The president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro, has an op-ed piece complaining about what he calls "antitrust witch hunts of America's crown jewel companies" including Apple and Intel. "American companies already have enough government-induced burdens limiting their potential. We have an anti-business immigration policy; a failing education system; union-backed protectionist regulations; and relatively high corporate taxes discouraging investment," he writes.

Rand Paul had it wrong; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a good law, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes in Forbes: "Title II is a unique provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its symbolic importance is enormous. Its practical inconvenience is zero. Its administrative expense is minuscule. What's not to like? There are lots of statutes that libertarians should want to repeal. This is one that they, and Rand Paul, should firmly and unconditionally support."

"If government leaders in the U.S. or Europe announced meaningful cuts in government spending or even a credible process to reduce the rate of increase—not a commission or a legislative rule, but concrete executive action—markets would celebrate and public applause would encourage more decisive action," David Malpass writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Kudos to CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, who really nails Rep. Barney Frank, the Democrat from Massachusetts who chairs the House financial services committee.

Mr. Frank on CNBC last week: "We should have done more to get affordable rental housing. My efforts have been towards affordable rental housing. I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership. I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that."

From a Bloomberg News article on executive compensation in the financial industry:

Henry Meyer III of KeyCorp, a Cleveland-based lender, topped the ranking of those providing the least value for the years 2008 and 2009. Meyer, 60, received a 21 percent increase in his 2009 compensation, to $8.15 million, though KeyCorp posted eight consecutive quarterly losses for the period ended on March 31.

The lender is still sitting on $2.5 billion in TARP funds.

The least-value ranking is based on KeyCorp's stock return for 2008 and 2009 -- down a total of 76 percent to $5.55 from $23.45 -- combined with Meyer's pay over the same period per million dollars of assets.

KeyCorp spokesman Bill Murschel says Meyer was rewarded for "strengthening capital levels, liquidity and funding ratios." He says Meyer's base salary increase, to $1.64 million, was funded in stock and can't be redeemed until the bank pays back TARP.

The Boston Globe Web site has a slide show of what it says are the 20 best ice cream stands in New England. This is the way capitalism is supposed to work. They compete against each other. Some of them are family-owned businesses, some of them are foreign-owned chains. None of them are run by the government. They innovate new flavors and compete on quality. New entrants can come in and challenge established institutions. There's amazing variety. And the politicians haven't yet stepped in to spoil the fun with taxes aimed at adverse health effects the way they did with cigarettes and will with soda. Yes, we know about the Northeast Dairy Compact. But still, it's a pretty robust market.

When President Obama pronounced the U.S. government a "reluctant" shareholder of General Motors and announced, "What I have no interest in doing is running GM," Reuters (and a lot of Americans) were skeptical. Reuters ran out a story under the headline "Obama may find it tough not to meddle in GM affairs."

One politician who made no such declaration of lack of interest in running GM is Senator Schumer, the Democrat of New York. He recently announced he'd written to a top Obama aide inviting her to visit a GM plant in New York:

A new CBS News Poll finds 54% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party and 55% have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party, while 7 in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in Washington. Hat tip: Stu Loeser.

Politico's Maggie Haberman reports:

As the Obama administration struggles to contain the massive oil spill threatening the Louisiana coast, one of its top environmental officials will be the featured attraction at a fundraiser for Senate Democrats next week in Manhattan, at which donors are promised they can speak to her about their "issues of concern."

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, who served as chief of staff to former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, is listed as the main attraction at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee breakfast scheduled for June 4.

Update: She's canceled.

The Cato Institute's Richard Rahn has a report from Montenegro, where a free-market-oriented economist named Veselin Vukotic, "has created a new private university" "University of Donja Gorica (UDG), that already has 1,500 students and a large, new building." Mr. Rahn reports that Montenegro "has made much progress toward a free and prosperous society, in part because of the extraordinary work of Mr. Vukotic. It has adopted the euro as its currency even though it is not yet a member of the European Union. It has just put in a 9 percent flat tax and moved toward free trade."

Thanks to reader-contributor-content co-creator-community member-watchdog E. for sending the link.

David Brooks claims in his New York Times column today that Edmund Burke "supported the American Revolution." As I noted in my review of Thomas Sowell's book, which makes the same error:

In fact, while Burke was more sympathetic to the complaints of the colonists than many other members of Parliament, it is overstating it to characterize him as a supporter of the Revolution. As I write in my biography of Samuel Adams, Burke spoke out in Parliament in favor of targeting the Revolutionary ringleaders. "The persons guilty were Mr. Hancock and Mr. Samuel Adams," Burke said on March 25, 1774 during the debate on the Boston Port Bill. "Punish Hancock, Adams, and others you know, but not all." A supporter of the Revolution would not have been calling for the punishment of its leaders.

The New York Times brings its readers up to date on the White House's alleged offer of a federal government job to Rep. Joe Sestak in return for dropping his Democratic primary challenge to Senator Arlen Specter, an offer he refused. We mentioned the issue here back in March.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a humdinger of an editorial about the latest legislation moving through Congress, which would extend unemployment benefits, among other things:

The sages in Congress continue to claim that these payments for not working will lead to more work. Representative Jim McDermott recently declared on the House floor that jobless payments are "one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus" because "every unemployment dollar spent returns $1.64 of economic benefits." So let's lay off everybody, pay them for not working, and watch the economy really boom. Where do they teach this stuff?

This bill is also one of the most expensive corporate welfare giveaways in recent years with subsidies for municipal bond traders, cotton farmers, yarn producers, sheep growers, Hawaiian sugar cane cooperatives, motor sports businesses, renewable energy firms, the steel lobby, and so on. Any industry that doesn't get a tax credit or other handout in this bill should fire its lobbyist.

The regulators at the federal Minerals Management Service used government computers to watch pornography, reports the Wall Street Journal, just like the Securities and Exchange Commission employees did.

Is it just me, or is skier versus snowboarder one of those fundamental divides in life like asker versus guesser? And if it is, do we want a snowboarder as Treasury secretary? Probably the correct answer is that it only matters what he does in office, not how he gets down the slopes. Still, at the risk of offending the snowboarder readers-participants-community members-co-creators-watchdogs here at FutureOfCapitalism.com, I have to admit that reading about Mr. Geithner's snowboarding on Bloomberg News, the thought, "that explains it," crossed my mind. Interesting, too, that he's a Dartmouth graduate, like Henry Paulson, which I hadn't realized about Mr. Geithner until reading the Bloomberg piece.