It's hard to quantify, but it sure looks to me as if more business leaders are more willing now than they were, say, a year ago to challenge the Obama administration's expansion of government. Verizon and the Business Roundtable's Ivan Seidenberg spoke out; Now Tenneco chairman and CEO Gregg Sherrill has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal:

The free enterprise system, hard-wired into this country's DNA, has created more wealth and lifted more people out of poverty than any other system ever devised by human beings. For the entire history of our nation, people from all over the world have come here for the opportunity to succeed on their own merits.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins writes, "Sarah Palin's own fame seems grounded on little but a look and an attitude."

What is it about successful women that causes people to say that their success is based just on looks? Ms. Palin, as a governor and mayor, had more executive experience than Barack Obama did when he became president. If a conservative male writer said this about a Democratic woman politician, he'd be accused of sexism.

Politico co-founder John Harris and Jim VandHei have a piece out this morning that begins almost as a parody of left-wing Obama-worship, attempting to answer the "mystery" of why ""Obama is perceived as failing to win over the public, even though by most conventional measures he is clearly succeeding."

The piece gets better as it goes on, however: "on the issues voters care most about — the economy, jobs and spending — Obama has shown himself to be a big-government liberal. This reality is killing him with independent-minded voters."

More:

In what would surprise media critics outside Washington, many reporters don't much like Obama or his gang either. They accurately perceive the contempt with which they are held by his White House, an attitude that undoubtedly flows from the top. Insults and blustery non-responses, f-bombs flying, are common in how West Wing aides speak to reporters.

The chief counsel in the division of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joan McKown, "will depart the agency to become a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Jones Day," an SEC press release announces. Jones Day clients, according to the firm Web site, include Citicorp, Deutsche Bank AG, Dresdner Kleinwort Limited, General Electric, The Goldman Sachs Group, L.P., Jefferies & Company, Inc., JPMorgan Chase Bank, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P.

Columbia University's $1.38 million-a-year president, Lee Bollinger, has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal today calling for increased taxpayer subsidies for journalists. It's worth a careful deconstruction.

Mr. Bollinger: "foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future."

A few dozen full-time foreign correspondents in China is far more than we had from 1949 until the 1970s. Time had plenty of correspondents in China in the 1940s but still got the story wrong because Henry Luce wouldn't listen to Teddy White. What matters isn't how many full-time foreign correspondents one has somewhere but how accurate the coverage is.

James Stewart sides with Gordon Crovitz in the Bloomberg Versus Crovitz debate over Google and China.

When people point to the lack of private-sector experience in the Obama administration, I usually reply by pointing out Lawrence Summers's $5.2 million a year, one-day-a-week job at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund, or Rahm Emanuel's two-and-a-half year, $16.2 million stint as managing director in the Chicago office of Wasserstein, Perella. Now comes President Obama's nominee to head the office of management and budget, Jacob Lew, who shares with Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Summers private sector experience that is both short and lucrative. From 2006 to January 2009 Mr. Lew worked at Citigroup. The Washington Times reports:

Mr. Lew took home $1.1 million in compensation from Citigroup during 2008 and the first two weeks of January 2009, according to his 2009 government ethics filing.

Amity Shlaes has been astonishingly prolific lately -- a piece for AOL News July 8, a piece for the Wall Street Journal July 13, and a piece for Bloomberg also published July 13.

The best of the three pieces in my view is the Bloomberg column: "What is failing us isn't our economy, but our politics," she writes, calling for humility in government. She likes Rep. Paul Ryan and Governor Mitch Daniels, and she suggests cutting taxes and regulations, abandoning fiscal stimulus, and reducing expectations about entitlements. She preemptively acknowledges her plan will be "ridiculed," but says it's worth laying out nonetheless.

The New York Times has a short article about a hit-and-run accident involving a state senator, Eric Schneiderman, who represents parts of Manhattan and the Bronx:

The senator...was leaving the NY1 studio in Chelsea after taping an interview when his driver hit a parked minivan and left the scene. ...

A spokesman for Mr. Schneiderman said the car's driver was a staff member, Rachel Kagan, 22, the niece of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court nominee.

The damaged car's owner, Melissa Rabinovich, an executive editor for NY1, said it had $3,000 in damage: a cracked bumper, a damaged back panel and a cracked left taillight. She filed a police report and called Mr. Schneiderman's office on Tuesday after tracing the license plate, which a witness had noted.

New York City is replacing the Willis Avenue Bridge between Harlem and the Bronx, the New York Post reports: "When it opened in 1901, the Willis Avenue Bridge cost only $2.5 million. The new bridge's price tag of over $612 million makes it the most expensive the city's Department of Transportation has ever built." Either a dollar is worth a lot less than it was in 1901, or bridges have gotten a lot more expensive, or some combination of the two. Earlier: My Daily News op-ed piece on the cost of renovating the Brooklyn Bridge.

Frederick Sheehan on why Emerson Electric is moving to Asia:

American CEOs are voting with their feet. Since they aren't investing in the United States, does it make sense for the individual stockholder or bondholder to do so?...

Most forthright is David Farr, President, Chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric Corporation, a 120-year-old manufacturer with over $21 billion in annual sales. Emerson's headquarters is in Chicago, Illinois, [Update: Several commenters say it is in fact in St. Louis, Mo.] but maybe not for long:

"Why would any CEO invest one penny in the US? There is not one reason based on the new rules of the game."

- David Farr, CEO, Emerson Electric, quarterly conference call, May 2009

...David Farr has a business to run. He described the reason he is moving Emerson Electric to Asia at the Baird Industrial Conference last November:

Senator Scott Brown explains his support for the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and Massachusetts free-market types respond, here.

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

A Democratic Congressman from Queens, Gregory Meeks, lives in a 6,000-square-foot house in Queens paid for with four different loans, including one $40,000 loan in January 2007, the Daily News reports:

in January 2007, Meeks borrowed $40,000 from Queens businessman Ed Ahmad. Sources have told the Daily News that Meeks used the money from Ahmad to help pay for the house.

Meeks acknowledged to The News last month that he had failed to report the loan from Ahmad on his 2007 and 2008 annual financial disclosure forms.

He didn't make any payments on the loan until last month - after the FBI questioned Ahmad about the arrangement.

Where does a non-congressman go to find one of these no-payment home loans?

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column up at Forbes.com in which he argues that the Defense of Marriage Act should be repealed by Congress, not overturned by judges:

Under our law, only the state may issue marriage licenses. That power carries with it a duty to serve all-comers on equal terms, which means that the state should not be able to pick and choose those on whom it bestows its favors. DOMA offends this principle in two ways. First, it excludes polygamous couples from receiving these marital benefits. Second, it excludes gay couples. Both groups contribute to the funds that support these various government programs. Both should share in its benefits.

In an article headlined, "Tax Cuts for High-Income Americans Depend on Democrats Blinking," Bloomberg News takes a look at the prospect that certain Bush-era income tax cuts will be extended for at least another year. The article mentions the views of seven people: Senator Wyden, Senator Voinovich, Roberton Williams, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, John Boehner, and Stan Collender. Of these, only one, Mr. Boehner, is a real supporter of the Bush tax cuts.

Mr. Collender, identified by Bloomberg only as "a former House and Senate budget analyst who is managing director of Qorvis Communications, a Washington communications firm," turns out to be a Clinton appointee who gave $1,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 1992, $1,000 to Hillary Clinton in 2000, $1,000 to left-wing Democrat Rosa DeLauro in 2009, and $1,000 to Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Paul Hodes in March 2010, according to FEC records.