The Hill newspaper has an article detailing the political contributions and lobbying expenditures of two of the manufacturers of the airport body scan machines.

L-3 Communications, which supplies some of the machines, has paid $100,000 this year to a lobbying firm run by "Linda Hall Daschle, a former administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration and wife of ex-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)," the newspaper reports. The company also has Alfonse D'Amato, the Republican former senator from New York, working on its behalf.

The other body-scan supplier, Rapiscan, has paid Holland & Knight $480,000 in lobbying fees since May 2008 for the services of lobbyists who include a former aide to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), David Whitestone. "Rapiscan's parent company, OSI Systems Inc., has an active political action committee. During the 2010 campaign, it made more than $60,000 in campaign contributions to candidates and committees, according to FEC records," the Hill reports.

One more point is worth mentioning or emphasizing about U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's speech about insider trading. It's the section, probably intended as a laugh line, that went like this:

Insider trading, they suggest, is not a particular scourge and is a poor pick as a priority for law enforcement. I know that no one in this room thinks that. (Perhaps that's because you all have bills to pay.)

The point that insider trading laws, and the enforcement of them, enrich lawyers, or at least allow them to pay their bills, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the whole compliance industry. There are the firms that specialize in distributing corporate press releases (one of them is owned by Warren Buffett) and the investor relations public relations firms that specialize in writing the releases and the lawyers who specialize in reviewing them and advising on their preparation. They all have a stake in keeping the system more or less as it is, or at least making sure any changes are in the direction of more rather than less complexity.

President Obama is considering Gene Sperling along with Roger Altman as a possible replacement for Lawrence Summers as chairman of the National Economic Council, a top White House economic policy job, The New York Times reports.

Holman Jenkins has a pretty good column in the Wall Street Journal pushing back against the SEC and FBI's "insider information" raids:

The logic of insider trading law, taken to its dead-horse extreme, is to keep good information out of stock prices. In the SEC's ideal world, any information originating inside a company will be reflected in stock prices only after the company has publicly announced it to the world's investors simultaneously. As a colleague said of Stalin, there is no way to get the SEC's ideal world without mangling the real world beyond repair.

Mike Allen's Politico Playbook has some excerpts from Sarah Palin's new book, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag:

Through the purchase of large chunks of Chrysler and General Motors, the bailing out of Wall Street banks, ... government is taking over more and more of the role that the free market has traditionally played in America. ... It's called crony capitalism....

Some say we don't actually have a two-party system, that each party is the party of big government, with a Republican wing that likes wars, deficits, and assaults on civil liberties, and a Democrat wing that likes welfare, taxes, and assaults on commercial laissez-faire. There's some truth to this idea. ... If Democrats are driving the country toward socialism at a hundred miles an hour, while the Republicans are driving at only fifty, commonsense constitutional conservatives want to turn the car around.

David Stockman has a piece up at MarketWatch describing Warren Buffett's thank-you note to Uncle Sam as "gushing drivel" that is factually inaccurate:

Warren Buffett ended up with a call on GE that was stapled to a put to Uncle Sam. No wonder he's grateful. But no taxpayer can be grateful....

Thanks to the Geithner/ Paulson/ Bernanke claque, the needed financial cleansing and purge never happened. Instead, we've just drifted deeper into a statist regime in which Uncle Sam backstops, stimulates, underwrites, and meddles with every aspect of our broken capitalist machine.

The FutureOfCapitalism California bureau notices a news article in the San Francisco Chronicle that asserts, "The solid left majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has an opportunity to do what city voters haven't done for more than two decades: put a progressive in the mayor's office. Not since the election of Art Agnos in 1987 has a progressive served as mayor."

The bureau observes that reality is different in San Francisco, and that the city's past mayors haven't exactly been conservatives.

Mickey Kaus has an item up at Newsweek about how the Obama administration meddled in GM even as it claimed it wouldn't:

And then Obama complained the Tea Partiers who worry about government control didn't listen to him? Maybe that's because they suspected, rightly, that what he said he was doing and what his government actually was doing weren't the same thing. He won't meddle except when he will. But, don't worry, it will be kept secret! It's enough to make even a non-paranoid anti-corporatist wonder where it all ends

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new Forbes column up on "Government by Waiver":

Waivers are by definition an exercise of administrative discretion that benefits the party who receives its special dispensation. Yet nothing in ObamaCare explains who should receive these waivers or why.

