The American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray has a piece in the Washington Post about what he calls the "New Elite":

the New Elite lives in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn't get America, there is some truth in the accusation.

Part of the isolation is political...

But the politics of the New Elite are not the main point. When it comes to the schools where they were educated, the degrees they hold, the Zip codes where they reside and the television shows they watch, I doubt if there is much to differentiate the staff of the conservative Weekly Standard from that of the liberal New Republic, or the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute from those of the Brookings Institution, or Republican senators from Democratic ones.

If an American political candidate called for eliminating entirely the federal departments of education, commerce, energy, transportation, and housing and urban development, along with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Social Security, and Medicare, the candidate would probably be denounced as extreme.

So give Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, an anchor at CNBC and the author of You Know I'm Right: More Prosperity, Less Government, some credit for writing a book that stakes out and defends these positions.

"Man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts," she writes. She does write that — but she is quoting a January 1989 speech by President Reagan. It's a reminder that ideas that ideas that initially may seem extreme can win wide support with the right politician communicating them.

How to encapsulate the difference between FutureOfCapitalism.com and the New York Times? We've got different missions and different resources, but here is one example. When three members of the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, wrote a book called Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, FutureOfCapitalism.com published a 1,200-word review that appeared on the book's publication date. How has the Times handled the book? It has waddled in with a review more than five weeks after the book came out, whose treatment of the book, in its entirety, is as follows:

The New York Times sent an email "breaking news" alert and also posted an article to its Web site about the latest batch of Wikileaks documents asserting that, as the Times put it, "The deaths of Iraqi civilians — at the hands mainly of other Iraqis, but also of the American military — appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration."

Well, that is one way of looking at it. But another way to look at it is that, even with the worst face that the Times-Wikileaks combination could put on it (Headline "A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq" — "In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures" ), the civilian casualty toll is far lower than the 600,000 that had been claimed by two researchers at the Bloomberg School of Health at Johns Hopkins University.

From Thomas Friedman's New York Times column:

In the past two weeks, I've taken the Amtrak Acela to the Philadelphia and New York stations. In both places there were signs on the train platforms boasting that new construction work there was being paid for by "the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009," that is, the $787 billion stimulus. And what was that work? New "lighting" — so now you can see even better just how disgustingly decayed, undersized and outdated are the rail platforms and infrastructure in two of our biggest cities.

I take Amtrak to Philadelphia sometimes and I disagree with Mr. Friedman's premise that the Philadelphia station is decayed or undersized. It's a grand old building with soaring high ceilings.

But assume he's right: How did these Amtrak stations get so run down? They are run by the government. If Mr. Friedman wants to spruce them up, he should suggest turning them over to the private sector, and they might wind up as fancy as the Four Seasons.

The Yankees didn't make it to the World Series this year. The New York team and their $206 million-a-year player payroll lost in the American League Championship Series to the Texas Rangers, who had a payroll of $55 million.

What does that mean for some of the topics often discussed here? One of the complaints often made about campaign spending is that it isn't fair that one rich person or corporation can spend money that will outweigh the votes of many other non-rich persons. But it's difficult to actually buy an election in America. Money can be an advantage, but it's only one factor among many, as losing political candidates like Steve Forbes, Ross Perot, and Michael Huffington have all found out.

The big news of the day is Treasury Secretary Geithner's call for the Group of 20 economically powerful countries to, as the New York Times put it, "keep their current-account balance — whether a surplus or a deficit — below 4 percent of gross domestic product."

More from the Times article: "The German economy minister, Rainer Brüderle, told reporters that the proposal could be viewed as a reversion to 'planned economy thinking.'"

The German has got that right. After all, one of the problems with Mr. Geithner's proposal is that trade deficits and surpluses are to a significant degree the result of individual decisions, freely made, to purchase goods made elsewhere. A government target or control on the overall trade account could wind up interfering in those decisions.

From a USA Today article on investing or speculating in gold: "Once you own a gold coin, you have to figure out where to store it. Most people prefer a bank safe-deposit box. If you don't trust banks, find a secure place where robbers can't get your coins."

Something about that "If you don't trust banks" line made me smile. I can't quite put my finger on why.

"Treasury Gets 36% Return Buying Toxic Mortgages From Banks in First Year" is the headline over a Bloomberg News dispatch that begins, "A U.S. government program aimed at reviving the mortgage-backed securities market returned more than triple what stocks or bonds gained in the past year. The eight funds created under the Public-Private Investment Program, or PPIP, reported net internal rates of return averaging 36 percent through Sept. 30, the Treasury Department said in a report this week. That compares with the 10 percent return for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and 8.2 percent for the BarCap U.S. Aggregate Total Return Index of bonds."

From a New York Times article headlined "Bob Perry, Longtime GOP Donor, Adds Millions":

Mr. Perry is atop a group of megadonors who have contributed $1 million or more this year to Republican groups like American Crossroads and the Republican Governors Association. Others include Robert B. Rowling, a Texas billionaire; Wayne Hughes, the chairman and founder of Public Storage; Harold Simmons, another Swift Boat financier; Jerry Perenchio, a former chairman of Univision; Trevor Rees-Jones, a Dallas oil-and-gas billionaire; Paul Singer, a Manhattan hedge fund manager; and Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate.

What do all these givers have in common? Notwithstanding President Obama's scare campaign, they are individuals, not corporations. They are Americans, not foreigners. And they are named, not anonymous. All the hype about the Citizens United ruling opening the floodgates to anonymous donations from foreign companies is just that: hype.

The Center for Class Action Fairness is looking for someone who bought Apple stock between November 2005 and May 2006 and wants to object to the proposed settlement in the class action lawsuit brought by the New York city pension fund that we wrote about here.

Shares of Bank of America plunged nearly 10% earlier this week, to as low as $11.28 on Wednesday morning from $12.41 on Tuesday afternoon, after CNBC aired a report titled "Suing Bank of America." In the report, embedded below, a CNBC personality interviews a lawyer, Kathy Patrick of Gibbs & Bruns LLP, who the CNBC personality described on-air as representing "Eight large investment firms in this suit against Bank of America."

New York Times editorial position on the estate tax: "estate-tax foes sold Americans a myth about a 'death tax' that prevented average people from passing on hard-earned money." The editorial called for the estate tax to be restored because "fairness, progressivity and the need for revenue demand" it.

New York Times news article today advising Times readers on how to get around the estate tax (headline: 'Leave the Children the House, Without a Big Tax Bill"): "Shifting ownership of a home makes sense even for people who are only moderately wealthy, said Lawrence P. Katzenstein, a lawyer with Thompson Coburn in St. Louis. For example, a widow with a co-op apartment worth $2 million and marketable securities totaling $3 million might not want to give away investment assets — she needs to live on the income. By transferring her apartment (if the co-op rules allow it) she can reap a substantial estate tax savings without disturbing her investment portfolio."

From a New York Times editorial about Sharron Angle, the Republican running against Senator Harry Reid:

In a particularly preposterous bit of spin, she told a group of Hispanic students a few days ago, when she did not realize she was being recorded, that those people were not necessarily Hispanic. They might have been coming through the Canadian border, she said, calling it "the most porous border that we have" and adding that that is "where the terrorists came through." (The Canadian ambassador immediately protested this nonsense.)

Nonsense? From a PBS Frontline timeline on Ahmed Ressam's "Millennium Plot":

Ressam says that on the morning of Dec. 14, he called Meskini and told him he would be in Seattle that evening. That afternoon, he took a ferry from Victoria, B.C., to Port Angeles, Wash., with more than 100 pounds of explosives stashed in the wheelbed of the trunk of his rental car. His accomplice, Dahoumane, did not travel with him.

The New York Times writes up some contributions to Karl Rove's American Crossroads group, among them what the Times calls, "an astonishing $7 million from Bob Perry, a longtime Democratic nemesis who was one of the major financiers of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record in the 2004 presidential race."

What is so astonishing? The Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Politico all managed to report the same news without being astonished, or at least without conveying their astonishment to readers.