From a story in the Vineyard Gazette, which covers Martha's Vineyard, which is in Massachusetts, which, for all you clueless Wall Street Journal readers, is in the Northeast:

"The recently completed temporary Lagoon Pond drawbridge in Vineyard Haven that took six years to build and cost over $9 million is already suffering from some of the same problems that plagued the old drawbridge that was torn down last year." The article goes on, "The permanent bridge will be completed sometime in 2013 at a cost of some $35 million. Funding will come entirely from the state."

"Green jobs have become a mantra for many governments, including that of the United States. But few nations are better positioned -- or motivated -- to fuse the fight against recession and global warming than Spain. The country is already a leader in renewable fuels through $30 billion in public support and has been cited by the Obama administration as a model for the creation of a green economy." -- The Washington Post, September 24, 2009.

"Spain unemployment rate hits 20%" -- headline, BBC, April 30, 2010. 

Given how badly the ratings agencies overrated mortagage-backed securities, "it is astonishing and sad that investors still seem to quake when Standard & Poor's junks Greece and downgrades Spain," writes Hugo Dixon.

Just as the ratings agencies can overrate companies and securities in good times (lowering their cost of capital), they can underrate companies and securities in tough times (increasing their cost of capital).

Did John Paulson or Goldman Sachs violate the Fair Credit Protection Act by using the consumer credit ratings known as FICO scores to structure the synthetic derivative at the center of the Securities and Exchange Commission's case against Goldman? A lawyer, Avery Goodman, writes at Seeking Alpha:

Such information may only be used with respect to specifically defined "permissible purposes." Permissible purposes include those events that somehow involve or benefit the original borrower in some way. The borrower must either be applying for or receiving credit, or someone must be doing something, in the chain of contract, to facilitate the borrower's ability to receive credit, such as creating, buying or selling an existing loan.

Some highlights from the recent news:

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe the $787 billion stimulus package the president passed last year has helped create jobs, according to a new Pew Research Center poll," the Washington Examiner notices.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that for the first quarter of 2010, lobbying spending in D.C. was $903 million, or about $10 million a day. The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney reports that in the health care sector the six top big lobbying sectors "all sided with Obama in supporting the legislation, as did nine of the top ten. That makes it hard to swallow Obama's claim that passing the legislation represented 'standing up to the special interests.'"

"The Chabad House at Harvard, an Orthodox Jewish center, has placed a $6 million bid to purchase the building at 45 Dunster Street from the Fly Club," reports the Harvard Crimson. Never mind that when I graduated from Harvard 16 years ago the Chabad House at Harvard did not exist and the Fly Club, an all-male exclusive social club, might have then been more accurately called the WASP club, at least as far as I knew. What interests us here at FutureOfCapitalism.com about the story is this sentence from the Crimson story: "'This offer is above market value for the house and is very attractive for the Fly graduate board from a business perspective,' read an e-mail that was sent over a final club list."

Glenn Beck is scheduled to devote his entire hourlong Fox News Channel show, airing at 5 p.m. Eastern tomorrow (Friday) to Samuel Adams. I make an appearance in connection with my biography of the founding father. It's a bit far afield from our usual topics here, but I thought I'd flag it in advance for those who might be interested in watching.

With all the talk and hype about a "newspaper war" in New York, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times saw fit this morning to cover last night's Alexander Hamilton Dinner of the Manhattan Institute. So we'll try to fill the gap.

The evening opened with Paul Singer, the chairman of the Manhattan Institute and the founder and manager of the Elliott Associates hedge fund, denouncing what he called "unprecedented" "govermental overreach into the United States economy."

He described what he said were "punitive and indiscriminate attacks...against anything that moves in the world of finance."

He said Senator Dodd's financial "reform" bill "in fact institutionalizes 'too big to fail."' He suggested "specific fixes to the bankruptcy code" would be better than using the crisis to replace the rule of law with "arbitrary" policy set by "the englightened elite" in Washington D.C.

The Weekly Standard's William Kristol finds it "creepy" that the CEO of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, would write to President Obama saying, "You can count on me and the entire Citi organization to support" Mr. Obama's financial "reform."

