Consider a career in public service, he writes in a classic column. His definition of public service, though, is different from the one a lot of graduates will hear.

The conventional wisdom is that the Israeli action against the Gaza flotilla will further damage the already frayed relationship between the Obama administration and Israel. Nothing in the White House statement issued after today's phone call between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama, who were to meet this week, undermines that conventional wisdom. On the other hand, there's a case to be made that Mr. Obama now owes Mr. Netanyahu a favor: instead of focusing on the oil spill or the Sestak scandal, the press and the public are now focused on Israel and the Gaza flotilla.

Keith Hennessey, who was an economic policy official in the George W. Bush administration, catches the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, undermining the claim that health care reform will bend the cost curve down. Mr. Hennessey doesn't comment on it, but what caught my eye was the credit line on one of Mr. Elmendorf's slides from Wednesday's presentation to the Institute of Medicine. The credit line on the CBO slide reads "Source: Goldman Sachs based on CBO estimates."

Emanuel Derman, a physicist who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs beginning in 1985, has some interesting thoughts in an interview with Edge.org:

It's interesting in this regard that the three biggest banks recently announced their quarterly results and not only day in the last quarter did they lose money. That is totally astonishing. It's really a reflection of what the administration has done. They've made interest rates very low so it's cheap for the banks to borrow money. They have eliminated a lot of the players, so there is much less competition for taking on risky trades and you can do them at a price that is much more preferable to the person who is in control. This is a risk profile that is a result of regulation and administrative policies rather than of genuine market conditions.

The Boston Globe has a report on the bill passed by the Massachusetts State Senate that would "toughen or expand rules that bar illegal immigrants from public health care, housing, and higher education benefits." It would also establish a 24-hour anonymous hotline where callers could "report illegal immigrants or companies that employ them to the government."

The Globe notes it's quite a turnaround for the Bay State, which not so long ago "even sent social workers to Texas to check on immigrants who may have been separated from their children."

An overly generous welfare state is, of course, the catch for those of us who believe that immigration is a good thing and the more immigrants the better. Still, there's something vaguely unsettling about encouraging people to call anonymous hotlines to report their neighbors to the government -- it seems more like something out of the Kremlin than Beacon Hill.

Secretary of State Clinton apparently agrees with Jamie Dimon, not Mary O'Grady or Thomas Friedman, on Brazil:

"Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they're growing like crazy," Clinton said. "And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty."

The White House chooses the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend to unload the news -- in the form of a memo from the White House counsel, so that anyone he talked to about it is covered by both lawyer-client privilege and executive privilege -- that "The White House Chief of Staff enlisted the support of former President Clinton who agreed to raise with Congressman Sestak options of service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board." There's no explanation of why Mr. Clinton was enlisted for this task. If it would have been legal or appropriate for a White House official to do it directly, why bother getting Mr. Clinton involved? And if it would have been illegal or inappropriate for a White House official to do it directly, does the use of a cut-out, even if it comports with the letter of the law, match the spirit of the law or the administration's stated intention to set a high ethical bar?

One of the mysteries of the SEC's case against Arthur Samberg and his Pequot hedge fund is the identity of Mr. Samberg's "friend" who benefited from a stock recommendation Mr. Samberg made on the basis of what the SEC says was inside information. The SEC complaint says, "at Samberg's recommendation, a friend of Samberg's purchased 300,000 shares of Microsoft stock." The complaint goes on, "the friend of Samberg's who had purchased Microsoft shares at Samberg's recommendation on April 19 had gains of $372,060."

This is one of the paradoxes of inside information. The SEC brought charges against Mr. Samberg, but not against the "friend," who the agency didn't even name. It's as if the message being sent by the regulators is that it's okay to profit from inside information, as long as you get it secondhand rather than firsthand.

I haven't seen the "friend" mentioned in any of the press coverage today.

The news that Warren Buffett has been subpoenaed to appear before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission after initially refusing to do so breaks in an article in Fortune by Carol Loomis, who discloses in the article that she is "a longtime friend of his and a Berkshire shareholder." Of the three commission officials who went to Omaha to interview Mr. Buffett before the testimony, two "brought books for him to autograph," the article reports. The hearing will apparently focus on the role of the ratings agencies, including Moody's, in which Mr. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway had a stake.

Columnist Michael Gerson writes:

Two months after passing a law that supporters claimed would reduce federal deficits, largely through Medicare cuts, the House is moving toward a temporary "doctor fix" that would add tens of billions in Medicare costs. Even more expensive fixes are likely in the future. Congressional leaders knew this spending would be necessary when they passed health reform in March. Yet they didn't include this liability in the law, in order to hide the overall cost of the entitlement. In a failing corporation, this would be a scandal, investigated by Congress. In Congress, this is known as legislative strategy.

Jonah Goldberg notices Vice President Biden's astonishing remarks to the European Parliament in Brussels:

As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, D.C., as the 'capital of the free world.' But it seems to me that this great city, which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title.

Mr. Goldberg points out that if Mr. Biden were improvising, that'd be one thing, but these were prepared remarks.

More from the governor of New Jersey: "Consider this fact: In 2009, we lost 121,000 private-sector jobs in New Jersey, while the municipal and school board payrolls grew by 11,300 jobs. The private sector shrank ... while the government grew. That's exactly backwards from how it's supposed to be."

We've written in the past about the phenomenon of "moral balancing," where a person who is less than righteous in one area tries to compensate in another. So news of Arthur Samberg and his Pequot fund and their $28 million civil settlement with the SEC on insider trading charges (without admitting or denying wrongdoing) sent me scrambling for the annual Form 990 of the Samberg Family Foundation.

The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, has a piece on FoxNews.com about Congress's attempt to raise taxes on "carried interest" of fund managers: "Not being ignorant cattle unwittingly led to the slaughter, investment fund managers won't simply 'eat' this tax hike. The most likely scenario is that the rest of the partners—limited parties such as defined benefit pension plans, university endowments, and charitable trusts—will see their share of the profits shrink. The true incidence of this tax hike will come in the form of underfunded pensions, endowments, and charities."

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

E.J. Dionne has a column in the Washington Post that runs under the headline, "Gulf oil spill offers a lesson in capitalism vs. socialism." He writes:

'Deregulation' is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics claim it is.

But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task.

President Obama, of all people, had a fine response to this line of argument in his press conference: