The Economist has an article on the governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, who is one of the more interesting and promising characters on the Republican horizon. It reports, "he wants to raise the retirement age and stop sending Social Security cheques to the rich."

We said just the other day that "One of the surprising things in the battle of ideas these days is the degree to which the center-right of the political spectrum wants to make government tax and spending policy tilt more away from the 'rich.'" Obama wants to raise their taxes; Mitch Daniels just wants to stop sending them Social Security checks. Do they get a refund for the money they paid in to the system before they retired?

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration — another legacy of President Nixon — is going after a two-employee, home-based company in St. Louis, Heff's Tuckpointing. The company consists of the owner and his nephew, but the federal government wants to protect them from themselves, levying $3,600 in fines on the company. The St. Louis Dispatch has the details in a column that runs under the excellent headline "Small business owner stands up to government." Link via Rush Limbaugh's email newsletter.

The State Department is paying ground zero mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf a $200 a day honorarium and a per-diem of between $400 and $500 a day for a "15-day tour to Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates" that begins today, the Associated Press reports. It's the fourth such U.S.-government-sponsored trip he has been on; two of them were during the Bush administration.

When President Obama has lost Margaret Carlson, a reliably left-wing columnist for the ardently pro-mosque Mayor Bloomberg's Bloomberg News, he's really in trouble. From Ms. Carlson's column:

Having mixed feelings about the placement of a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero doesn't make you a yahoo. It makes you human. It doesn't help that the imam in charge, moderate though he may be, once told Americans to "acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end."...The Obama mindset is dismissive of those who have never sipped espresso in the faculty lounge.

Scooter Libby, Conrad Black, now Rod Blagojevich — the Wall Street Journal has an editorial critical of the prosecutor in all three cases, Patrick Fitzgerald, "whose conduct more and more suggests another unaccountable federal prosecutor run amok."

The Heritage Foundation and the Washington Examiner both weigh in on the federally backed 3.5%-down mortgages for luxury condominiums in Manhattan's Gramercy Park, noted here back on August 13.

The Republicans running against Harry Reid for Senate in Nevada, Sharron Angle, gives a strong interview to the New York Times:

this Keynesian economics that didn't work in the 1930s. It didn't work for President Carter, and it's not working now. And yet they seem to just keep spending more. That seems to be their answer to everything, is spend more....

The solution to our problems is pay back on the debt, cut back on the spending and take back our economy by reducing marginal tax rates and also regulation.

The Financial Times catches the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, proposing a "reunification tax." The South Korean president doubtless has a better sense of the situation that we do from afar, but surely there would be significant savings from uniting North and South Korea as well as expenses. Defense costs would presumably decline. And think of all the savings on Kim Jong-Il's consumption of luxury goods.

It smacks of the tendency of politicians everywhere to dream up new excuses for justifying new taxes.

Thomas Sowell has a new column taking issue with President Obama's definition of "rich":

A couple making $125,000 a year each are not rich, even though together they reach that magic $250,000 income level. In most cases, they haven't been making $125,000 a year all their working lives. Far more often, they have reached this level after decades of working their way up from lower incomes-- and now the government steps in to grab the reward they have earned over the years.

John Stossel has a new column rebutting President Obama's claim that Social Security privatization would have been a disaster because the stock market crashed.

What would it mean for the stock market if Republicans took over at least one house of Congress in the midterm election? The manager of the Congressional Effect Fund, Eric Singer, has a look at the history of returns when there is "a divided or gridlocked government...in which the President and at least one chamber of Congress are from different political parties" versus a "unified government," such as the situation that obtains now, with the Democrats in charge of both the White House and Congress.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but the past performance is pretty amazing:

Since 1973, using the price of gold as a deflator (instead of the Consumer Price Index, which has suffered from style drift over the years) real, inflation-adjusted returns for the S&P 500 were a fabulous 15.3 percent gain in "gridlock" years, and a horrible 9.9 percent loss in years with unified government....

CHILMARK, Mass. — President Obama is schedule to arrive here on Martha's Vineyard tomorrow for a ten-day vacation following his weekend dip off the Florida coast.

And if the president thought that the Florida vacation was the one where he would encounter angry locals upset about callous decision-making by federal Minerals Management Service officials who put the interests of big energy companies ahead of the health of birds, fish, and local residents — well, he should have joined me and the Republican candidate for governor of Massachusetts at the community center in Chilmark earlier this month, where about 100 residents and elected officials voiced concern about state and federal plans to surround Martha's Vineyard with hundreds of 50-story high wind turbines.

This isn't just the long-running tale of the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound. State and federal authorities plan to develop at least two more wind farms off Martha's Vineyard, a point that those at the meeting were reminded of by large graphics and renderings of how the windmills would mar the views from the beach.

As a rule we try to keep the tone around here well-modulated, but every once and a while President Obama says something so outrageously false that it's genuinely infuriating. Such was the case earlier this week, when the president spoke Monday at a lunch in Wisconsin and uttered the following:

We got here after nearly 10 years of an economic agenda in Washington that was pretty easy to sum up: You cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; you cut rules for special interests; you cut working folks loose to fend for themselves. If you're out of a job, tough luck, you're on your own. Don't have enough money for college? Tough luck, you're on your own. You don't have health insurance? Too bad, you're on your own. That was the philosophy of the last decade: You are on your own.

Mr. Obama repeated a similar attack again Tuesday at a lunch in Seattle:

When Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote skeptically about the $75 million proposed settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission, arguing that the people who would pay were "Citigroup's shareholders — the same people who were arguably defrauded by its failure to disclose its exposure to subprime mortgages in the first place," we flagged it here as "intriguing."

Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, a federal judge, Ellen Segal Huvelle, a Clinton appointee, has declined to approve the settlement, asking the SEC, as the Journal puts it, "why Citigroup shareholders should have to pay for the alleged sins of bank executives."

Competition in Westhampton Beach between two independent bookstores, a long-established one and a new entrant, is the topic of an article in the The New York Times:

"There's no legal or ethical principle that says you don't open a second store of some kind because someone else has the first one," said James Kramon, a longtime summer resident here.

The ethics of it are certainly something that have been debated for a long time; there's a summary of the Jewish religious law about it up here. (Readers may also wonder if James Kramon is any relation to Times editor Glenn Kramon.)