One of the many egregious aspects of Jane Mayer's New Yorker article on the Koch brothers was the comparison it made between the Koch brothers and George Soros:

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama's. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros's giving is transparent, and that "none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests."

Just a week after students at Cuyahoga Community college were reportedly rounded up to fill empty seats at an appearance by President Obama in Ohio, CNBC is asking the Princeton Club of Washington for help in filling a "special live Town Hall event from Washington D.C., featuring President Barack Obama."

From an e-mail to Princeton Club of Washington members obtained by FutureOfCapitalism.com:

AN ALUMNI ALERT ....

The Princeton Club of Washington has received a
TIME-SENSITIVE INVITATION to participate in a
TOWN HALL with President Obama on Sept. 20.
A special group will be selected for this, and
it will be held in the Washington, DC area...

The ballots had barely been counted yesterday before the press was making sweeping predictions that the Tea Party candidates who won primaries would go down to defeat in general elections. You'd expect this sort of thing from the liberal outlets. Bloomberg News headlined its article, "Tea Party Success in Delaware Senate Race Increases Chance of Democrat Win." And the New York Times called Carl Paladino's victory in the gubernatorial primary in New York "a potentially destabilizing blow for New York Republicans" that "raises the possibility of a lopsided general election contest with Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, who has amassed a $24 million war chest and whose commanding lead in the polls has lent him an air of invincibility."

The latest entry in the season of political books took three authors to craft and begins with a foreword by yet a fourth. Yet Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, by Republican Congressmen Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, for the most part manages to avoid the perils of group authorship and to succeed in concisely conveying a sense of what these three men are up to.

The foreword by the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes calls Mr. Ryan "the most influential Republican thinker in Congress." Mr. Barnes predicts that Mr. Cantor "will be speaker or majority leader the next time Republicans control the House," while Mr. Ryan "will be in line to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee."

The book proceeds to a "roundtable discussion" among the three authors, with Mr. Ryan charging that the Democrats have a "hardcore-left agenda," of wanting "to transform this country into a cradle-to-grave European social welfare state and change the idea of America forever."

Josh Barro, the Walter Wriston fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, asserts that in 2013, "closing the fiscal gap will, and should, involve a significant tax increase....Orszag is right that a tax increase is necessary....I agree with Orszag's premise that the Clinton-era tax rates on earned income are acceptable."

I think his reasoning is flawed. He writes:

keeping current tax policies in place (aside from temporary tax cuts in the stimulus package) would bring in federal revenues of just 18% of GDP over the next decade.

For comparison, that's below the 19% of GDP revenue target in Rep. Paul Ryan's "Roadmap" fiscal reform plan, which nonetheless requires sharp entitlement cuts to achieve budget balance. It's also a bit below the postwar average of federal tax receipts, even though demographic changes and rising health care costs have made entitlement programs structurally more expensive-not entirely in ways that could or should have been avoided.

Having already taken on the auto industry, the financial sector, health care, housing, and student loans, the Obama administration is now taking aim at another part of the economy: the restaurant industry. First Lady Michelle Obama gave a remarkable speech yesterday to the National Restaurant Association:

today, no matter what kind of restaurant you visit -- whether it's Italian, French, Mexican, American -- most kids' menus look pretty much the same. And trust me, we've seen a lot of them.

One local survey found that 90 percent of those menus includes mac and cheese -- our children's favorite; 80 percent includes chicken fingers; 60 includes burgers or cheeseburgers.

Some options weigh in at over 1,000 calories, and that's close to the recommended amount that a child should have for the entire day. And I think -- and I know you all think -- that our kids deserve better than that.

USA Today has a long article about the idea of giving a "free" breakfast to all children in school. "In Pueblo, school officials take a counterintuitive approach: They offer free breakfast to all children regardless of income, so no one is embarrassed to be eating it. In most schools here, breakfast is served right in the classrooms," the newspaper reports. "Feeding free breakfast to students who can afford to pay avoids the stigma for students who can't but don't want everyone to know. Serving breakfast in class means kids don't have to get there early to be fed, Kidd and other school nutrition directors say. Bus schedules, parents' work schedules, and, for high school students, the desire to sleep as late as possible make getting to school early for breakfast difficult."

