Dinesh D'Souza has a fascinating piece in Forbes tracing President Obama's policies and politics to his father's anticolonialism:

Who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. ...He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents.... In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself....

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective ...

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from "car czar' Steven Rattner's new book Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry. The book excerpt attributes two remarks to President Obama's White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: "Why even save GM?" and "F— the UAW." The Wall Street Journal followed that up with a sentence in brackets: "[A spokeswoman for Mr. Emanuel denied both remarks attributed to him.]"

It seems to me that while the Journal may have been trying to display responsibility by providing Mr. Emanuel a chance to respond, the paper's handling of the question amounts to a default. Consider the possible explanations for the situation.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a blog post up at Forbes on free markets and racial exploitation in the South:

The entire system of segregation has, in some quarters, been grotesquely treated as though it were some form of market system, when in fact it was anything but. The key feature of a market system is ease of entry and exit, which puts pressure on all economic players....As a libertarian, the central lesson to learn from this disgraceful historical episode is that free entry and free exit are the cheapest and most powerful ways to combat segregation.

The review of Cotton and Race in the Making of America is also worth a read for those interested in the topic of racism and capitalism.

President Obama gave a press conference this morning (the transcript is here), and it was really something.

Among the highlights: In response to a question about corruption in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama responded, "we've made progress on some of those fronts. I mean, when it comes to corruption, I'll just give you an example. Four years ago, 11 judges in the Afghan legal system were indicted for corruption. This year, 86 were indicted for corruption."

Posting will be sparse to non-existent Thursday and Friday as the editor marks the Jewish New Year. A happy and healthy new year to all reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creators, whatever your religious persuasion or lack of it. We'll be back in full force in 5771.

Reason magazine notices the Los Angeles Business Journal's article about a $5.2 million city of Los Angeles subsidy for China-based electric-car maker BYD, which says it will bring between 46 and 102 jobs to Los Angeles. Warren Buffett is a BYD investor, so the Los Angeles taxpayer are effectively subsidizing him. This, like TARP for Mr. Buffett's/Berkshire Hathaway's financial industry investments and the high-speed-rail "stimulus" for his Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroad, is one to remember the next time Mr. Buffett starts pontificating about how his taxes and those of his competitors should be higher.

"Ultimately, there is no dividing line between Main Street and Wall Street. We will rise or we will fall together as one nation." — President Obama, Remarks by the President on Wall Street Reform, Cooper Union, New York, New York, April 22, 2010.

"We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn't come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn't do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell. We did it with sweat and effort and innovation. (Applause.) We did it on the assembly line and at the construction site." — President Obama, Remarks by the President at Laborfest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 6, 2010.

The Democratic candidate for governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has been receiving campaign contributions from a surprising source, state campaign finance records show: Julia and David Koch, the businessman-philanthropist caricatured in a recent New Yorker piece (see our commentary here) as a corporate polluter who has secretly poured tens of millions of dollars into anti-Obama causes.

The contributions from Mr. Koch and his wife Julia to the Cuomo campaign total $74,900, according to the campaign finance records. David Koch made three separate gifts: $25,000 on July 10, 2010; $18,000 on November 16, 2009; and $6,900 on November 30, 2009. Julia Koch made two donations: $15,000 on July 10, 2010, and $10,000 on January 4, 2010.

We asked spokesmen for the Cuomo campaign and for Mr. Koch yesterday morning whether they had any explanation to offer for the contributions. They haven't yet provided one.

The increasing number of voices on the center-right of the political spectrum who want to try to solve the entitlement problem on the backs of "the rich" is a trend we have been following closely here.

Two more data points: First, an Amity Shlaes column reporting on a proposal by the Heritage Foundation's David John, who "would stanch the Social Security system's red ink by reducing government pensions that higher earners receive." (Mr. John's earlier ardor for fixing Social Security's finances regardless of the principles at stake prompted a 2006 New York Sun editorial headlined "The Heritage Tax," which elicited a letter to the editor in response from the think tank.)

Thomas Sowell has a new column: "What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and Congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that."

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The chairman of HSBC, Stephen Green, whose book was reviewed here back on March 4, will leave the bank to become trade minister of Great Britain, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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Bloomberg News has a nasty habit of quoting "professors" to validate their reporters' and columnists' points of view without identifying the political affiliation of the professors. We caught the news service doing it earlier here. The latest example comes in Albert Hunt's column likening Glenn Beck to Charles Coughlin. Writes Mr. Hunt:

Beck and Coughlin share a great deal: as mesmerizing broadcasters able to articulate the anger and frustration of a flock frightened by economic hard times.

"There are a lot of parallels between Coughlin and Beck," says Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who wrote a book about American populism of the left and right, including a section on the Catholic priest. "They both speak the language of rebellion against the establishment and to bring America back to God, citing a golden era of the past."

Bloomberg News's Matthew Lynn has a truly bizarre column out assailing "the rich." He writes: "the rich have changed over the past decade. They are, it turns out, a nasty bunch of people who are only getting nastier."

More: "There is an increasing amount of evidence that the rich are a vicious tribe of people."

And he claims, "The investment bankers and hedge-fund managers who make up most of the new rich elite don't have much contact with ordinary people." This is nuts. Does he assume the rich don't have family members who aren't rich? Or that their children don't have teachers in school? Or that they don't have any interactions with employees or staff people?

Does this blanket description of "the rich" as nasty and vicious include Mr. Lynn's employer, Michael Bloomberg?