Now that the controversy over Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is front-page news in the New York Times, it's worth thinking about two cases that show the limits of the federal law, and the power of other forces, including rational choice and self-interest, in bringing about desegregation.

The IRS has posted statistics on taxpayers coming and going from various states in 2008 versus 2007. New York lost 201,570 taxpayers with aggregate adjusted gross income of about $12.3 billion, mostly to Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Over the same year, the Empire State gained 173,194 taxpayers with aggregate adjusted gross income of about $8.4 billion. The biggest feeder states to New York were New Jersey, foreign countries, Florida, Pennsylvania, and California. On a net basis, the state lost taxpayers, and the ones that left earned more money than the new ones who arrived.

How about this, from a professor at the Naval Academy at Annapolis:

Another program that is placing strain on the academies is an unofficial affirmative-action preference in admissions. While we can debate the merits of universities making diversity a priority in deciding which students to admit, how can one defend the use of race as a factor at taxpayer-financed academies — especially those whose purpose is to defend the Constitution? Yet, as I can confirm from the years I spent on the admissions board in 2002 and '03 and from my conversations with more recent board members, if an applicant identifies himself or herself as non-white, the bar for qualification immediately drops.

What a surprising piece to see on, of all places, the usually left-of-center New York Times op-ed page.

After writing the post on Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act I went over to Yahoo! News and discovered that among the most emailed and most viewed stories was this article headlined "How Rand Paul's civil rights views escaped media scrutiny." The article is about Mr. Paul being questioned about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the Louisville Courier-Journal, National Public Radio, and MSNBC. Add to that the syndicated column by the Washington Post's Michael Gerson that sparked my post this morning and it's hard to see how the views have "escaped" scrutiny.

A speechwriter for President Bush, Michael Gerson, has a new column critical of the Tea Party movement and the winner of the Kentucky Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Rand Paul, who is Rep. Ron Paul's son. He writes:

The tea party movement, being resistant to systemization, is resistant to characterization. But in its simplest form (and there seems to be no other form), it might be called "constitutional conservatism." It adopts a rigorous hermeneutic: If the Constitution does not specifically mention it, the federal government isn't allowed to do it. This represents a kind of 10th Amendment fundamentalism -- a muscular form of states' rights that would undo much of the federal role since Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps since Abraham Lincoln.

This philosophy has the virtue of being easily explainable -- and the drawback of being impossible. The current federal role did not grow primarily because of the statist ambitions of liberals; it grew in response to democratic choices and global challenges.

He goes on:

The Senate financial reform bill passed only after the newly elected Republican senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, issued a statement warning about financial institutions "that did not contribute to the financial crisis, but would be crippled by the current legislation and in turn would result in job losses." Mr. Brown then, strangely enough, voted to move ahead with the legislation, reportedly based on assurances that it would be improved after passage in conference negotiations with the House. The Boston Globe reports Mr. Brown changed his mind and his vote "during a 40-mile bike ride he went on this morning with Senator John Kerry."

Democrats in Congress want to raise $42 billion over 10 years by legalizing and taxing online gambling, the Wall Street Journal reports.

There's a libertarian case for legalizing online gambling, but it seems to me that the decision on it, like legalizing drugs or alcohol or even tobacco, should be driven more by the underlying merits than by whether the government is so fast-growing and starved for revenue that it's looking for more and more enterprizes in which to make itself a profit-sharing partner.

A Web site explains the MBA Oath -- an oath kind of like the Hippocratic Oath taken by medical students, only for business students rather than medical students, and invented last year rather than thousands of years ago. The text of the oath is here. The new dean of Harvard Business School is a big backer, according to a Bloomberg News article about the oath. Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal calls it "dumb," "silly," and "infantilizing."

Gerry Langeler of OVP Venture Partners makes some good arguments against raising the tax on "carried interest" of fund managers. He's brave enough to put his name to them, and the New York Times is brave enough to print them (in DealBook, not the print newspaper). There are some cracks at hedge funds and Tea Parties, but overall it's a very strong piece. It concludes: "If Congress wants to propose taxing gains on home ownership as ordinary income, and/or taxing the gains on entrepreneurs' stock as ordinary income, have at it. But, assuming that is political suicide, let's get back to common sense and leave the historical, proper capital gains treatment of carried interest alone."

My Washington Examiner op-ed piece on taxation of carried interest is here, for those who missed it when it first came out.

Nina Easton of Fortune has a heck of a column, illustrated with a photograph she took herself, about a Service Employees International Union protest at the home of a lawyer for Bank of America. The lawyer's teenage son was home at the time and locked himself in the bathroom to protect himself. Glenn Beck talked about it on television tonight. Ms. Easton calls it "the politics of personal intimidation."

President Obama says he wants to raise the standards of civil discourse in politics. So who is on the guest list for the second state dinner in his presidency? Whoopi Goldberg, who last made political headlines for making a "a vulgar riff on President Bush's name" at a Kerry campaign fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, which was too much even for the Kerry campaign. Also in attendance: executives from TARP recipients Morgan Stanley, American Express, and Bank of America.

General Electric, whose new profile as a big-government force has been detailed regularly here, is riding to the rescue of ShoreBank, the Chicago bank that describes its mission as "to create economic equity and a healthy environment."

Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus is asking the White House to answer whether it has been involved in saving the bank. Bloomberg Businessweek has a report that claims the bank "has long-standing ties to the president," which may be an overstatement. The article says, "After Obama was elected, former ShoreBank executive Robert Weissbourd served on the president-elect's transition team."

When the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week on Walmart's first quarter, the same-store sales figures were down, while the income numbers were up. The Journal's headline then, as we noted, focused on the bad news: "Wal-Mart Same-Store Sales Fall." This morning, Sears Holdings reported its first quarter results, with an outcome that is the reverse of Walmart's -- same-store sales are up, while income is down. The Journal headline: "Sears Profit Slides 39%, Hurt by Lower Margins."

If you had to discern a governing principle of the Journal's retail coverage, it wouldn't be to emphasize profits at the expense of same-store sales, or to emphasize same-store sales at the expense of profits, but simply to emphasize whatever news is worse for the retailer. In part this is the natural bad-news bias of the press; a plane crash is newsworthy, while a plane landing safely is not.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates's father, the lawyer Bill Gates Sr., wants his son to have to pay more state income taxes. Mr. Gates Sr. gives an interview to Bloomberg News expressing support for a Washington State initiative to impose a state income tax on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples earning more than $400,000. "Poor people and middle-income people are paying too much to support the state and rich people aren't paying enough," Mr. Gates Sr. says.

Radio and Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck notices that the Amazon.com list of the top 25 bestselling books in the country includes a book about George Washington's faith recommended by Mr. Beck, a second book about George Washington recommended by Mr. Beck, and my own biography of Samuel Adams, which Mr. Beck has also been kind enough to talk about favorably on his programs. The Federalist Papers are pretty high on the Amazon list as well.