The breakfast includes "individual packages of Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms cereal."

The New York Times today runs a book review by Michiko Kakutani of a new book, The Backlash, by Will Bunch. The Times review includes a sentence claiming that Mr. Bunch attributes the rise of the Tea Party in part to "'The electronic media' — including the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and local talk radio imitators, as well as social networking forces like Facebook and Twitter — which have enabled 'like-minded Obama naysayers' to come together 'without actual journalists intervening to filter out untrue information like the canard about the president's birth certificate.'"

The review goes on to associate Mr. Beck with "birthers" a second time:

Thomas Sowell has a new column with a mention of rent control: "New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, 'rent control' laws do not control rent."

And Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw has a fascinating post about " an ingenious scheme used by some universities in New York, where much rental housing is rent controlled." As he sums it up, "In the end, the goal of the rent control laws is thwarted (the low rents are enjoyed by well-paid tenured faculty rather than the needy), the income tax laws are thwarted (a sizable part of compensation is untaxed), and all this is done by a nonprofit institution (the university) whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public interest."

Bloomberg News, which only hours ago was assuring us that "wealthy Americans" were going to spend their tax cuts on BMW convertibles, now frets, in a separate story, "Rich Americans Save Tax Cuts Instead of Spending, Moody's Says."

Well, which is it? It all seems aimed at preventing the extension of the Bush tax cuts. As the second article helpfully explains, "The findings may weaken arguments by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who say allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to lapse will prompt them to reduce their spending, harming the economy."

The New York Times obituary of Stalinist folk-music figure Irwin Silber fits the pattern, Ronald Radosh writes: "Every time an American Communist or leftist dies, you can count on one thing: the New York Times will run a major obituary, and it will be misleading, incomplete, or very favorable to their life and record."

Bloomberg News has an article headlined "Top Earners Lose Cost of BMW if Bush Tax Cuts Expire." It begins, "Wealthy Americans have the price of a BMW convertible riding on the outcome of the Congressional battle over tax cuts set to expire this year."

This is an astonishing flip-flop from the August 12, 2010 article from Bloomberg News Journo-list member Ryan Donmoyer, who wrote, under the headline, "Most High Earners Wouldn't See Big Bill From Tax Rise," an article that said, "Under the Democrats' plan to end a tax break for those earning more than $200,000 per individual or $250,000 per couple, the 3.8 million filers who fall in the $200,000 to $500,000 income range would pay $2 billion more in 2011 taxes, or an average of $532, according to a July 30 letter from the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation."

David Warsh calls Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece "unconvincing in her characterizations of the Mercatus Center as little more than a cat's paw for the wealthy and conservative Koch brothers, of Wichita, Kansas, and Manhattan."

An August 18, 2008 editorial in Investor's Business Daily that appeared under the headline "Like Father, Like Son," also got into the policy views of Barack Obama Sr. described in the Dinesh D'Souza Forbes article. It includes more priceless quotations from that 1965 article in East Africa Journal, including this one: "the government should restrict the size of farms that can be owned by one individual throughout the country."

Senator Lieberman of Connecticut gave a speech in Connecticut this morning explaining why he favors extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone, not just those that President Obama thinks "need' the money:

I don't think it makes sense to raise any federal taxes during the uncertain economy we are struggling through. The more money we leave in private hands, the quicker our economic recovery will be. And that means I will do everything I can to make sure Congress extends the so-called Bush tax cuts for another year and takes action to prevent the estate tax from rising back to where it was.....

in our current economic situation, we cannot risk the economic headwinds that would be caused by tax increases. We need to keep as much money as possible in people's pockets and business's bank accounts.

I know that many people, including the President, have argued that the tax cuts should not be continued for people making more than $200,000 a year, but to me these are the people we need to be using their income to spend and invest to spur growth and job creation.