Says Mr. Kristol, "the U.S. government owns 27% of Citi." More: "A CEO seeking political favor commits his 'entire organization' to work for a particular policy outcome. And if individual Citi employees disagree? No stifling of freedom of speech or freedom of political activity there, I'm sure....:"

This is a little more complicated than Mr. Kristol has it. The First Amendment guarantee of free speech is a prohibition on Congress, not on employers. If some Weekly Standard employee started running around saying Mr. Kristol has lost it and that President Obama's expansion of government is really terrific, Mr. Kristol would be well within his rights to fire the employee, as long as there's no free speech guarantee in the employee's employment contract, if there is such a contract.

Still, he's right about the fact that it's creepy.

"More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco's nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. "The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn't include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions."

"The average city worker salary in San Francisco is $93,000 before benefits, according to Deputy City Controller Monique Zmuda. The data take into account everyone from park gardeners and street cleaners to attorneys and technology specialists. Almost 100 city employees made $200,000 or more in 2009; six bumped past $300,000 when overtime and other cash-outs were included."

After the original post on what Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein should have said to the Senate hearing this week, suggestions are flowing on others who are better subjects for a Senate inquisition on the causes of the financial crisis than are Mr. Blankfein or Goldman Sachs. Mr. Blankfein could have told the senators:

If you are really looking for some headline-grabbing testimony, why don't you invite Andrew Cuomo up here? The press is on the verge of anointing him the next governor of New York, but he spent the 1990s as President Clinton's housing secretary pushing mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. Maybe you don't want to spoil the Democrats' chances of holding the governorship of New York? Or maybe because he's a politician like you guys are, you are going easy on him.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was duly deferential to the senators at yesterday's hearing, playing along with the theatrics and answering "yes, sir" even as Senator Levin cast aspersions on Mr, Blankfein's integrity.

Here's what Mr. Blankfein might have said were he in a feistier mood:

Mr. Chairman:

Thank you for inviting me here today, but you've got the wrong guy. As far as contributing factors to the financial crisis, me and my firm should be way low down on the list.

Sure, we lost a lot less than some of the others when it came to exposure to the U.S. housing market. We even made some money over some periods and on some trades, though not on that Abacus one that the SEC complaint is about. But what's wrong with that? American companies are supposed to make money, after all. If everyone had been making money, there wouldn't have been a financial crisis.

Why are you calling me up here and not Robert Rubin, the chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, which lost a lot more money on this stuff than we did, and required even more taxpayer money to save? Is it because he's a former Clinton administration official?

The writer Edward Jay Epstein has a new post summarizing the SEC's case against Goldman Sachs. The fraud case "does not add up," he says, in part because "it implies a conspiracy without co-conspirators."

"Not only is there no motive or logic for Goldman to have sabotaged its own fund, but the SEC complaint fails to cite a single witness or document to substantiate that theory. Nevertheless, SEC has brilliantly succeeded in implanting that idea in the media," Mr. Epstein writes. "So however the SEC legal case is settled, the SEC has already won in the court of public opinion."

"Particularly important is a change in payment of rating agencies. Since these provide a public good, they must be funded by a general levy," writes Martin Wolf in the Financial Times today. How is it a public good to have organizations running around misjudging risk? And why should they be rewarded for their failure by winning a claim on a permanent funding stream of tax dollars?

We already have a system in capitalism for rewarding those who make accurate judgments about risks -- it's called profits on investments. The idea that the taxpayers should attempt to set up and fund a parallel risk-assessment and rating system is odd. Why would someone with skill at assessing risk want to work for a government-funded rating agency when the rewards in the private sector for accurately assessing risk are so high?

I understand that the current system of having ratings agencies paid by the firms they rate creates an apparent conflict. But it's not clear that the best way to manage the conflict would be to have the government take it over.

The New York Times today has an article that is a welcome corrective to some of the coverage of the Catholic sex abuse scandal that drew criticism from Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal. It's a profile of the trial lawyer, Jeffrey Anderson, who is driving a lot of the press coverage:

he insists that the cases, which number more than a thousand (he says he has not counted), have never been about the money.

Yet in 2002, he estimated that he had at that point won more than $60 million in settlements from Catholic dioceses, and he acknowledges that in the most complicated cases, he may receive as much as 40 percent of a settlement or judgment.

Mr. Anderson drives a Lexus, leads his small firm from a former bank building replete with chandeliers, dark leather and marble, and co-owns with his wife a Victorian inn that promises "the ultimate experience in luxury, privacy and romance."