The dangers from this uncertainty are enormous. Make no mistake about it, a waiver gives the favored organization a competitive advantage over its rivals. But it is not only one applicant that pulls out all the stops. Its competitors often follow suit while simultaneously trying to block the waiver for the original applicant. Administrative expertise quickly takes a back seat to old-fashioned political muscle and intrigue....Economically, the high fixed costs of administrative compliance drive small firms to seek takeover by powerful larger firms whose deeper purses and better political contacts help them weather the storm.

One of the ways press coverage gets slanted is that some people get their motives questioned, while others do not. A great example is the front of today's New York Times metro section. "Expansion of Bike Lanes in City Brings Backlash," is the headline over one article about a "backlash" that for the purposes of the Times article consists of exactly two quoted individuals. The first is Leslie Sicklick, 45, "a dog walker and substitute teacher." The other is Norman Steisel, "a former sanitation commissioner and deputy mayor." The article doesn't say or probe whether Mr. Steisel or Ms. Sicklick wanted jobs in the Bloomberg administration, or whether they know how to ride bikes, or whether they are just people who don't like change.

A reader writes in regard to the Nicholas Kristof "Hedge Fund Republic" article we posted about here the other day:

Commentators confuse wealth inequality and income inequality and use them interchangeably. Sure there is overlap, but it is not the same. Warren Buffet is the second wealthiest man in the US but his income is far less extreme. There is far more mobility year to year in income distribution than in wealth distribution. That said, old money has a way of dissipating itself--see the Rockefellers, Kennedys, Hartfords, etc.

Whenever comparing income inequality across generations, it would be helpful if commentators mentioned the change in income of the lowest decile of earners. It would not be good for anyone if income inequality dropped while the earnings of the bottom decile of workers declined as well.

Canada's Globe and Mail carried an article over the weekend under the headline, "Is humanitarian aid bad for Africa?":

a growing number of humanitarian and development experts – including former true believers – argue that aid money frequently prolongs wars, props up dictators, impedes democracy, aids oppression and stifles human rights

The article raises some points similar to those explored by Philip Gourevitch in a New Yorker article we mentioned here earlier.

Bloomberg News reports Warren Buffett calling for increased taxes on the "rich" as if it's news rather than something he's already said about a zillion times before. No one seems to ever follow up by asking how much Mr. Buffett has paid in taxes relative to his wealth. Mr. Buffett doesn't seem shy about giving public policy advice in public via the press, but it'd also be interesting to know what, if any, policy advice he gives privately to government officials and how it has panned out. Mr. Buffett says, "I think that people at the high end -- people like myself -- should be paying a lot more in taxes." Nothing is stopping him from doing so voluntarily. But instead he has structured his affairs — low annual salary, lots of unrealized long-term capital gains, a big charitable foundation to get around the estate tax — so as to minimize his taxes.

The Wall Street Journal CEO Council, a group that includes News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Citigroup's Vikram Pandit, Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, Verizon's Ivan Seidenberg, KKR's Henry Kravis, and Amway's Doug DeVos, has come out for raising taxes — just not on themselves.

Today's Journal includes a special section reporting on "The CEOs' Top Priorities." Among them: "Deficit reduction should include spending cuts, tax increases and credible budget rules." Tax increases! How do you like that? The CEOs think Americans are undertaxed.

Yet when it comes to their own taxes, or at least their companies' the CEOs want the taxes not increased, but cut. "Should include: cut of 10 percentage points in corporate tax rate; 100% depreciation on capital equipment through 2012; permanent R&D tax credit; cut in taxes on repatriated earnings, provided earnings are reinvested."

New York Times reporter David Carr, columnizing about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.'s iPad newspaper project The Daily: "The Daily will have a separate opinion section, which will seem wildly anachronistic to readers who have grown up reading news and point-of-view analysis in the same piece of digital journalism."

Does Mr. Carr also find the separate opinion section in the print, Web, and iPad versions of the New York Times anachronistic? Or is it only anachronistic when Mr. Murdoch does it? If Mr. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News are any indication, it's not as if the opinion will be a news-free zone, either.