New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lashes out at Goldman Sachs today, writing, "The behavior of some leading Wall Street banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, has been utterly selfish. U.S. taxpayers saved Goldman by saving one of its big counterparties, A.I.G. By any fair calculation, the U.S. Treasury should own a slice of Goldman today." This is a flawed line of reasoning, for at least four reasons.

First, as I point out in the long Goldman post, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, and the combination of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America were each AIG counterparties about as big as Goldman. Yet Mr. Friedman isn't condemning them.

Voters in Oregon, in an election that ended yesterday, chose to raise taxes on businesses and on those earning $125,000 a year or more, which an Associated Press news article defines as "the rich." It'll be interesting to see if this statewide election gets as much attention as Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on January 15 previewing the Oregon vote. The AP says government employee unions spent heavily on the campaign in Oregon, and the wire service quotes the state Republican chairman as saying, "The bottom line is the unions bought the election."

The Wall Street Journal picks up allegations from a new book by disgruntled former Edwards presidential campaign employee Andrew Young. Senator Edwards, recall, was the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate in 2004: "Young says Edwards is an Atkins-dieter who hated making appearances at state fairs where 'fat rednecks try to shove food down my face. I know I'm the people's senator, but do I have to hang out with them?' Before a SEIU candidate forum in Las Vegas, Young says Edwards made him cut out a 'made in the USA' label from Young's own suit to sew in place of Edwards's 'made in Italy' label." The SEIU is the Service Employees International Union. The Journal has no response from Mr. Edwards. There's also an angle involving Bunny Mellon.

The New Yorker's long and mostly, though not entirely, condescension-free dispatch on the Tea Party movement is well worth a read for those interested in the grass-roots rebellion in the making against both Democrats and Republicans. The news peg for the magazine is Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts (on which please see also N. Richard Greenfield's report published on this site, as well as the reader comment on it by Frederick Van Bennekom).

The decision by Lance Armstrong's cancer charity, LIVESTRONG, to back the Senate health care overhaul bill prompted a flurry of comments on the charity's Web site along the lines of, "I support Livestrong in its work to defeat cancer. I do NOT, however, agree with their support of this healthcare travesty. As much as I would like to continue to financially support Livestrong, the idea of my donations going to support horrendous legisation like this causes me to seek out a different outlet for my cancer donations." It's an interesting little comment thread to read, because it appears to be not politicians or think tank "experts" or professional opinionators but just regular people voicing their concerns about what's in the Senate bill. The charity does its best, too, to explain its reasoning in backing the bill.

Reader N. Richard Greenfield files the following dispatch with the benefit of a week's perspective on the election victory of Scott Brown:

Massachusetts has always been in the thick of things politically, and last week's election harkened back to the original tea parties and sparks of rebellion at the country's birth. Along with the presidencies of the Adamses, John Kennedy and Calvin Coolidge, Massachusetts has also given the Democrats recent presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. This past week, the Bay State was at the political center of gravity again, deciding whether the United States is a one party or two-party government over the next 11 months.

In 2008, Massachusetts joined the rest of the country in rejecting the Bush presidency and using as its measure for president 'historic choice' rather than qualifications. Just what one would expect for the bluest of blue states.

The founder of AQR Capital Management, Clifford Asness, has sent along by e-mail an early version of his latest commentary to be published on his Stumblingontruth.com Web site. This one replies to President Obama's attacks on the bankers. Some highlights: "When a failing government with totalitarian impulses needs help, it's pretty standard strategy to call down a pogrom against an unpopular class of citizens. The bankers are nothing if not unpopular. Unfortunately for this President, he will, I hope, find the financial community not cowering from his Cossacks on a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (Greenwich, CT), but meeting his accusations with logic and patriotism."

TaxProf has the details, via the Economist, of how the furniture giant Ikea is owned by a non-profit foundation dedicated to "innovation in the field of architectural and interior design." At $36 billion it's the world's wealthiest charity, and not particularly transparent. Other businesses owned by or closely linked to non-profits include fashion designer Geoffrey Beene, the food brand Newman's Own, and the St. Petersburg Times newspaper in Florida.

