Lloyd Grove has quite the dispatch from the Aspen Ideas Festival, notices Michael Barone, who is also there.

The anti-windmill forces had a full page ad in the Vineyard Gazette over July 4 weekend. It's pretty well done and worth a look for anyone under the impression that, post-BP-spill, wind farms are going to face an easier time of it.

David Frum's post on child poverty and income inequality has attracted some favorable attention from the Washington Examiner's E.D. Kain, who calls the Frum item "excellent and thought provoking."

Mr. Frum writes "America suffers much more child poverty than do comparably wealthy countries," in part because of "our much lower levels of social spending, which mean that poor families receive far less social support than do poor families in other countries."

That turns out to be inaccurate. As we wrote back in May:

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., writes up his views on financial "reform" legislation in a lively piece for the Bowdoin Daily Sun:

To make it work, the committee had to come up with $19 billion to pay for some of the "special provisions" in the bill. There weren't any tax experts around on the committee, so they had decided to give a group of unelected officials the power to set both the size of the tax base and the rate that would be applied on a taxpayer-by-taxpayer basis to a target group of financial service companies. Not since the Sheriff of Nottingham has a tax collector had such discretion on who to tax and how much.

William Cohan, writing in the New York Times about what he calls the "concerted effort by the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress to demonize Goldman Sachs":

Despite the political haymaking, the truth is that Goldman Sachs did nothing differently in the years leading up to the crisis than did other firms of its stature. Nothing has come to light in any of the very public recent assaults on the firm that also could not be discovered by looking through millions of documents at every other Wall Street firm with large trading and capital-markets businesses.

If anything, what has been revealed in all the reams of Goldman documents is that the firm was — and remains — a better risk-manager than any of its competitors.

He suggests Goldman give up its status as a bank holding company. He doesn't really get into the question of why Goldman has been demonized more than other firms, such as JP Morgan Chase.

Jacob Sullum has an interesting column, pegged to the Elana Kagan confirmation hearing, on the concept of "natural rights." He explains: "These are not rights the government creates — they are pre-existing rights the government is bound to respect."

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who only a couple weeks ago was bemoaning that, "By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses," is today being named by President Obama to the president's Export Council. The CEO of ethanol subsidy (and tariff) welfare queen Archer Daniels Midland gets a seat on the Export Council as well, as does the CEO of ObamaCare beneficiary Pfizer and the CEO of Ford, which benefited from a $5.9 billion federal loan.

Bloomberg News takes its Lloyd Blankfein obsession to a new low, publishing an entire news article about a $1.7 million portion of the Goldman Sachs chief executive's charitable giving, and promoting the story as one of its "top headlines." Why no Bloomberg story on Jamie Dimon's charitable giving, or on John Paulson's, or Ben Bernanke's, or Timothy Geithner's? It's just weird.

Why is Rush Limbaugh so highly compensated that he could afford to put up all of his guests at his recent wedding for two nights at the Breakers in Palm Beach? He's just good. Two items from his email newsletter today that deserve wider circulation: President Obama's NASA administrator said in a recent interview that President Obama told him that his "foremost" mission should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering." And in President Obama's remarks on July 4, he said "we celebrate the principles that are timeless —- tenets first declared by men of property and wealth, but which gave rise to what Lincoln called a 'new birth of freedom' in America: civil rights and voting rights, workers' rights and women's rights, and the rights of every American." Rush's response was, "Even on the day of our independence, the leader of the regime has to bash this country."

A Massachusetts-based FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator writes to share news of a $1 million television advertising campaign aimed at getting Congress to pass some kind of energy "reform" bill. The latest spot features Tim Healy, the ceo of a publicly traded company called EnerNOC, Inc. "Congress must act" the ad says, "call your senators today."

The FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator writes, "The fundamental message is that the company can create jobs in Massachusetts if the taxpayers will subsidize us...Why don't they use the $1M to invest in their own business? Because the ad campaign is a better investment?"

Tropicana has taken its "half gallon" orange juice container down to 59 ounces from 64, a fact I didn't notice (even though I buy about a container a week of the stuff) until I read a post about it by Steven Horwitz at the Coordination Problem blog:

If you eat tuna fish, you may have noticed the ongoing shrinkage in the size of the standard can of tuna, which used to be 6oz and is now 5oz. I have noticed Chunky soups going from 19oz to 18.5 and some canned tomato products going from 15oz to 14.5. Jody noted that the Dial bath bars we use have a new curved shape that makes them slightly smaller than they used to be....

the shrunken products sell for more or less the same price as the older, larger sized ones did. In the case of the juice, the standard price at my local grocery store has been around 2.99 for some time. Tuna prices have stayed about the same as well. But 2.99 for a slightly smaller carton is functionally equivalent to a higher price for the old, larger one.

William McGurn has a column in today's Wall Street Journal on Walmart's expansion in Chicago, which reminded me that I wanted to post something here about my drive Sunday, which took me past a new Walmart supercenter in Worcester, Massachusetts. A Worcester Telegram & Gazette article and the map that goes with it highlight the two things I noticed: "12 wind turbines atop 48-foot light poles in the parking lot to help generate electricity for the parking lot lights and the store" and a street named "Walmart Way."

The Route 146 connector between the Massachusetts Turnpike and I-290 features a new government road sign marking the turn for "Walmart Way." Google Maps shows other streets named Walmart Way in Lawrence, Ohio; Newport News, Virginia; Tift, Georgia; Chesterfield, Virginia, and Lumpkin, Georgia. There's also a "Wal-Mart Way," with a hyphen, in Maysville, Kentucky.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece highlighting the difficulty of implementing the Volcker Rule, part of the not-passed-by-the-Senate-yet financial "reform":

It isn't clear if regulators will see the shifts as anything more than sleight of hand. The Volcker rule, named for Obama Administration adviser and former Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker and passed by the House last week as part of the financial-overhaul bill, directs federal officials to disallow most proprietary trading at banks unless the trades are meant to serve near-term client demand or reduce risk.

But does that mean a trader can't buy a bunch of bonds in anticipation that investors would want to buy them a week later at a higher price? What if the trader holds the bonds for a month or two? Such scenarios make it difficult to draw a clear line between proprietary trading and the sort of client-centered trades typically handled by separate desks at most firms. Regulators could take years to establish clear rules.

On Commentary's Contentions blog, John Podhoretz does a wonderful job of demolishing the New York Times's ridiculous front-page attack on charitable tax deductions for groups that help Jews settle in the land of Israel. Mr. Podhoretz takes issue with both "the open and explicit suggestion that tax-deductible dollars should only support policies with which the sitting administration agrees or wishes to foster" and "the notion that tax-exempt dollars belong to the U.S. Treasury and are, in effect, given as a gift by the government to whomever receives them. The general proposition behind it is that any private-sector dollar not confiscated by the government is in essence a gift from the government."

Intel co-founder Andrew Grove writes in Bloomberg Businessweek:

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers—factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple, Microsoft, Dell, or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Sony.

...Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple's products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones.