Roger C. Altman has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times that is remarkable for a whole variety of reasons, but let's begin with the most outrageous. He writes: "corporate America should remember the president's actual record....the president made the courageous decision to put General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy. As a result, both survived and, today, G.M. in particular is coming back fast — along with its hundreds of suppliers. Moreover, taxpayers are likely to recover the full value of their investment in the company."

Mr. Altman is identified at the end of the piece only as, "Roger C. Altman, an investment banker, was a deputy secretary of the Treasury during the first Clinton administration."

So long as we are on the topic of ruling class versus country class, two more data points:

A Ross Douthat column in today's New York Times: "The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren't racial minorities; they're working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts....This cultural divide has been widening for years."

The Cato Institute has a good post on how, in an effort to defend the "individual mandate" in ObamaCare from constitutional challenge, the Obama administration is defending it as a tax, even though, in arguing for passing the bill, Democrats denied that the penalty for not being insured was a tax. Law professor Randy Barnett has more at Volokh.com.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator E. for sending the link.

The FiveBooks Web site has an interview with Yuval Levin in which Mr. Levin recommends five books on American conservatism. The interviewer, Jonathan Rauch, offers some of his own thoughts in questioning Mr. Levin:

[Rauch]:So what do Hayekans do, or Burkeans do, when they reach 2010. You've got big government, bigger than they've ever liked, but big government itself has become embedded in mores and traditions. Are you stuck between a revolutionary fervour to overthrow it all, and a shrugging acceptance that we're stuck with it? Or is there some third path?

From a new batch of papers out today from the National Bureau of Economic Research, three that are intriguing:

When food stamps were rolled out nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s, one effect was that the recipients worked less. (Abstract).

The market thought Scott Brown's election was good for health care stocks: "We find that the reduced likelihood of Health Reform's passage after the Brown election led to a significant increase in health industry stocks and average cumulative abnormal returns of 1.2 percent, corresponding to an increase in total market value of approximately $14.5 billion. Focusing on managed care (insurance) firms, we find an average cumulative abnormal return of 6.5 percent (a $6.7 billion increase in market value), with individual firms' cumulative abnormal returns ranging from around 5 to 9 percent." (Abstract.)

The July-August issue of the American Spectator carries a long piece by Angelo Codevilla about what Professor Codevilla calls the "ruling class" and the "country class" and the differences between the two. It's a lengthy, somewhat Manichean piece full of sweeping generalizations, and I don't agree with all of it, particularly the foreign-policy parts, but it's worth a look for those interested in what we have called here the "arrogance of the elites." It's particularly strong on the weakness of the Republicans: "The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it." And there are some good lines: "Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?"

His suggestion: "Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them."

The "burrowing in" of reporters from the hard-left partisan press or advocacy groups into (supposedly) mainstream news organizations has been a topic here: James Sterngold went from being a regular contributor to Mother Jones to being a reporter for Bloomberg News. The latest example is the co-author of the big Washington Post investigation of the intelligence community, William Arkin. The Post investigation front page describes him as follows:

William M. Arkin has been a columnist and reporter with The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com since 1998. He has worked on the subject of government secrecy and national security affairs for more than 30 years. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books about the U.S. military and national security.

Bloomberg News catches the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, writing a letter supporting Toyota in a trade case brought by an American who says he has the patent to some of the hybrid technology used in the Prius. This is how Bloomberg frames it:

The Washington-based ITC must decide what is more important: Severinsky's right to protect the millions of dollars invested in his invention or the potential economic harm of banning Toyota's hybrid-vehicle imports.

"We're confident that the government will look at this for what it is," Jim Lentz, president of the Japanese automaker's U.S. sales unit in Torrance, California, said in an interview. "I don't think it would be in the best interest of the American consumer to take the No. 1-selling hybrid off the market."

Today's New York Times story on the Goldman Sachs-SEC settlement quotes Senator Carl Levin of Michigan as saying, "A key factor in the settlement is that Goldman acknowledges wrongdoing." From the SEC's own press release on the settlement: "Goldman agreed to settle the SEC's charges without admitting or denying the allegations."

