The Bloomberg News home page is linking to an article from TheStreet.com about how shares in drug company Dendreon were up 10%, then down 6%, on reports of whether the Food and Drug Administration was going to have a meeting about Dendreon's prostate cancer drug, Provenge. This is something of an old story; as the overly conspiratorial and ad hominem but nonetheless interesting Web site deepcapture.com reports, Jim Cramer was discussing Dendreon as a "battleground stock" all the way back in 2005. But as a FutureOfCapitalism.com reader points out in an email, the Dendreon/Provenge situation points out some of the downside of having a single federal agency responsible for approving drugs.

The American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein at least had the decency to apologize for his snideness toward Sarah Palin. Will Time Warner apologize after its HBO channel aired Bill Maher describing the Republican Party's 2008 vice presidential nominee, a former governor of Alaska, as "a brain dead woman" and "a babbling, barely-housebroken, uneducated being"? Or for Mr. Maher's comment that Tiger Woods was "having sex with more women than even a black celebrity needs to have sex with, and thereby threatening to unbalance the delicate ecosystem of playas and ho's"? Will the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, or a prominent conservative blogger, Reihan Salam, who appeared on the show during which Mr. Maher made his comments, distance themselves from his remarks? A list of the members of Time Warner's corporate board of directors is here. I've got nothing against rough-and-tumble politics and I'm not an advocate of political correctness, but is there a point at which civilized people recoil from this sort of thing? Where are the National Organization for Women and the NAACP when you need them? Wouldn't they be out in force if the Fox News Channel were airing this sort of thing?

Mickey Kaus is running in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California against Barbara Boxer, he says. It'll be interesting to see whether the Democratic establishment out on the Coast is as hostile to competition as it was here in New York, where Harold Ford was discouraged out of the race. Mr. Ford explored running with a message that included: "cut taxes for businesses — big and small — and find innovative ways to get Americans back to work. We can start by giving any companies that are less than five years old an exemption from payroll taxes for six months; extending the current capital gains and dividend tax rates through 2012; giving permanent tax credits for businesses that invest in research and development; and reducing the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent."

PIMCO's Bill Gross's March market commentary begins with a screed against cocktail parties and goes on to pronounce that in the financial crisis, "American-style capitalism with its leverage, deregulation, and religious belief in lower and lower taxes reached a dead end." Link via The Browser.

One item in Warren Buffett's three-hour session on CNBC this morning that probably raised a lot of writers' eyebrows was this:

BUFFETT: Yeah, it probably does. But the truth is, I would get people that know a lot more about it than I do. And, I mean, it--if you get the fellow that's written on health care recently in the New Yorker, Gawande. I mean, he had--he had an article last summer that was absolutely magnificent. My partner Charlie Munger sat down and wrote out a check for $20,000 to him and he's never met him, never had any correspondence with it, he just mailed it to the New Yorker and he said, 'This article is so useful socially.' He says, 'Just give this as a gift to the--to Dr. Gawande.'

If you didn't get enough of Warren Buffett in his Berkshire Hathaway annual chairman's letter released over the weekend, the "Oracle of Omaha" was on CNBC for three hours this morning. What a strange romance it is between Mr. Buffett and the financial news network. Mr. Buffett really seems to love being on the channel -- enough so that he arrived at the Omaha restaurant where the CNBC crew was waiting for him at 4:45 a.m., local time. He managed to remind the reporter, Becky Quick, that he recently dined with her boss, GE chief Jeffrey Immelt. Berkshire's $3 billion investment in GE, which, until the Comcast deal closes, remains CNBC's parent, and, even after that deal, will remain a significant minority investor in CNBC's parent, is mentioned just in passing.

"I don't like capitalism too much, either," writes Jeffrey Goldberg, the celebrated correspondent of the Atlantic and a former colleague of mine at the Forward. Who knows how many others in the working press share his sentiments but only convey them more subtly, through their journalism.

A new YouTube video on the importance of profits, from Sean Malone. Link via Coordination Problem. Watch it: it's an entire economics education in less than four minutes.

Before moving ahead any further on a health care overhaul, the president and members of Congress should stop and read Roger Battistella's new book, Health Care Turning Point. It won't take long; the text of the book is a slim 134 pages. But those pages are packed with facts and analysis that have the potential to change the way readers think about health care. I learned a lot from it, and I thought I already knew a lot about health care.

Mr. Battistella, emeritus professor of health policy and management at Cornell University, frames his argument as a critique of proposals for a single-payer system, in which the government would pay for everyone's health care. But there are all sorts of useful insights here even for those who were skeptical of a single-payer system to begin with. The book is not mainly directed at the debate over ObamaCare, though those interested in that debate and involved in it will find much that applies.

The New York Times's T magazine has an article about women artists whose work is on display at the Whitney biennial. Reports the Times: "Josephine Meckseper's resplendent film, shot last year at the giant Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., is a 'consumer critique on the collapse and failure of capitalism,' and incorporates military recruiting footage on display there." The Whitney Web site helpfully explains further that "Meckseper exposes the political ramifications of America's culture of consumption. In this work, Meckseper uses a video camera to explore Minneapolis's Mall of America—one of the top tourist destinations in the United States—pausing to examine window displays, sale signs, and dormant rides in its indoor amusement park. Meckseper then manipulates the footage, employing ironically patriotic red and blue filters.... The artist also turns the footage on its side and adds a vaguely sinister soundtrack. The result is an abstraction of otherwise documentary images and a sense of alienation and disorientation. The mall becomes a hostile, dangerous place." Why is it that in some circles, patriotism is always ironic? If capitalism has failed, someone should get word to all those companies advertising their pricey goods in the T magazine, and to the Whitney's board of trustees, which includes more than a few members who owe their fortunes to that "failed" system. Which is more sinister, a shopping mall or a museum that allows trustees to take the money they earned in capitalism and then spend the money on artists who will portray capitalism itself as sinster or failed?

Michael Kinsley, writing in today's New York Times, says the "best moment" of the health care summit was Senator Coburn's suggestion that the government send "undercover patients" to root out Medicare fraud and abuse. Mr. Kinsley writes, in apparent sincerity, "An entire nation thinks: 'Huh! Is there some reason we don't do that already?'" As we wrote here the day of the summit, there are plenty of reasons not to do it. It veers close to entrapment. It involves the government lying to and spying on its own citizens. It could lead to longer waits and perhaps greater mortality among genuinely sick patients kept waiting while doctors are occupied with "undercover patients" pretending to be sick.

First Paul Krugman started denouncing "the arrogance of elites." Now New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes, "A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals." He suggests that "secular liberals" try to "give up some of their snootiness." It's starting to sound like the Fox News Channel over there at the Times editorial page.

The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, has released his annual letter, and, as always, it makes for some interesting reading. Said Mr. Buffett: "We will never become dependent on the kindness of strangers. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. Moreover, that liquidity will be constantly refreshed by a gusher of earnings from our many and diverse businesses. When the financial system went into cardiac arrest in September 2008, Berkshire was a supplier of liquidity and capital to the system, not a supplicant. At the very peak of the crisis, we poured $15.5 billion into a business world that could otherwise look only to the federal government for help."

There seems to be increasing openness on the center-right to the idea of a new value-added tax -- a kind of national sales tax or consumption tax -- to help close the federal budget deficit in America. I earlier noted the sentiments of former Bush aides Glenn Hubbard and Karl Rove; they've since been joined by Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University with a free-market orientation (is that redundant?), who in a blog post that stopped short of endorsing the idea nevertheless wrote, "There exists a credible bipartisan deal which involves at least half the VAT revenue for deficit reduction, combined with cuts, or slower increases, in marginal tax rates on income and perhaps an elimination of the corporate income tax. Spend some of the rest on health care for the poor, if that is the deal on the Democratic side." And Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, another former Bush aide, wrote last week that if he were a conservative on President Obama's fiscal commission, he'd go along with a VAT as part of a deal that would include elimination of the death tax (Professor Mankiw called it the estate tax) and cuts in the top personal and corporate income tax rates (to 25%).

The Washington Examiner's morning "must reads" column (third item) nicely summarizes The New York Times's account of President Obama's plans to use an executive order to require government contractors to meet all kinds of requirements, perhaps including paying higher wages and more generous benefits. The Examiner:

Writer Steven Greenhouse, developing a story broken by The Daily Caller, seems surprised that people who mow lawns on federal contracts would not make more than $22,000 a year. That won't even pay for parking in the Upper West Side.

Unions say it will lift wages nationally and actually save money because better-paid workers will be more productive. Maybe, or maybe it will make things more expensive and make government work even more poorly.