Last week I flagged a dispatch by Bloomberg News about the Bush tax cuts as particularly leftish biased. Now it turns out that the author of the dispatch, Ryan Donmoyer, was a participant in the Journo-list email discussion group in which members fantasized about killing Rush Limbaugh, throwing Michael Ledeen through a plate glass window, and discussed accusing various right-wingers of racism to distract attention from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many of the other participants are identified with openly left publications such as the Nation. But Bloomberg News is supposed to be straight down the middle.

Eric Alterman, the $166,895 a year City University of New York "distinguished professor" of English and Journalism, doesn't come off as too distinguished in the latest leaked Journo-list emails.

The advocacy group United for a Fair Economy convened a conference-call/press conference earlier today to try to revive the estate tax, or the death tax, or the inheritance tax, or whatever you may prefer to call it, which lapsed at the beginning of 2010.

Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs executive-turned Clinton Treasury secretary-turned Citigroup executive, began the call by calling the estate tax a way to find revenue for the government "with no supply-side effect." He didn't clarify, but what I think he meant is that while people may work less when taxes increase, they are not going to stop dying because the death tax increases. It's great to see Mr. Rubin emerging as a believer in supply-side economics; welcome to the fight.

Mr. Rubin urged Congress to reenact the estate tax now, before the August recess, after which it would be "complicated" by the politics of midterm elections. This seemed to be a forthright acknowledgment that the death tax is not a winning issue, politically, for the Democrats.

Amity Shlaes has a new Bloomberg column up on a 1942 Supreme Court case, Wickard v. Filburn, that expanded the federal government's powers under the Commerce Clause of the constitution. She notes a Rasmussen Poll finding that "only 23 percent of Americans believe their government rules with 'the consent of the governed.'" And she suggests "passage of a constitutional amendment that explicitly delineates limits to government intervention in states."

This blog notes that the CME Group came out pretty well in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, and that Senator Dodd's wife, Jackie Clegg, is a $153,000 a year member of the board of directors of the CME group. More here.

Thanks to reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator J. for the tip.

With Charles Krauthammer warning Republicans not to underestimate President Obama in connection with 2012, it's worth also recalling that certain legislative victories and personnel placements are hard to reverse even after elections. Generally I'm not big on insect metaphors, but it's been suggested to me that a President Obama who loses elections in 2010 or 2012 might be something like a male praying mantis who dies after sex but who nonetheless keeps his line alive.

Who is going to staff all the new bureaucracies created by ObamaCare and financial reform? People the Obama team hire, with civil service job protections that will keep them in place for a long time. In less than two years in office, President Obama has already had as many Supreme Court picks (Sotomayor and Kagan) as President George W. Bush had in eight years (Roberts and Alito).

While the Democrats still have a majority in Congress, they are doing what they can to use their government power against their critics in the press. A release today from Rep. Anthony Weiner begins, "Rep. Anthony Weiner (D – Queens & Brooklyn) and House Commerce Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Rush (D – Chicago) formally announced a hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection to investigate the business practices of Goldline International, a precious metals dealer that uses aggressive sales tactics and conservative spokespeople such as Fox News' Glenn Beck to sell overpriced gold coins." The release goes on, "Goldline Plays off Public Fears of Government Takeover and Has Formed an Unholy Alliance with Conservative Pundits to Drive a False Narrative...Goldline employs several conservative pundits to act as shills for its' precious metal business, including Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Laura Ingraham, and Fred Thompson. By drumming up public fears during financially uncertain times, conservative pundits are able to drive a false narrative." Beck answers back at WeinerFacts.com.

From an article in today's New York Times about the Bronx River:

In 2006, parks officials and environmental groups stocked the river with 201 alewife herring, and three years later some herring returned to spawn. To help herring climb upstream to better spawning pools, officials want to build three sets of aluminum fish ladders, each set costing up to $400,000.

$1.2 million for three aluminum herring ladders in the Bronx will probably strike a lot of people as an excessively costly government expenditure in the current political and economic environment.

The New York Times, which last month featured a front-page article faulting the Bloomberg administration for its supposed lack of racial diversity while ignoring its own largely white editorial leadership, today unleashes a front-page article faulting the Bloomberg administration for supposedly doling out unpaid summer internships to the relatives of the rich and powerful while ignoring the New York Times Company's own internships, which pay about $900 a week. Do they really expect us to believe that no one with any connections to important Times advertisers or editors or publishers or shareholders or sources landed any of these internships, or, for that matter, jobs on the paper?

Bloomberg News has an article on the New York City comptroller's refusal to disclose the identities of six city outside pension managers fired for poor performance:

He refused to identify them all, even after Bloomberg News sought their names under the state's Freedom of Information Law. Liu, a Taiwan-born Democrat who became the first Asian-American elected to citywide office in November, didn't want to embarrass them, said his spokeswoman, Sharon Lee....

Paul Greenberg has a column on Walmart's spending $1 million or $2 million to fight a single $7,000 penalty imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration: "Now and then a private company will have the resources -- and will -- to stick up for itself."

Thomas Sowell's latest: "There is not now, nor has there ever been, anything post-racial about Barack Obama, except for the people who voted for him in the mistaken belief that he shared their desire to be post-racial. When he leaves office, especially if it is after one term, he will leave this country more racially polarized than before."

The Daily Caller has gotten and published some more copies of emails from that e-mail list of left-wing journalists -- Journo-List -- of the sort that got David Weigel ousted from his perch at the Washington Post. This time, they seemed to want to get the press to focus less on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and suggested trying to smear some right-wingers (anyone but soon-to-be New York Times columnist Ross Douthat) as racist as a diversion. Among the participants was Holly Yeager, who now works at, get this, the Columbia Journalism Review.

When the financial "reform" bill proposed to have the president appoint the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, the Wall Street Journal saddled up its highest horse and wrote an editorial denouncing what it called "politicizing the Federal Reserve." So who do we get as chairman of the New York Fed under the supposedly apolitical system that the Journal editorialists were defending? None other than Lee Bollinger, the $1.38 million a year president of Columbia University, who even the Journal's news department, citing his use of eminent domain for campus expansion, his advocacy of taxpayer subsidies for news, his ban on ROTC at Columbia's campus while welcoming Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, can figure out is a left-winger.

The Los Angeles Times has a pretty good profile of the actuary who got WellPoint/Anthem to roll back its rate increase in California. He had worked for Ernst & Young, "where he supervised 45 actuaries and enjoyed a corner office with a sweeping view of San Diego Bay. Ernst & Young downsized seven years ago, leaving Axene, then 53, out of work.":

He decided to start his own business...a small office behind his master bedroom serves as the corporate headquarters of Axene Health Partners. He shares the bare-bones space — dubbed 'the Outhouse' — with Tiffany, his office manager and daughter-in-law, and his son Josh, an actuary, while six other employees work from their homes in California and Oregon. Axene likes it that way, surrounded by family in a tranquil place where he can wear shorts and deck shoes to work...