Former Federal Reserve governor and George W. Bush economic aide Larry Lindsey, now president and CEO of The Lindsey Group, an economic advisory firm based in Washington, D.C., has the cover article in the new Weekly Standard, rebutting the Alan Blinder-Mark Zandi paper claiming that the stimulus worked:

The paper argued that fiscal stimulus enacted under both Presidents Bush and Obama lowered the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points. But it did not measure either the number of people who found work or the effectiveness with which the Obama stimulus created jobs. Instead, it assumed through the use of economic modeling that the recently enacted stimulus was roughly as effective, dollar for dollar, as similar provisions in the past. It then multiplied the past measures of job creating effectiveness by the number of dollars in the current plan and added the result to the current unemployment rate.

Clark Hoyt, who recently completed a three year stint as "public editor"/ombudsman of the New York Times, is going to work for Bloomberg News in Washington, a spokesman for the wire service confirms to FutureOfCapitalism.com. "Clark will help advise on our planned aggressive expansion of our government news reporting from Washington and work closely with our team there, reporting directly to editor-in-chief Matthew A. Winkler," the spokesman said.

The spokesman denied that the addition is a response to the participation of Bloomberg Washington news reporter Ryan Donmoyer in the Journo-List e-mail group in which members fantasized about killing Rush Limbaugh or throwing Michael Ledeen through a plate glass window, and discussed accusing various right-wingers of racism to distract attention from Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

A tipster says that Clark Hoyt, who just finished a stint as the New York Times's ombudsman/public editor, will join the Bloomberg News Washington bureau to try to keep the likes of Journo-lister Ryan Donmoyer on the straight and narrow. I have an inquiry in to Bloomberg about the matter and will update if they respond. Update: See the update above.

Sarah Palin notes her husband's union membership and courts the blue-collar labor vote while while Michelle Obama vacations in Spain at "the luxury Hotel Villa Padierna, a Ritz-Carlton property often described as one of the world's top 10 hotels. Rates range between $500 and $2,500 a night," and President Obama gets ready for a ten-day vacation on Martha's Vineyard. The New York Sun has an editorial.

The Wall Street Journal has two noteworthy pieces on the Giving Pledge, the Bill Gates-Warren Buffett effort to get billionaires to pledge half their assets to charity.

Evan Newmark has a column describing the pledges as "condescending, nearly cartoonish PR exercises – the exact opposite of good leadership." He suggests the effort is somehow linked to tax increases: "in terms of public perception, is there better cover for higher taxes than America's 'wealthy' giving their money away?"

And Michael Corkery has an item somewhat capriciously singling out some people who haven't taken the Giving Pledge. He mentions a lot of people as "missing" from the list, but makes no mention of the man he works for, Rupert Murdoch, who is also "missing," but who, since he owns the newspaper, gets a free pass from this kind of pressure or scrutiny, at least in his own paper.

The Wall Street Journal has a news article on Bank of America's desire to win release from "a secret U.S. sanction imposed during the financial crisis."

Since Bank of America is a publicly traded company, aren't regulators and bank management depriving the investing public of material information by keeping this memorandum of understanding "confidential"?

The Journal says: "The Charlotte, N.C., lender, for example, isn't allowed to raise its dividend as long as the memorandum hasn't been lifted, said people familiar with the agreement."

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't a government memorandum preventing the dividend from being raised something that potential investors would not want to be "secret"?

The Journal article doesn't get into the issue of whether the bank or the government have an obligation to disclose this memo to the investing public.

A county health inspector in Portland, Oregon, shut down the lemonade stand of a 7-year-old who was selling cups of lemonade for 50 cents each because she hadn't paid the government $120 for a temporary restaurant license, reports National Public Radio, which calls the health inspectors "knuckle-headed."

The Associated Press has an interview with the mother of Al Qaeda's new chief of global operations:

Shukrijumah's mother, Zurah Adbu Ahmed, said Thursday on the front stoop of her small home in suburban Miramar, Fla., that her son frequently talked about what he considered the excesses of American society — such as alcohol and drug abuse and women wearing skimpy clothes.

It's the skimpy clothes that do it, every time.

For years the journalists and academics have said settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be a high foreign policy priority for America because it would remove a potential grievance of terrorists. Are they all now going to launch campaigns against skimpy clothing? Don't hold your breath.

General Motors Chief Executive Ed Whitacre, as reported by USA Today: "We don't like this label of government ownership....People in GM are embarrassed by that. You lose your reputation and it's hard to get back."

Charles Krauthammer has a new column on what he calls "executive overreach" — executive branch officials acting beyond the authority they have been granted by Congress, and so escaping the consent of the governed. He writes:

How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country's nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

Larry Kudlow has a new column about the effects of what he calls "the coming tax bomb" and "Washington's war on investment":

the position of the Democratic party in power in Washington is that transfer payments (taxing and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul) are good for growth, and that investment is bad....

The great flaw in the thinking of the Democrats is that they are ignorant of the economic power of saving and investment. Saving is a good thing. Stocks, bonds, bank deposits, money-market funds, commercial paper, venture capital, private equity, real estate partnerships -- all that saving is channeled into business investment. And whether that capital goes into new start-ups or small businesses or large firms, it finances the kind of new investment in plants and equipment and software and buildings that ultimately creates jobs and family incomes. And that, in turn, spurs consumption.

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." There's some of this in a plan by Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Coburn, who are Republicans, backed by Karl Rove, to raise Medicare premiums on couples making more than $170,000 a year. Now Glenn Hubbard, who was chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and is dean of Columbia Business School, has an op-ed piece in Politico suggesting "a temporary payroll tax holiday...for lower-income workers." On Social Security, he suggests "progressive indexing, in which lower-income workers' benefits are indexed to growth in wages (as under current law), while benefits for higher-income workers are indexed only to growth in prices."

University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan, writing at the New York Times's Economix blog under the headline "Eurosclerosis Comes to America":

this recession has been unique in terms of the multitude of public policies that dull incentives to work and earn income. Best known are unemployment benefits, which are paid only to people who have not yet accepted a new job. But the mortgage modification programs, begun by the Bush administration and tweaked by the Obama administration, offer mortgage forgiveness to borrowers with low incomes while offering nothing to those with high incomes.

Link via Economic Policies for the 21st Century.

From the Financial Times:

The Republican Study Committee, which represents 116 members, a majority of the Grand Old Party's House membership, recently drafted a bill seen as a blueprint for what they would do if they took control in November.

It includes plans to eliminate the inheritance tax, which they call the "Death Tax", reducing corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 12.5 per cent, and abolishing capital gains taxes.

Voters in Missouri, in a statewide ballot referendum known as "Proposition C" "overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance, rebuking President Barack Obama's administration and giving Republicans their first political victory in a national campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March," reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The paper says the voters rejected the mandate, and passed Proposition C, by a "ratio of nearly 3 to 1," despite more than $300,000 in spending by the Missouri Hospital Association in support of the ObamaCare mandate.