrew J. Maloney III, $500 on September 13.

From a commentary by David Malpass at Economic Polices for the 21st Century:

The Fed already has a huge self-interested constituency, Wall Street, primed to support broader Fed bond purchases. The Fed's August preannouncement of Treasury bond purchases gave the bond market a juicy buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news opportunity to buy ahead of the Fed and then use the Fed's purchases as an exit strategy, taking a huge market profit off the Fed. This strategy also worked on the Fed's December 2008 MBS purchase announcement, giving Wall Street a huge profit buying MBS in advance of the Fed. The cost to the economy and savers of these concentrated profits is spread across the entire system, and will grow as the Fed expands. There'll be another round of concentrated profits whenever the Fed buys a new asset class or ultimately tries to divest itself.

He also reports, "The Federal Reserve System (including the regional banks) already has 22,000 employees."

The annual report to Congress by the National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, is worth a look:

taxpayers and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours a year complying with tax-filing requirements. To place this in context, it would require more than three million full-time employees to work 6.1 billion hours, making "tax compliance" one of the largest industries in the United States.

She also signs on to the argument I made in the post on "Tax Reform and Deficits," that, as I put it, "there's a danger inherent in mixing up tax reform and deficit reduction....mixing up tax reform with a government grab for even more revenue risks giving tax reform a bad name by associating it with tax increases, which are unpopular."

She writes:

The New York Times has a feature on six businesses that did not survive 2010. My favorite is an Oregon-based architectural firm whose founder is named Richard Barbis. The Times explains: "Too much of the company's work was in the private sector, Mr. Barbis said, as opposed to the public sector where many projects were financed with government stimulus money."

Nicholas Kristof has a column in the New York Times suggesting that for-profit businesses may do more to help Haiti than charities:

What Haiti needs above all these days is these kinds of livelihoods for its people, not just shipments of food and clothing. It's hard to think of a charitable project that will be as beneficial as the Coca-Cola Company's decision to build up the mango juice industry in Haiti, supporting 25,000 farmers. The same is true of the move by South Korean garment companies to open factories in Haiti.