The chairman and chief executive of for-profit education provider Kaplan Inc. has a letter to the editor of the New York Times responding to last week's hatchet job.

Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren Buffett has an op-ed piece in the New York Times praising the government's response to the financial crisis: "Overall, your actions were remarkably effective....I would like to commend a few of your troops. In the darkest of days, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair grasped the gravity of the situation and acted with courage and dispatch." The bottom of the article says, "Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company."

He could have signed it instead, "Warren Buffett, the largest crony capitalist in the world, shareholder of GE, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, M&T Bank, and American Express, as well as competitor of private equity and hedge fund firms that have been threatened with new taxes and regulations, and behind the scenes, insider adviser to most of the government officials mentioned above."

The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, has vetoed the Board of Supervisors legislation that would have banned Happy Meal toys unless the meals for children met certain nutritional requirements. The San Francisco Chronicle reports. Said the mayor, a Democrat: "Doing these types of toy bans is inappropriate, I don't think particularly effective, and I just think goes way too far in inserting government to try to be the decision-maker in someone's life as opposed to parents."

The newspaper says, "Despite Newsom's opposition, the law may still end up on the books. The board passed it on an 8-3 vote Tuesday, the minimum needed to override a veto."

The Chronicle article is from over the weekend.

The Center for Class Action Fairness, which got into the picture in that Apple options backdating suit involving a lawsuit brought by the City of New York's pension fund after I wrote a piece here about how outrageous the settlement was, has gotten the settlement modified so that class members get an additional $2.5 million that had been slated for university-based "corporate governance" programs. Under the newly modified proposed settlement, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Delaware no longer will get any money.

A press release from the Center for Class Action Fairness's Ted Frank says:

Just in time for the Christmas (or other holiday) shopping season, Congressman Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, issued a press release and held a press conference to announce the results of a study he conducted "warning shoppers of the exceedingly high interest rates on retail store credit cards, which can have interest rates as high as 28.99% -- nearly double the average credit card."

Topping Mr. Weiner's list of what his press release called "the Top 5 Worst Retail Store Cards" were Radio Shack, with a 28.99% interest rate; Best Buy and Staples with a 27.99% rate, and Home Depot, with a 25.99% rate.

What Mr. Weiner's press release omitted was that the Radio Shack, Staples, and Home Depot cards — three of Mr. Weiner's four "worst" — are all issued by Citibank. (The Best Buy card is an HSBC product.)

At least two points are worth making here.

It's starting to dawn on even the British Labour Party that maybe a 50% tax on all income above $241,000 a year isn't such a bright idea, the Financial Times reports.

A post-discharge study of 780 Medicare patients treated in hospitals in October 2008 found that "about one in seven patients (13.5%) experienced at least one serious instance of harm from medical care that prolonged their hospital stay, caused permanent harm, required life-sustaining intervention, or contributed to their deaths," USA Today reports in a column by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. "Medication errors factored in more than half the patient fatalities in our sample, including use of the wrong drug, giving the wrong dosage, or inadequately treating known side effects."

I don't know that non-Medicare patients get treated any worse or any better than the Medicare patients. But this quality issue is a scandal that deserves as much, maybe more attention than the cost and access issues that got all the attention during health reform. What's the point of making sure someone has health insurance if when the person gets to the hospital the doctors are just going to give him the wrong medicine or the wrong dose of medicine?

The Wall Street Journal has a news article about what it says is a NYU photography professor's plan "to undergo surgery in coming weeks" to install a camera in the back of his head as "art."

The Journal article seems to suggest the controversy is mainly about "the competing values of creative expression and student privacy," but I can see a lot of concerns here other than student privacy.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Who is going to perform the surgery and where? Who will pay for all the attendant costs? Who will be liable if something goes wrong?

The whole thing smacks of an elaborate prank or "performance art."

George Gilder, writing in the Wall Street Journal about "California's Destructive Green Jobs Lobby":

Led by Al Gore's investment affiliate, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, the campaign to save AB 32 raised $31 million—more than three times the $10 million that the oil companies raised for repeal. Pouring in millions were such promethean venturers as John Doerr and Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins, Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin of Google, and the legendary Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove of Intel. The campaign even managed to shake down a contribution from the state's public utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, and gained the backing of the GOP's eBay billionaire gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman.

A front-page Wall Street Journal news article endorses Chinese Communism:

China's national economic strategy is detailed and multifaceted, and it is challenging the U.S. and other powers on a number of fronts.

Central to China's approach are policies that champion state-owned firms and other so-called national champions, seek aggressively to obtain advanced technology, and manage its exchange rate to benefit exporters. It leverages state control of the financial system to channel low-cost capital to domestic industries—and to resource-rich foreign nations whose oil and minerals China needs to maintain rapid growth.

China's policies are partly a product of its unique status: a developing country that is also a rising superpower. Its leaders don't assume the market is preeminent. Rather, they see state power as essential to maintaining stability and growth, and thereby ensuring continued Communist Party rule.

From a New York Times news article about the Federal Reserve and the dollar:

the Fed's new vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen...said she was "not happy to see us caught up in a political debate."

Right. Heaven forfend that the dollar or the Federal Reserve actually become the subject of a political debate! The Times (nor the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed her) doesn't ask her why she opposes such a debate. Does she think that the American public is too stupid or unsophisticated to engage in it? Is she afraid of losing it? Are there any other subjects that involve trillions of dollars of money and a government institution with important effects on the economy that should be outside of political debate?

More:

A New York Times editorial complaining about Rep. Charles Rangel's ethics asserts, "as the committee chairwoman, Zoe Lofgren, pointed out, the committee has repeatedly advised Mr. Rangel since 2008 that he could set up a defense fund to raise the money, which he has not done....He certainly should know that House rules prohibit pro bono lawyers in such circumstances to avoid the appearance of legal favoritism, and that anyone who faces the committee had better find a way to pay for a good defense."

The New York Times has a good editorial about how the government should not be allowed to go through and look at the contents of your laptop computer hard drive without a warrant or probable cause when you come back into the country from a trip abroad. The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein covered this issue back in June 2008.

It's the Obama administration now carrying out the searches, not the Bush administration that was doing it when Mr. Gerstein first started covering the issue. But on this one, at least in Congress, it's the Democrats leading the effort against the expansion of government power against the individual.

Having covered Abraham Foxman as a journalist for more than 15 years now, I've come to marvel at his ability to insert himself into the center of newsworthy controversies, whether it is by angering left-wingers by opposing the mosque and swimming pool near ground zero, or angering right-wingers by denouncing Glenn Beck's coverage of George Soros only weeks after sending Mr. Beck a letter lauding Mr. Beck as "a friend of the Jewish people, and a friend of Israel."

So leave it to Mr. Foxman to find an angle into the story of the worldwide financial downturn, which he does in his new book, Jews and Money.

The earlier coverage of for-profit education here has been attracting some attention, so I thought it was worth passing along a few more related items: