The New York Times publishes an article marveling at the notion that the Tea Party is skeptical of climate change and of the cap and tax legislation supposed to be a solution for it. Never mind that a Democratic Congress and president elected before the Tea Party started have not managed to enact cap and tax. The Times adopts a conspiratorial view that this is all the result of "the fossil fuel industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it."

The Times goes on:

They have created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy.

Commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission are escalating their rhetoric over the fee dispute between Cablevision and News Corp. that has led to the dropping of some Fox broadcast programming from the Cablevision cable network.

Today FCC commissioner Michael Copps, a former history professor who was a longtime aide to Senator Hollings, issued a statement saying, "in too many instances, retransmission consent has degenerated into a fight between huge monied interests to see who can milk who the most—and consumers are left holding an empty pail."

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger pens a love note to New York's Republican candidate for comptroller, Harry Wilson. Mr. Henninger calls it "the most important 2010 election you've never heard of." If you've been reading FutureOfCapitalism, you have heard of it: We interviewed Mr. Wilson back in March and wrote about it here.

Michael Barone, who is among other things a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke this morning in New York at an AEI event and offered his predictions for the upcoming election. He said the Republicans will gain between six and 11 seats in the Senate and about 60 seats in the House.

Mr. Barone, who I think is one of the shrewdest observers out there, offered two other interesting observations. The first was that the Republican candidate for governor of Michigan is leading the United Auto Workers-backed Democrat by about 20 points in the polls. If the auto bailout isn't helping Democrats in Michigan, where is it helping?

Several of the minority-owned broker-dealers the Treasury Department has touted as part of a program to sell the government's shares of Citigroup are led by major donors to President Obama's political campaigns and to Democrats in Congress, a review of Federal Election Commission records by FutureOfCapitalism.com has found.

A Treasury press release described Loop Capital Markets as "an African American-owned full service investment bank and brokerage firm headquartered in Chicago, IL." Records show the firm's employees donated $45,550 to Barack Obama's federal political campaigns and $3,000 to Senator Kerry's campaigns. The firm's CEO, James Reynolds Jr., gave $10,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $15,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $10,100 to the congressional campaigns of Jesse Jackson Jr., $3,000 to the congressional campaigns of Rahm Emanuel, and $2,300 each to the campaigns of Senators Durbin and Clinton.

Rep. Barney Frank has been defending himself against criticism for accepting a winter private jet ride to the U.S. Virgin Islands from money manager Donald Sussman on the grounds that, as Mr. Frank puts it, "I voted to raise his taxes."

The truth of the matter, though, is that Mr. Frank joined with his Democratic colleague, Rep. Charles Rangel, in backing a provision widely seen as a favor to those, like Mr. Sussman, who participated in a Virgin Islands economic development program that allowed him to avoid 90% of the federal income tax that he would have otherwise owed.

The New York Times has a fascinating article about a supposedly woman-owned hedge fund that in fact was backed by a man, S. Donald Sussman. Reports the Times:

The arrangement with Mr. Sussman "may have been designed to mislead a number of observers, from the tax authorities to the S.E.C. to entities wishing to invest in women-owned businesses," Judge Richard J. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote in an August ruling in the case

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In 1997, Mr. Sussman, who had earlier withdrawn his investment adviser registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, settled a claim with the commission that he had failed to disclose a loan he made from a hedge fund he controlled to acquire a building that was used as offices.

Those of us on the center-right have a tendency to ignore or at least downplay the way that government waste, incompetence, and inefficiency extends into the national security side of government as well as other areas. The Washington Times reports that the CIA is suing a former intelligence officer who is the author, under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones, of the book The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. The Times article says that among the book's disclosures is that "despite being limited solely to collecting secrets outside the country, 90 percent of CIA employees live and work entirely inside the United States."

A New York lawyer is advertising that his firm will defend homeowners from foreclosure actions and that it "knows each and every defense available. We are generally successful in keeping owners in possession of their home for as long as one year from commencement of the action."

In other words, even with the announcement that Bank of America is resuming foreclosures, delinquent homeowners may still enjoy "possession of their home for as long as one year."

From the Heritage Foundation's "Morning Bell" email: President Obama's "budget proposal would spend $10.3 trillion on means-tested welfare over the next decade. Before the current rise in poverty, that was enough to give $250,000 to each person currently living in poverty in the U.S., or $1 million for a poor family of four."

The Treasury Department this morning announced plans to sell another 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup common stock: "Treasury currently owns approximately 3.6 billion shares of Citigroup common stock and expects to continue selling its shares in the market in an orderly fashion. The sale of 1.5 billion additional shares of Citigroup common stock, as authorized pursuant to the fourth trading plan, would bring Treasury's holdings of Citigroup common stock to approximately 7 percent of total shares outstanding — down from a high of approximately 27 percent."

The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair, spoke today in Baltimore at a meeting of the Risk Management Association. Highlights of her prepared remarks:

Over the past dozen years or so, the United States has experienced classic asset price bubbles in the stock market and the housing market. Where might asset bubbles be forming today?

One candidate is U.S. farmland values, which remain some 58 percent above their 2000 levels in inflation-adjusted terms. Strong agricultural conditions have spurred renewed interest in farmland on the part of investors. But today's positive fundamentals are subject to change. A sharp decline in farmland prices similar to the early 1980s could have a severe adverse impact on the nation's 1,579 farm banks. While the credit structure underlying U.S. farmland does not appear to involve excessive leverage or inappropriate loan products, this is a situation that will continue to require close monitoring.

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Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new Forbes column updating the state of play in one of the legal challenges to ObamaCare: "the question is whether state coercion can be used to overcome what the government sees as a free-riding problem by people who won't get insurance until they get sick."

The New Yorker has a long piece on the Harry Reid-Sharron Angle Senate race in Nevada that includes this sentence: "Between Obama's Inauguration, in January, 2009, and the congressional recess early last month, more consequential liberal legislation passed than at any time since the Great Society: health-care reform, the economic-stimulus package, financial regulation, a big education bill, the rescue of the auto industry, and the second phase of the rescue of the big banks."

Maybe I missed it, but I thought the auto industry "rescue" and "the second phase of the rescue of the big banks" were Treasury and Federal Reserve operations that took place without any legislative authorization other than the TARP vote in 2008. The Republicans tried to offer an amendment to stop the auto bailout and were voted down, but that's a little different than affirmatively passing a law.

Via Boston radio host Michael Graham comes news that a Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, Jim McGovern, announced "the Constitution is wrong" on campaign speech, then minutes later denied having said that. Here are the two YouTube videos: