The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the employment data for May: "Government employment rose by 390,000 in May. The Federal government hired 411,000 temporary workers for Census 2010...Private-sector employment changed little (+41,000)...In May, the civilian labor force participation rate edged down by 0.2 percentage point to 65.0 percent....Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in May, up by 291,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them." None of this is particularly good news, unless you are a Republican running for office or an employer looking to hire people. The increase year over year in the number of discouraged workers is particularly, well, discouraging, because that is a year during which we've been told an economic recovery has begun and the effects of the "stimulus" spending have been brought to bear.

Amity Shlaes has a column on the "academic fury" directed at Glenn Beck: "Since the man is a riveting educator, the professors are correct to be concerned. He's not just reacting or shaping individual thoughts. He is bringing competition into the Ed Biz."

I got some insight of my own into what Ms. Shlaes calls the "university guild" via a review of my book published in an academic history journal and written by a history professor. If the academic historians would write books more like mine, the professor acknowledged in the review, it might "alleviate the sense of alienation and insignificance that plagues academic life in some quarters." I tried to write a letter to the editor in response but was told the journal doesn't accept them. It's that "sense of alienation and insignificance that plagues academic life" that drives some of the fury at Mr. Beck, I suspect.

We've been writing here some about the phenomenon of "moral balancing," in which a person who is less than righteous in one area tries to compensate in another, or vice versa. The latest example comes from Boston, where the Boston Globe describes the rise and fall of a Democratic state senator, Dianne Wilkerson, who pleaded guilty to federal charges of attempted extortion and accepting a $23,500 bribe: "She was an early champion of domestic partnerships, and later gay marriage, and an outspoken and effective foe of racial profiling. She was an eloquent voice on behalf of gay marriage as a civil rights issue...she was caught on tape taking bribes from a Roxbury businessman who wanted a liquor licence. She could help him, she said; she believed in doing good and making good.There she was on video, stuffing the money down her bra."

Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner and John Carney of CNBC, who are brothers, both write about Warren Buffett and Moody's. Timothy does so with a kind reference to this Web site, and John does so with a smart piece headlined "Warren Buffett's Anti-Competive Profits" explaining that Mr. Buffett's claim that competition would hurt ratings accuracy is bogus. John Carney: "If competition were merely about agencies competing for business from issuers, quality might decline. But this ignores the perspective of the bond buyer, who would prefer to buy bonds rated by the agency with the highest quality ratings."

I do think John Carney is too kind to Mr. Buffett with the sentence, "It would be unfair to Buffett to wonder if he is just talking his book here." It'd be unfair to John to wonder if in his new job at CNBC he has, alas, already imbibed some of his network's overly reverential stance toward the Oracle of Omaha.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial noting that the Justice Department asked for more time to respond to a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare:

Taking these matters with more gravity was Judge Roger Vinson, who denied Justice's extension request on Friday. A delay isn't warranted, he wrote dryly, because the defendants "have at their disposal the very substantial resources of the federal government, including numerous attorneys and staff within and outside the United States Department of Justice."

Don't the judge and the Journal realize the Justice Department is all tied up with the criminal investigations of Goldman Sachs and BP?

The New York Times reports, under the headline "8,000 M.T.A. Employees Made $100,000 Last Year": "a Long Island Rail Road conductor who retired in April, made $239,148." The Metropolitan Transportation Authority's chairman, Jay Walder, earns "$350,000 a year as chairman, as well as a $3,500 monthly housing allowance," the Times reports. That's even more than Peter Beinart makes at the City University of New York, though perhaps not on an hourly basis; Mr. Beinart's only in New York one day a week.

This as the MTA is slashing bus routes to save money, including the route my kids take home from school. It's outrageous, actually -- the government agency is being run for the benefit of the employees, rather than the transit-riding and taxpaying public. Good for the Manhattan Institute for exposing the data, which was picked up widely across the New York press today.

Steve Jobs's comments deriding bloggers and vowing "Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal...so they can afford to keep their editorial operations intact" didn't make much sense to me until I read this morning's New York Times editorial and realized Apple wants the backing of the big papers in its antitrust battles with the Obama administration. Perhaps that's too cynical a way of looking at it.

"Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians -- James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, class of 1879," George Will writes. He's on Madison's side.

Vice President Biden was in New York City yesterday to announce a $500 million project to repaint the Brooklyn Bridge with the assistance of $30 million in federal "stimulus" money and $192 million in other federal money. A New York Sun editorial from 2006 provides some useful context and skepticism missing from today's press coverage (come to think of it, despite the vaunted New York newspaper "war" between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, there isn't much coverage of this $500 million expenditure of taxpayer funds). From the 2006 Sun editorial:

The founding editor of the New York Sun, Seth Lipsky, was honored last night in New York by the American Jewish Historical Society with its Emma Lazarus award. The former New York Sun and Forward team of Gary Shapiro and Amanda Gordon have coverage.

We'd been wondering about what happened to the Romanoff half of the Romanoff-Sestak scandal we wrote about back in March on the basis of FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-participant-watchdog-community member content-co-creator R.'s email of an American Spectator article. The Sestak side of it got a lot of attention, but you didn't hear much about Andrew Romanoff, the other candidate that the White House dangled a federal post in front of to induce him out of a primary. Now the Associated Press tackles the Romanoff side of it, reporting that "Romanoff on Wednesday night released a copy of an e-mail in which White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina described three federal international development jobs that might be available to him if he were not challenging Bennet for the Democratic nomination."

The New York Times has a blog post about a paper by George Mason University economist Rusell Roberts that, as the Times puts it, "it was inept government policy, not Wall Street greed, that allowed the financial system to spin out of control." Says the Times: "While some believe more regulation is needed, Mr. Roberts argues that it was government intervention in the markets that created the crisis and that less, not more, regulation is what the system needs to heal and to survive."

FutureOfCapitalism.com interviewed Professor Roberts about his Hayek-Keynes video back in February.

Warren Buffett expands before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the value of his investment in Moody's: "The long term value was...the duopoly....incredible pricing power." Commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin bores in: "What is the source of the pricing power?" Mr. Buffett: "The source of the pricing power?....It's required. It's like an SEC filing fee....Often it's by statute."

Republicans have been worked up about the federal government's requirement on individuals to buy health insurance under ObamaCare. But this is a mandate, too -- if you want to issue securities, you pretty much have to pay Warren Buffett for a rating.

Warren Buffett, testifying today before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, was asked by Commissioner Peter Wallison what he uses derivatives for. Mr. Buffett's reply: "I use 'em to make money. If I think they are mispriced, I buy them."

Someone at the Wall Street Journal has a weakness for Apple's Steve Jobs. First came the Journal's coverage of Mr. Jobs's lashing out at Adobe's Flash. The Journal reported it under the headline "Jobs Gives Very Candid Thoughts on Flash" and said his comment "offers a level of candidness unusual for the CEO of a major company." Now comes a Journal video that the paper promotes with the teaser, "Jobs talks candidly about Apple's situation with Gizmodo, the site that bought an iPhone prototype found in a bar." Unless they've got a lie-detector strapped to the guy, how the heck do they know whether he's being candid or not? Even then...