Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz takes up an anti-Wikileaks argument earlier proffered by Jamie Kirchick. Mr. Crovitz writes:

For defenders of WikiLeaks who claim there's been no harm done: Do you really want to support one of the world's most repressive regimes? Robert Mugabe had his thugs disrupt the 2008 elections in Zimbabwe, but in a compromise, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was made prime minister. One leaked State Department cable reports that Mr. Tsvangirai in 2009 pleaded with U.S. and European diplomats to maintain sanctions, which focused on the assets of the Mugabe regime, in order to keep pressure for political reform. He acknowledged that in public he felt obliged to call for an end to the sanctions. Mr. Mugabe's appointed attorney general is now investigating Mr. Tsvangirai for treason.

The deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl, has a scathing column about the President Obama-Secretary Clinton record on foreign policy when it comes to promotion of freedom, democracy, and human rights: "So much for a fresh start on human rights. Clinton's Bahrain visit reflected what seems to be an intractable piece of the Obama administration's character: a deeply ingrained resistance to the notion that the United States should publicly shame authoritarian regimes or stand up for the dissidents they persecute. ...In Latin America, friends of the United States marvel at its passivity as Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega systematically crush civil society organizations and independent media."

Goldman Sachs's $450 million investment in Facebook, a deal which reportedly includes a promise by Goldman to raise an additional $1.5 billion or so for Facebook from Goldman clients, is a pretty good response to those critics of Goldman who say the firm is just a vampire squid that enriches itself by speculative short-term proprietary trading at the expense of the Main Street economy and that doesn't provide anything of value.

Copies of Walter Williams's autobiography Up From the Projects are temporarily out of stock at Amazon.com and used copies are selling for $168. The book was published December 1, 2010 by Hoover Institution Press. If listeners to right-wing talk radio are such a bunch of racists as the left says they are, why are they buying so many books by conservative black economists?

Professor Williams was on the Rush Limbaugh show last week with Mark Steyn guest-hosting.

"For-Profit Colleges Charge More While Doing Less" is the headline Bloomberg News put over a news article that in fact describes in detail a whole series of ways that the for-profit colleges are doing more for students than are competing community and state-owned colleges. According to the article, the for-profits offer students less crowded classes, with seats, courses that are easier to enroll in, and teachers who can be fired if they don't do a good job. The headline is just inaccurate, and, like so much of the press coverage of the for-profits, is slanted against the for-profits.

The New York Times steps up its campaign against income inequality, throwing Nicholas Kristof into battle to reinforce Frank Rich and Eduardo Porter. Mr. Kristof's column doesn't distinguish between equality of opportunity and equality of results, between income inequality, asset inequality, and other types of inequality, or between pre-tax, pre-transfer income inequality and post-tax, post-transfer income inequality. The column also says that "the gap between rich and poor fell during the Clinton administration," without much useful explanation of why, or of what measure is used. Most other accounts I have seen say pre-tax, pre-transfer income inequality rose during the Clinton administration, though it may have narrowed somewhat at the very end because of the collapse of the tech stock bubble.

The president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, has been writing, based on social science survey data, that conservatives give more to charity than liberals do:

Contrary to the liberal stereotype of the hard-hearted right-winger, opposition to income-leveling is not evidence that one does not care about others. Quite the contrary. The millions of Americans who believe in limited government give disproportionately to others.

Ann Coulter takes this argument to the next level by naming names:

In the decade before Joe Biden became vice president, the Bidens gave a total -- all 10 years combined -- of $3,690 to charity, or 0.2 percent of their income. They gave in a decade what most Americans in their tax bracket give in an average year, or about one row of hair plugs.

As an author, I'm hoping Borders Books will survive in one form or another. But as a consumer of news, I see the company's latest troubles — it's delaying payments to publishers and its shares are trading for a little more than $1 apiece — as a great opportunity to look back at some of the earlier coverage.

Here's the New York Times, in a November 21, 1999 article by Michelle Leder that ran under the headline "Investing: Old-Fashioned Growth Stirs Interest in Borders":

WITH all the attention being paid to the online rivalry between Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, could the smartest buy actually be the shares of the beleaguered Borders Group?

That is what investors in Borders are hoping....

The New York Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Paul Krugman, joins the ranks of those on the left (Hertzberg, Meacham) blaming voter ignorance for America's problems: "Nassau County shows how easily responsible government can collapse in this country, now that one of our major parties believes in budget magic. All it takes is disgruntled voters who don't know what's at stake — and we have plenty of those."

I think the voters are quite aware of what is at stake.

From a New York Times article on "The 110 Things New Yorkers Talked About in 2010":

67. The valedictorian of this year's graduating class at Columbia University plagiarized part of his speech from a YouTube video posted by the comedian Patton Oswalt.

75. Five Columbia University students are arrested on charges of selling an array of drugs at several fraternity houses and other campus residences.

92. A Columbia University professor is accused of having a consensual incestuous affair with his 24-year-old daughter. Columbia is having quite the year.

Not on the Times list: Columbia University's President Lee Bollinger's $1,753,984 annual compensation in 2008, reported this year. Or his taking over as chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Or Columbia's use of eminent domain for its campus expansion.

The New York Times Dealbook section carries the following reader comment on the Steven Rattner-Andrew Cuomo settlement, signed by "Jen Garry" of Mt. Pleasant, and recommended, as of this afternoon, by 17 Times readers:

RAT-ner indeed! Kickbacks from a pension plan, ugh. There seem to be no boundaries to this guys brass,crass indecency.
Where do I begin?
This fine is nothing to him with his vast wealth and holdings- "See kids, crime does pay"!
A position in the Obama Administration,as Head of the Auto Task Force, really? Do we not check these guys out at all?
Well, at least he can still benefit from the new and improved "Obama Tax Cuts".
I wouldn't trust this weasel with one dollar of mine- look at that picture, quite vermenesque, just like his name- Shame on you Steven.

James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column in the online Wall Street Journal is a particularly good one today, starting with the first item, about Yale and Cornell professors pledging their tax cuts to charity.

A post I wrote about National Public Radio's coverage of Israel is up at the Commentary group blog, Contentions, for those who are interested in that sort of thing.

Attorney General Cuomo, on his second-to-last day in office, has announced a settlement with Steven Rattner, whose case has been the subject of extensive coverage here.

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a different explanation of the census results than the tax-driven one I have been offering here. He says the answer is the "obscure rules regulating local land use":

In a sense, the anti-regulation crowd is right that the laissez-faire attitude of the South and West explains their recent growth. But the usual argument focuses on the wrong regulations.

Housing regulations, more than those that bind standard businesses, explain the Sun Belt's population growth. If New York and Massachusetts want to stop losing Congressional seats, then they must revisit the rules that make it so difficult to build.

Link via Mankiw.