From Rep. Ron Paul's "Statement in Opposition to H Res 1021, Condolences to Haiti": "I believe that the American people are very generous on their own and fear that a US government commitment to reconstruct Haiti may actually discourage private contributions. Mr. Speaker, already we see private US citizens and corporations raising millions of dollars for relief and reconstruction of Haiti. I do not believe the US government should get in the way of these laudable efforts." I'm not endorsing Dr. Paul's view by quoting it here, but I do think it's newsworthy, and that paying attention to voices on the extremes or fringes of the American political debate -- whether it's Ron Paul or Ralph Nader -- can be useful in helping or provoking people to think about and sometimes even reassess their unstated assumptions. Dr. Paul is an unusual creature in politics; he actually votes pretty consistently according to his stated principles.

In an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, the man who served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Clinton administration, Arthur Levitt, pushes back against President Obama's two newest proposals to tax and regulate what the president calls "fat cat" bankers. Writes Mr. Levitt, "While I applaud the president's heightened interest in financial regulatory reform, both ideas have flaws: the bank tax is unfair and will probably be no more effective than the UK bonus tax, while the ban on proprietary trading would have virtually no impact on the risk-taking that caused most bank losses during the crisis." The FT identifies Mr. Levitt only as "former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission" without any disclosure of Mr. Levitt's work as a paid adviser to Goldman Sachs, which has a significant financial interest in how the Obama administration's proposals on the bank tax and proprietary trading turn out. The Wall Street Journal let Mr. Levitt get away with the same thing last summer.

Now that newspapers are reporting President Obama will call for a three-year freeze on non-defense, non-entitlement, non-veterans spending, this YouTube video of Candidate Obama repeatedly campaigning against the idea of a spending freeze takes on some new resonance. There's a view out there that Mr. Obama is a rigidly committed leftist, but, if that is so, as we've seen on health care, he sure manages to adjust his stances and stated positions flexibly to the situation at hand. Whether that is praise or criticism will depend on the reader's own view of the world.

Bloomberg News columnist Caroline Baum imagines that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is headed for a job at Goldman Sachs. Reuters' BreakingViews column, reprinted in the New York Times, imagines that he is headed for a job at Citigroup. Either way, neither columnist expects him to last as Treasury secretary. Maybe David Warsh, who predicted in March of 2009 that either Mr. Geithner or Lawrence Summers would be gone from the Obama administration by June of 2009, was not wrong, just early. I think it's much likelier that, if Mr. Geithner leaves the administration, he'd end up following Gene Sperling's route to somewhere like the Council on Foreign Relations, where he can make nearly $1 million a year from Goldman Sachs without anyone knowing about it until his next turn in government service.

"I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," President Obama tells ABC News. The network says the president "ducked" when Diane Sawyer asked if he could guarantee there would not be a tax increase for anyone making less than $250,000. "I can guarantee that the worst thing we could do would be to raise taxes when the economy is still this weak," the president replied. Not clear why that applies just to the under $250,000 a year crowd, and Mr. Obama has already raised the cigarette tax. But interesting.

Senator Schumer, a Democrat, and Senator Hatch, a Republican, have an op-ed piece in today's New York Times proposing to give businesses tax incentives for hiring unemployed workers. Here's what they propose: "Starting immediately after enactment, any private-sector employer that hires a worker who had been unemployed for at least 60 days will not have to pay its 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax on that employee for the duration of 2010. The Social Security trust fund will then be made whole with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget between now and 2015. That's it. Simple to understand, and easy to explain." Like many efforts to use the tax code to fine-tune the behavior of firms or individuals rather than to efficiently and fairly raise the revenue required for government, however, this idea has problems that Mr. Schumer and Mr. Hatch don't confront in their article. What's to stop a business from firing its employees now and then re-hiring them two months later to take advantage of the tax benefit? If you are an employer interviewing a promising job applicant who has been unemployed for 30 days, are you going to tell that person to start work tomorrow, or wait a month so that you can take advantage of the tax benefits? If you were fired yesterday, are you going to start looking for work today, or wait 45 days until you are more appealing to a potential employer who knows about the tax benefit? The effect of the Schumer-Hatch proposal might be to retard job growth rather than to spur it. As we've noted before, neither the Republicans or the Democrats have a monopoly on bad ideas in Washington.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times: "Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.'s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.'s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.'s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.'s."