"In Chicago, Obama Aide Had V.I.P. List for Schools" is the headline on the New York Times article reporting that President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, kept a log documenting requests from politicians and other big shots who wanted help getting their children into selective public schools.

The Chicago Tribune's John Kass has a column on what he calls "Chicago's two-tiered public school system": "Does anyone actually believe that political insiders weren't favored at the expense of deserving kids? No."

Just wait to see how health care works once it is a universal entitlement like primary and secondary education.

Reviewing Joel Kotkin's book in today's Wall Street Journal, Nick Schulz frets about "a large percentage of out-of-wedlock births": "The collapse of the family in America's underclass persists—with more families than not headed by single mothers." Mr. Schulz doesn't mention how it worked out for Alexander Hamilton, Eric Clapton, and Jesus of Nazareth. This Web site, worth a look, has a list that documents the effects of living in a family with a single mother.

Bloomberg News manages to write an article about the legal challenges to the constitutional challenges to ObamaCare without finding even a single legal scholar who thinks they have a decent shot. Not one. File this one away for when and if the challenges see a courtroom success.

Other views on ObamaCare and the Constitution are available here and here.

John Stossel and Thomas Sowell both have new columns out today sounding alarms about the federal budget.

Bloomberg News columnist Susan Antilla has a column that on the surface should appeal to free-market types. "There are lots of people watching out to be sure the financial markets are running right. They just aren't the regulators employed by the government," she writes. "It takes a village -- of private investigators, judges, short sellers, bloggers and court-ordered examiners -- to get any financial regulating done these days. Here's an idea for making things right for investors: How about shutting down the dysfunctional SEC and giving taxpayers a regulatory voucher in a new privatized world of financial policing? They can use the money to hire from the expanding list of private investigators before they pick a mutual fund, sign on with a hedge fund, or decide on the merits of their 401(k) plan. And there no longer would be any pretense that their tax dollars were paying for regulation that actually protected them."

New York Times columnist David Brooks was recently described here as maintaining some attachment to the tax policies of the Democratic Party. Maybe I was too easy on him; libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes that Mr. Brooks's "analysis takes a page from the early Karl Marx."

The Road From Ruin: How To Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, is a valuable book, but perhaps not quite in the way its authors intend. Rather than reading it as a prescription of policies to follow, look at it as an example of the conventional wisdom held and expressed by a certain set of Davos-attending, European types.

It is replete with a straw man: "Overly simplistic" market "fundamentalists" who "believe the market can do no wrong," with "their characterization of private markets as good and government as bad." Who is it that's being overly simplistic here, the so-called market fundamentalists or the authors describing them?

A federal expenditure of $400 million for New York City housing projects is reported in today's New York Post, whose reference to an unnamed "financial institution" sent me scrambling for more details. The HUD press release makes reference to a "complex, multi-step process" by which the New York City Housing Authority received $423 million in stimulus funding. According to the release, "New York Housing Development Corporation" will "issue bonds on the private market to raise capital that will be combined with the Recovery Act funding to accelerate the rehabilitation of these units. Citibank, N.A., a limited partner in one of the two transactions, will invest approximately $209 million to purchase low-income housing tax credits awarded to the development."

The Financial Times's "Lex" column calls Google's decision to stop censoring its search engine in China a "lose-lose scenario." I was going to write a post disagreeing -- does the Financial Times publish a censored version of its Web site for consumption within China? Instead I went and bought some Google stock, hoping to take advantage of FT readers dumping their shares in a panic after reading the Lex column's worrying about Google losing access to China's market.

State government tax collection were down $66.9 billion, or 8.6%, in fiscal 2009 as compared to 2008, the Census Bureau reports. The largest percent decrease in revenue from individual income taxes was in Arizona, down 42.5%. The largest percent decrease in revenue from corporate net income tax was Michigan, down 63.5%.

What passes for a right-of-center voice on The New York Times's op-ed page, David Brooks, pronounces, "I'm no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party," then goes on, later in the same column, to say, "We will have to raise a consumption tax."

As I reported earlier, there's increasing openness to a value-added or consumption tax on the center-right. Still, the call for taxes to be raised suggests that if Mr. Brooks no longer has a spiritual attachment to the Democratic Party, he does have some attachment to its tax policies.

Back in February we noted a report in the New York Post that "The Treasury Department, which now owns 56 percent of the auto-financing outfit, wants GMAC to push ahead with a ResCap sale -- possibly to billionaire Warren Buffett." Now the Post has an update, reporting that Mr. Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway have apparently decided to stop pursuing "GMAC's Residential Capital mortgage-lending unit despite expressing interest in buying it as recently as two months ago."

Says the Post: "According to sources familiar with the matter, Buffett is backing off from ResCap in part because he's not interested in engaging in a bidding war for the money-losing business, which government-controlled GMAC recently decided to put on the block after several fits and starts. Among those considering taking a run at ResCap are The Blackstone Group and investment giant BlackRock."

"The Obama administration is discussing with banks a change in its foreclosure-prevention program that would encourage lenders to reduce the loan balance due in some cases," the Wall Street Journal reports in an article headlined, "White House Nudges Banks to Modify Loans."

A commenter at FutureOfCapitalism.com is calling for resisting ObamaCare with "civil disobedience, then, if necesary, by violence." Classics professor Victor Davis Hanson is calling these "revolutionary times," and the Heritage Foundation is likening ObamaCare's passage to the British imposition on America of the Intolerable Acts and says, "just as the colonists banded together to enact change after those acts were passed, so should America respond to Obamacare."

Newt Gingrich says, "Sunday was a pressured, bought, intimidated vote worthy of Hugo Chavez but unworthy of the United States of America."

"We are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans," Victor Davis Hanson writes. "We are in the most partisan age since Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed 'non-partisan.'"

He writes that he expects "a lot of the following in the next three years":