The Wall Street Journal reports:

Recruiters from the McCormick Group, an Arlington, Va., head-hunting firm, have approached law firms in Washington to gauge their interest in hiring Kevin M. Downing, the government lawyer who led the tax-evasion case against Swiss bank UBS AG, said people who have seen the pitches....The people said some law firms that represent the big financial and tax firms hit by the U.S. crackdown are on the receiving end of the pitches.

The Journal says Mr. Downing may have to recuse himself from some matters involving firms where he is job-hunting.

The Washington Examiner has some good coverage of the DISCLOSE Act, the attempt by Congress to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision, and, along with it, the First Amendment, by law rather than Constitutional Amendment. Rather than the blanket protections on free speech and the right of petition that are included in the First Amendment, the DISCLOSE Act gives certain favored groups more speech rights than other, less favored groups.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on the Business Roundtable's chairman and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg's comment 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."

Thanks to reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content-co-creators E. and S. for both sending this one.

The libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice has launched a new free speech blog, MakeNoLaw.Org. There's plenty of legislative and litigation action on this front, particularly on the campaign finance front, so this should be worth watching.

Al Gore is the subject of a public complaint by an anonymous Oregon massage therapist who says he behaved inappropriately when she came to his hotel room to provide a massage.

I was hesitant to even get into it on this site because it's an anonymously made negative accusation. The woman hired a lawyer and the lawyer told the police it was going to be handled civilly, which sounds like they were looking for a payment from Vice President Gore. On the other hand, if you say that, it's getting into "blame the victim" mode, which is itself problematic.

With all those caveats, though, a few points are worth mentioning. From the transcript of the woman's statement to police, as obtained by The Smoking Gun: "I cannot begin to imagine that such a public figure who is married with a very public life with his spouse and had books published about family life and relationships with his spouse and he was on some book or film tour of some altruistic environmental nature would be anything less than a model of stellar integrity."

More from the appearance of hedge fund manager Steven Eisman before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on for-profit education, covered earlier here:

Mr. Eisman claims the growth of the for-profit education industry is "purely a function of government largesse." That's ridiculous. You think that Bill Gates is getting a Pell Grant or a Stafford Loan when he watches a lecture from The Teaching Company? Some of the growth has to do with the fact that private companies have been quicker to adopt technology that makes distance learning possible, that they emphasize teaching and learning as opposed to research or football, and that they focus on practical fields such as nursing or auto mechanics rather than, say, art history.

All nine Supreme Court justices sided with Conrad Black, who played a significant role in starting up the New York Sun, in an opinion released this morning on his appeal.

It's a huge win for Lord Black, and a huge win for his lawyer, Miguel Estrada, who Senator Schumer kept off an appeals court even though he is one of the most brilliant constitutional advocates of his generation, and who might have preceded Justice Sotomayor as the first Hispanic on the high court (other than Cardozo) if Mr. Schumer hadn't gotten his way.

It's a huge defeat for Judge Richard Posner, whose Court of Appeals decision snidely dismissing Black's appeal won the support of not a single Supreme Court Justice, and was overturned in today's opinion.

It's a huge defeat for Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor in Chicago who went after Lord Black and who also was the force behind the jailing of Judith Miller and the prosecution of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is holding a hearing -- "the first in a series," according to Chairman Harkin -- this morning with the title "Emerging Risk? An Overview of the Federal Investment in For-Profit Education."

You can watch online if you have the stomach for it; hedge fund manager Steven Eisman, who has been campaigning for tougher federal regulation of the for-profit colleges while shorting their stocks, is scheduled to testify in the second panel.

A sense of the "gotcha" tone of the hearing is available from a report (pdf) that Chairman Harkin released today; "On average, for-profit schools are more expensive to attend than community colleges or public four year schools...Average annual tuition at a for-profit school was about $14,000 in 2009, while tuition at community college averaged about $2,500 and averaged $7,000 for in-state students at four-year public colleges."

Kudos to Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant himself, for joining Mayor Bloomberg and the chief executives of Disney and Boeing in supporting immigration law changes that include "more opportunities for immigrants to join the U.S. work force and a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants."

Now if he can just get his Fox News team to ease off on whipping up the "amnesty" objections, it might actually happen.