Goldman did acknowledge it had made "a mistake" that it "regrets," but there are plenty of regrettable mistakes (that third hot dog?) that don't rise to the level of "wrongdoing."

The New York Times lead news article about the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform contains a pretty strongly opinionated section of historical context:

Over the last half-century, as traders and lenders increasingly drove the nation's economic growth, politicians of both parties scrambled to get out of the way, passing a series of landmark bills that allowed financial companies to become larger, less transparent and more profitable.

Usury laws were set aside. Banks were allowed to expand across state lines, sell insurance, trade securities. The government watched and did nothing as the bulk of financial activity moved into a parallel universe of private investment funds, unregulated lenders and black markets like derivatives trading.

That era of hands-off optimism was gaveled to an end on Thursday as the Senate gave final approval to a bill that reasserts the importance of federal supervision of financial transactions.

Following up yesterday's New York Times editorial, the Financial Times has its own editorial today calling for increased government regulation of Google:

Barry Diller, chairman of Expedia and InterActiveCorp, protested this week about Google's $700m acquisition of ITA Software, saying that it would give Google unfair leverage in displaying flight information. Mr Diller wants the deal to be scrutinised carefully by regulators and conditions imposed.... the potential for antitrust abuse through the tying of vertical services to search raises clear concerns. European and US regulators should use the ITA deal to examine the issue broadly.

It would be wrong for Google to be hamstrung by regulators simply because its services are superior to rivals, but it needs to be watched with care.

Larry Kudlow explains the stock market rally:

The best thing to come out of the administration this summer was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's pledge to me in a CNBC interview to place a 20-20 limit on tax rates for investor capital gains and dividends. No one, most of all me, wants to see any increase in these tax rates. But at least the Geithner pledge means investment tax rates will stay low. The stock market took a turn for the better right after the interview.

Read it here first: The statue of Stalin at the National D-Day Memorial in Virginia, which we wrote about here back in November, is the subject of Michael Gerson's latest column: "Stalin and Hitler were moral equals in nearly every respect -- the slave labor camps, the mass graves, the night arrests, the sadistic and sycophantic circle of enablers....The main difference between Hitler and Stalin is that one lost a war and ended with a bullet in his head. The other gets a bust at the National D-Day Memorial."

The news of Goldman Sachs's settlement with the SEC is just breaking, but it's not too early to make a few observations.

1. We told you so. (See the May 19, 2010 item here under the headline "Looks Like Goldman Will Settle.")

2. It's unsatisfying. It's unsatisfying if you think Goldman didn't do anything wrong, because, under the settlement, the firm will have to disgorge $550 million, which is a lot of money to pay if you didn't do anything wrong. It's unsatisfying if you think Goldman did do something wrong, because, under the terms of the settlement (at least according to a New York Times news alert) Goldman will not have to admit any wrongdoing. If you think Goldman actually did do something wrong, that seems to fail to do full justice to the matter. And it's unsatisfying if you are not sure whether Goldman did something wrong, because the settlement leaves the matter vague. The message is that firms may be forced to disgorge hundreds of millions of dollars even if they didn't do anything wrong.

Business Insider has an item running under the headline, "The New York Times Goes Nuts, Says The Government Should Regulate Google's Search Algorithm." If you read the actual Times editorial, though, it stops just short of calling for such regulation, venturing only that it is "worth exploring" while cautioning, "Google provides an incredibly valuable service, and the government must be careful not to stifle its ability to innovate. Forcing it to publish the algorithm or the method it uses to evaluate it would allow every Web site to game the rules in order to climb up the rankings — destroying its value as a search engine. Requiring each algorithm tweak to be approved by regulators could drastically slow down its improvements."

The way I read the editorial was as a threat that if New York Times articles and pages don't show up high in the search results, the editorial board would go all the way and call for government action.