The New Yorker has an article by John Cassidy under the headline "Wall Street, Investment Bankers, and Social Good."

The article says, "In the country at large, where many businesses rely on the banks to fund their day-to-day operations, the power still isn't flowing properly. Over-all bank lending to firms and households remains below the level it reached in 2008."

It seems a little weird to use 2008 as a baseline for "proper" levels of bank lending. At the beginning of that year a lot of banks and non-bank lenders were lending to people and for things that have since been criticized as irresponsible, such as "Ninja" loans offering mortgages to people with no income, no job, and no assets. And at the end of the year there was a "credit crisis" and broader recession.

The article goes on:

Following Jeffrey Goldberg's reporting on the Transportation Security Administration, I braced myself for a trip from New York to Miami. On the way down, despite the big signs at JFK depicting naked people in translucent clothing and warning that you would look like that, too, in the new backscatter machines, the machines did not appear to be in use, and I went through a regular, old-fashioned metal detector.

The way home was more interesting. While most passengers were being directed through the regular, old-fashioned metal detectors, I was selected for the machine that looked like a cross between a stand-up MRI and something out of some Woody Allen science fiction movie. I had plenty of time before my flight, and submitting without objection to a decision by the government that it has to see me basically naked before I get on an airplane in my own country just runs counter to my basic contrarian personality, so I said, "I want to opt out."

Comment of the day, by Fred Van Bennekom, responding to the post "Airport Body Scan Alternative":

Clearly, we should be very concerned about terrorists infiltrating the highest levels of our government. A bomb in an executive office could wreak havoc throughout the government and the nation equivalent to a plane being blown up.

So, should not every employee of the executive branch have to go through security screening every day they enter their office? I believe they just go through the old fashioned metal detectors. Like pilots, they can get exposed to daily doses of radiation with the scanners or like passengers, they can get groped. I think you'd see changes if all DHS employees and if every person going from the East Wing to the West Wing got screened this way.

If it's good enough for us peons, it's good enough for them.

The Heritage Foundation, the Wall Street Journal editorial writers, and Mickey Kaus all are skeptical of President Obama's claim of success with the GM offering.

Twitter is banned in China, and the government there sentenced a woman to a year in labor camp for re-tweeting someone else's Twitter message, the Associated Press reports.

Vice President Biden tells GQ magazine, in an interview picked up in Mike Allen's Politico Playbook, that voters are finding that the scare stories about the effects of health "reform" are not true: "[people] are starting to find out now … that what they're told is simply not true. Their premiums haven't gone up."

What planet is this guy living on? My health insurance premiums are going up 7%. A Washington Post article from earlier this month appeared under the headline, "Workers' health insurance costs for 2011 include higher premiums and co-payments."

People can argue about whether this is because of ObamaCare or something that would have happened even without it. But to claim that premiums "haven't gone up" is just detached from reality.

One of the signers of the open letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke opposing QE2, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and an economic adviser to the McCain presidential campaign, did a conference call today about the QE2. He likened it to "trying to tow a Mack Truck with a gerbil," and he also warned that QE2 now takes the potential use of the policy off the table for future use in case the economy worsens. He also said it could "create inflation" and undermine the Fed's independence.

I asked him if this was just a dispute over monetary policy or if it was going beyond that to a dispute over the existence of the Federal Reserve, a return to the gold standard, or an adjustment of the Fed's dual mandates for full employment and price stability.

One of the loose threads of the Steven Rattner-Alan Hevesi case brought by the SEC today is the identity of the campaign donors identified in the following paragraph:

A lawyer whose clients have included a child pornography consumer, a crooked Wall Street trader, and a Muslim who plotted to bomb Bronx synagogues and fire missiles at American military planes is President Obama's latest nominee to the federal judiciary.

Mr. Obama announced the nomination of Vincent L. Briccetti to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York yesterday, saying, "I am pleased to nominate these distinguished individuals to serve on the United States District Court bench...I am confident they will serve the American people with integrity and a steadfast commitment to justice." A White House-issued capsule biography said Mr. Briccetti "specializes in white collar criminal defense."

How's this for timing? The same day that Warren Buffett has an op-ed piece in the New York Times commending the government's "remarkably effective" actions responding to the financial crisis, President Obama announces he's giving Mr. Buffett the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Barry Ritholz has a parody of the Buffett article up. The parody isn't right about everything but grasps some of the silliness of the whole thing.

A couple of the signers of the open letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke opposing QE2 were at the Manhattan Institute's party last night for the 20th birthday of City Journal. One of them made the point that there is a petition that members of the public can sign about the issue up at GrowPac.com, and that there's a desire to frame the issue as one of the expansion of the Fed ($3 trillion balance sheet, echoing the expansion of the federal government as a whole) rather than as a mere dispute over the proper monetary policy. Another made the point that regardless of your view of whether there should be a Fed or what its goals should be or even what its monetary policy should be, the debate over QE2 works politically strongly to the benefit of the Republicans, because in order to defend the need for it, Democrats and those who sympathize with the Fed have to talk about how weak the economic recovery is, how many people are still unemployed, and how the federal deficit is so big that there's no room left for any fiscal stimulus — all points that underscore the image of President Obama and Majority Leader Reid as big-spending leaders of a lousy economy.

Daniel Henninger has a column in the Wall Street Journal explicating the way that 23% top income tax rate in the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Reduction Commission proposal moves the goalposts in the tax policy debate. It's a point that was made here eight days ago, when the proposal first came out. But Mr. Henninger can really write.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is out with a piece headlined "A Hedge Fund Republic?"

He writes, "inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007."

Mr. Kristof uses the word "controlling" rather than "earning" so as not to allow his readers to consider the possibility that these earners might have done something such as work to create value so that customers were willing to pay them that compensation voluntarily.

He also doesn't specify that this income share is probably pre-tax, pre-transfer-program income. The progressive tax system and the benefits that flow to lower-income individuals — food stamps, the earned income tax credit, housing subsidies, Pell Grants — ameliorate the income inequality that Mr. Kristof bemoans, but Mr. Kristof doesn't mention any of that.

The source of this (probably apocryphal, or at least quasi-humorous) item is unknown to me, but it is making the rounds on the Internets in response to the furor over airport body-scans, which seem to have touched a nerve with the American public as the latest example of intrusive government:

A great alternative to body scanners at airports

The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports. It's a booth you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone, with none of the whining about racial profiling. It also would eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials. Justice would be swift. Case closed! You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system: "Attention standby passengers — we now have a seat available on flight number ____. Shalom."

Bloomberg News is reporting that Roger Altman is a leading candidate to take over from Lawrence Summers as chairman of President Obama's National Economic Council. Readers of this site may recall Mr. Altman's name from the post "Roger Altman's Unbelievable Gall," which reported on Mr. Altman's New York Times op-ed hailing President Obama's "courageous decision to put General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy."