An effort to challenge the constitutionality of ObamaCare wins a victory — not a final victory, but a victory nonetheless — in Virginia, from federal judge Henry Hudson, a George W. Bush appointee. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial.

Peter Beinart, the $143,235 a year one-day-a-week associate professor at the City University of New York who on Friday will do his second Martha's Vineyard speaking appearance of the summer, has a new post up at the Daily Beast proclaiming that "Indifference to the rights and dignity of Palestinians is a cancer eating away at the moral pretensions of the American Jewish establishment" and asserting, "now the chickens are coming back home to America to roost."

Is it just me, or have I been seeing more and more of this lately? From today's Wall Street Journal: "Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a hedge-fund manager."

From today's Financial Times: "This article was co-authored by Richard Clarida, global strategic adviser at Pimco and professor of economics at Columbia University."

And of course there is Alan Blinder, professor of economics at Princeton and senior adviser at Promontory Financial Group.

And Lawrence Summers, who was professor of economics at Harvard and $5.2 million a year, one-day-a-week adviser to the D.E. Shaw hedge fund.

Back in April we wrote about Jamie Dimon's targeting of the "GNPH" — government, not-for profit and healthcare — sector as an area for J.P. Morgan Chase to focus on. Now, the Financial Times reports, "JPMorgan Chase will on Tuesday announce it has hired a former Clinton administration Treasury official to spearhead a new drive to win more commercial banking business from governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The recruitment of Daniel Zelikow, who served under Robert Rubin and is close to Tim Geithner, the current Treasury secretary, is part of JPMorgan's efforts to boost its overseas revenues."

Momentum seems to be building for marijuana legalization. Rep. Barney Frank, in a New York Times interview over the weekend: "Do you think your bill to legalize marijuana will ever pass? Yes, in the next five years." Amity Shlaes, in a new Bloomberg column: "People feel about marijuana today the way they felt about liquor when FDR became president. Americans are increasingly supporting legalization of the drug. For the first time in memory, it seems conceivable that a president might be able to push legalization through Congress. If the administration backed the legalization of marijuana, consumers would be so grateful that the government could tax the heck out of the herb."

Economic Policies for the 21st Century has an editorial commenting on a recent Financial Times piece by the head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet: "A French lifetime bureaucrat took to the op-ed page of an English language newspaper to defend free-market capitalism from his American counterparts....As America presses for more and more government outlays to help the economy emerge from recession, a French bureaucrat cites the economic research of a European supranational body to advocate substantial reductions in government spending. Even odder is that the benefits of increased government spending have become conventional wisdom in Washington just as sentiment moves in the exact opposite direction in capitals Americans used to deride as 'socialist.'"

If you had asked me what the richest county in America is, I'd have maybe guessed the one that includes Silicon Valley in California, or Greenwich, Conn. But Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner reports a Forbes survey based on median income: "the richest county in the nation, and 6 of the 10 wealthiest, are DC bedroom communities....The lesson is clear: government, not the free market, is where money is made these days."

One of the decisions faced by the 91-year-old new owner of Newsweek, Sidney Harman, will be what to do about columnist Fareed Zakaria. Leon Wieseltier memorably described him as a "black-tie barometer" and as "the consummate spokesman for the shibboleths of the White House and for the smooth new worldliness, the at-the-highest-levels impatience with democracy and human rights as central objectives of our foreign policy, that now characterize advanced liberal thinking about America's role in the world." Michael Ledeen describes him as "pathetic."

If you listen carefully you can start to hear a pattern of voices on the center-right making an economy-related argument against tax increases. Bloomberg News has an article reporting on a comment by a House Republican leader, Mike Pence: "Raising taxes during the worst economy in 25 years is a profoundly bad idea and I won't support it." Over at the Financial Times, Clive Crook writes, "On the immediate issue, a simple compromise presents itself. As Harvard University's Martin Feldstein has proposed, extend all the tax cuts for two more years, allowing the recovery to gain momentum; then reverse all of them, to help bring public borrowing back under control."

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, has a new campaign going against civil forfeiture: "How much private property is the government stealing in your state?"

The Wall Street Journal quotes Ranji H. Nagaswami, who in February 2009 left the post of chief investment officer at AllianceBernstein and will take over as chief investment adviser to Mayor Bloomberg's appointees on the city's pension funds, as saying, "Governments have been my most important clients in my 23-plus years" in the workforce.

Maybe the quote is out of context somehow, but, if accurate, Ii's the sort of comment that must be causing cringing over at AllianceBernstein and salivating at the firm's competitors. How is a comment like that supposed to make AllianceBernstein's many corporate and individual, non-governmental clients feel? If you are in the investment mangement business, or any business, for that matter, isn't part of the trick making sure that all the clients feel important?

After the whole Shirley Sherrod fiasco I am somewhat hesitant to pass along videos from Andrew Breitbart's site (A FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-community member-content co-creator writes to call me on lapsing into establishment thinking, since I often link to New York Times or Wall Street Journal items even though those papers screw plenty of things up, too. I plead guilty.), but this one of Rep. Pete Stark, a California Democrat, defending the constitutionality of ObamaCare, is too good to pass up: "The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country."

Economic Policies for the 21st Century has an editorial applying some skepticism to President Obama's claim that the government spending on General Motors and Chrysler has been a big success: "The overall story is not nearly as rosy the Administration would like you to believe."

The piece is particularly good at debunking the "repaid in full" claim made by GM: "Perhaps the two best statements on this topic came from Senator Carper (D-DE) and Steve Rattner, the former White House auto recovery czar. Senator Carper said: 'It sounds like it's kind of like taking money out of one pocket and putting in the other,' while Steve Rattner commented: GM 'may have slightly elasticized the reality of things.'"

The New York Times has an editorial this morning taking the position that the First Amendment protects both "animal cruelty videos" that include "depictions of animals being crushed or mutilated" and also "the sale of violent video games to minors." The Times has also, in the past, said that the First Amendment should allow Americans to provide "material support" to terrorist groups. What the First Amendment doesn't protect, in the Times's view, is the ability to run a television commercial about a political issue without disclosing your identity or your funding sources. The Times editorialists are First Amendment absolutists regarding everything except for the political speech that the First Amendment was intended to protect in the first place.

The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott notices a Rasmussen Poll showing 56% of New Yorkers favor repealing ObamaCare.