To judge by the comments on the Yahoo! news article ("Bloomberg, Murdoch and all their pro-amnesty cronies should be lined up and shot for treason"), this position will generate some angry comments disagreeing with me, and I acknowledge that line-jumping, rule of law, counterterrorism, and the generosity of government benefits for immigrants are all issues. So go ahead and post a disagreeing comment, if you feel so moved, but please read the book review of Immigrant Inc. before you do so..

Senators Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, and Sheldon Whitehouse will introduce what they are calling (George Orwell, call your office) the Responsible Estate Tax, with a rate of 55% on estates above $50 million, and a 10% surtax on top of that on the value of an estate above $500 million ($1 billion for couples), Paul Caron's TaxProf blog reports. At least Mr. Sanders is intellectually honest enough openly to call himself a socialist, which is more than can be said for Messrs. Harkin and Whitehouse.

Here's how Bloomberg News handles a piece of a long article today on Bill Gross and Pimco:

Gross saw the mortgage debacle coming and was able to dodge most of the damage -- thanks partly to yoga.

In 2005, he suspected a housing bubble had formed. During a yoga session, it occurred to him to send analysts posing as homebuyers into the field to test his theory. The research helped him decide as early as 2005 to avoid subprime-mortgage- backed securities.

Rap music and fashion businessman Russell Simmons's RushCard is a pre-paid Visa debit card with about 2.5 million users that imposes "a $9.95 monthly charge, $3 for activation, $1 for every purchase if a PIN is used, $1 for online bill paying, and 50¢ to check the balance at an ATM." Bloomberg News reports that Democratic congressmen Gregory Meeks, Maxine Waters, and Richard Durbin apparently think this is such a great deal for consumers that it should get more favorable treatment than bank-issued debit cards.

Somehow I think that if the "RushCard" were issued by Rush Limbaugh rather than Russell Simmons, the lawmakers wouldn't be such big fans. It looks like a good business for Mr. Simmons, because he not only gets the fees, he gets use of the float on the cash that's been loaded on the cards. If you are a legal resident of America without liens against you, it's hard to see why you'd prefer the RushCard to a cheaper bank account with a debit card available through a credit union or a bank.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial endorsing the proposed "Volcker Rule" on the grounds that it would "limit the opportunities for banks to speculate with federally insured deposits," and thus "would once again draw a risk-taking line that was crossed too often in 2008."

I actually agree that if banks are going to participate in federal deposit insurance, the government can impose some conditions on what the banks do with the insured deposits. But it's worth remembering that Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs all had little to no federally insured deposits. If there's a problem that this financial "reform" legislation is intended to fix, it's not clear that speculating with federally insured deposits was in any way central to it. Federally insured deposits are only one of the advantages big banks have; others include the lower-rate borrowing that comes with "too big to fail" and the access to the Federal Reserve.

The meme that the Obama administration's post-BP-spill offshore drilling ban is a big help to Brazil's partially state-owned petroleum company, Petrobras, and that that is a big help to billionaire American George Soros, who makes a lot of leftish political contributions and had a big Petrobras stake reported at one point, is getting some traction. Investor's Business Daily has an editorial reporting:

Last August, the U.S. Export-Import Bank issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Brazil's state-run Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion, with the promise of more to follow. Why are we lending billions to a foreign oil company that made $15 billion last year?

These taxpayer dollars finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Apparently there are no pristine beaches full of tourists there. Someday we may be importing that oil we're helping Brazil get at.

We're admittedly a bit far afield from the usual turf here, but in all the commentary on President Obama's decision to replace General McChrystal with General Petraeus, a point I haven't yet seen made involves General Petraeus's political future.

If President Obama is really worried about Petraeus emerging as a Republican politician (or, less probably, as a Democrat or Independent challenger in 2012), what better way to handle it than by saddling General Petraeus with a mission that President Obama believes has little chance of success, in a configuration of authority in which Petraeus now doesn't even have a subordinate to blame?

It's a win-win for Mr. Obama -- either America succeeds in Afghanistan, and Mr. Obama can claim credit himself, or, the scenario that Mr. Obama probably thinks is more likely, he fails in Afghanistan, and can at least eliminate a potential political rival, General Petraeus, by making him the scapegoat. It's the old, "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer," approach.