"There are shades of the French Revolution here," Albert Hunt writes in his latest Bloomberg News column, about the Tea Party. He doesn't say what aspect of the French Revolution reminds him of the Tea Party. The violent extremism? Or the overthrow of a self-serving ruling class out of touch with the public? Are the similarities to the French Revolution good or bad? To judge by the tone of the rest of Mr. Hunt's column, if it were up to him France would still be ruled by the Bourbon dynasty. And he calls the Koch brothers "ultraconservative"?

The New York Daily News has published an op-ed piece I wrote under the headline, "Mad money: Why the rich are angry, and why you should worry about it." The link is here.

One of the hottest stories in Washington at the moment was broken by my former Forward and New York Sun colleague Eli Lake, who reported that the left-wing advocacy group on Arab-Israeli issues J Street is being funded by George Soros and a Hong Kong-based figure named Consolacion Esdicul. The Washington Examiner, Weekly Standard, and Atlantic (Jeffrey Goldberg) all follow up.

Bloomberg News writes up a talk in Montreal by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Highlights:

Canada's economy also benefits from the fact that homeowners, unlike their U.S. neighbors, can't take mortgage interest as a tax deduction, Taleb said. That removes the incentive to take on too much debt, he said.

"The first thing to do if you want to solve the mortgage problem in the U.S. is to stop making these interest payments deductible," he said. "Has someone dared to talk about this in Washington? No, because the U.S. homebuilders' lobby is hyperactive and doesn't want people to talk about this."

The president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, is really something. From his speech today at the U.N. General Assembly:

The first issue is the worldwide economic crisis and the methods to overcome it. I am afraid we are moving in a wrong direction. The anti-crisis measures that have been proposed and already partly implemented follow from the assumption that the crisis was a failure of markets and that the right way out is more regulation of markets. This is a mistaken assumption. It is not possible to prevent any future crisis by implementing substantial, markets damaging macroeconomic and regulatory government interventions as it is the case now. It is only possible to destroy the markets and together with them the chances for economic growth and prosperity in both developed and developing countries.

The New York Jewish Week has an interview with Melvyn Weiss, subheadlined, "Disbarred class-action king, after jail stint, wants his good name back." Highlights: "Weiss declined to say whether he regretted his actions or what he might do over again with the benefit of hindsight." Weiss lost money with Bernard Madoff and vents some anger about that in the interview, calling Madoff, "a mass murderer in every sense of the word because he killed people's spirits."

The New York Sun has an editorial.

The official House Republican "Pledge to America" site is here; the link to download the 48-page PDF is here.

If it were me trying to win an election I'd release 10 or 15 bullet points on a Web page rather than a 48-page PDF, but maybe I am missing something. A Wall Street Journal editorial reacts in part by dismissing conservatives who say the Pledge is too weak: "As for the purer-than-thou bloggers and talk-show hosts, their cries for a Moses on Capitol Hill to lead them to the promised land are touching, if foolish."

The gibe could be directed at their News Corp. colleague, Glenn Beck, whose take is here.

The Economist says of President Obama: "A president who does so little to counter the idea that he dislikes business is, self-evidently, a worryingly negligent chief executive....The evidence that American business thinks the president does not understand Main Street is mounting....A Bloomberg survey this week found that three-quarters of American investors believe he is against business. The bedrock of the tea-party movement is angry small-business owners. The Economist has lost count of the number of prominent chief executives, many of them Democrats, who complain privately that the president does not understand their trade—that he treats them merely as adornments at photocalls and uses teleprompters to talk to them; that he shows scant interest in their views on which tax cuts would persuade them to hire people; that his team is woefully short of anyone who has had to meet a payroll (there are fewer businesspeople in this White House than in any recent administration); and that regulatory uncertainty is hampering their willingness to invest."

The president is "anti-business," says former GE chief Jack Welch.

This video shows a Republican candidate for Stark County, Ohio treasurer.

"Why CEOs Can't Stand Obama" is the headline over an article on Web site MSN Money:

Cypress Semiconductor's Rodgers told me last week that he had "started out happy with Obama because we had broken through the white male barrier" and made "a step forward for equality." But Rodgers added: "I have become deeply disappointed with him. It is amateur hour in Washington. The guy hasn't got a clue about the economy, how jobs are created, how wealth is created. It reminds me of the Jimmy Carter years, only worse."...

Observers say such overt attacks are rare. "I don't remember corporate leaders speaking out this vehemently in the past, said Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co., which offers investment advice. "People in these positions don't get there unless they know how to keep their mouths shut when they need to."

Bronte Capital's John Hempton has a post about what a crummy investment the battery company A123 has been for him:

we lost money because the company just can't get manufacturing costs low enough fast enough to produce the rosy future we saw. We assumed away execution risk and paid the price.

A123 might get there in the end – and the stock is almost certainly a better buy now than when we purchased it – in that they are further developed and the stock is half the price. But we are hardly in a position to judge whether they will execute in the end. And we are already seeing competitive products in development.

The executive vice president of Goldline, Scott Carter, will be in the witness chair tomorrow fielding questions from Congressman Anthony Weiner at a hearing of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection.

Mr. Carter spoke with FutureOfCapitalism.com by phone in advance of the hearing. He said his company is being singled out because of its sponsorship of conservative talk shows.

Mr. Carter said his company has been in business for 50 years, has an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau, and has the "best disclosures in the industry."

"We're the only company that's been called," he said. "We're the advertiser, so we've been selected."

I asked him if he'd considered pulling the ads to get Mr. Weiner off his back.

"No," he said. "We are not going to do that." He said the company's advertising decisions are based "purely on performance" measures such as "cost per lead" and are not motivated by ideology. "It's your basic advertising business model," he said.

The New York Times on Sunday devoted more than 1,000 words to an article by two of its staff reporters about what it described as "the brutal, premeditated killings of three Afghan civilians — allegedly at the hands of American soldiers." Today the Times ran another 1,000-word, staff-written article, on the front-page, about gays in the military. Meanwhile, the president posthumously awards the Medal of Honor to Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard Etchberger, and the Times handles it with a 230-word squib from the Associated Press wire service.

Meanwhile, Times editor executive Bill Keller is going around complaining that the impact of Fox News has been "to introduce a level of cynicism into the public debate."