John Stossel has moved his blog, which had been really crackling over at ABC, along with himself over to Fox Business. The new address is here, and it's good to see him back in action on the Web.

Buried on page 1373 of Speaker Pelosi's 1990-page health care bill (pdf) is a provision that amounts to a present for another reliable Democratic constituency, nurses' unions. The section authorizes the Secretary of Labor to establish a grant program to provide nursing education. To qualify for the grant, an entity must be either "jointly administrered by a health care employer and a labor union," or by "one or more organizations which represent the interests of direct care health care workers or staff nurses and in which the direct health care workers or staff nurses have direct input as to the leadership of the organization." On top of that, any school of nursing or employer that qualifies must be one that "provides wages and benefits to its nurses that are competitive for its market or that have been collectively bargained with a labor organization." The whole notion of requiring competitive wages and benefits is redundant, anyway, because if the wages are not competitive, the employer would not succeed in attracting any employees. What's really going on here is that the nurses' unions -- just like all the other interest groups, from drug companies to trial lawyers to doctors -- are getting their piece of the action, for which the rest of America is going to be stuck with the bill.

Speaker Pelosi's health care overhaul bill (pdf) includes a little present to that Democratic constituency group known as trial lawyers. Buried on page 1432 of the 1990-page bill is a provision that would require the health and human services secretary to determine the effectiveness of medical liability reform by ascertaining that "the law does not limit attorneys' fees or impose caps on damages." Even President Obama, in his speech to a joint session of Congress on health care, expressed support for reforming medical malpractice laws. If it's up to Speaker Pelosi, those reforms won't include damage caps or limits on lawyers' fees. Which means that they won't be much of a reform at all.

The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair, delivered the Alfred Landon lecture today at Kansas State University, and the text is worth deconstructing.

Ms. Bair: "WAMU became the largest insured depository institution to fail, though thanks to the FDIC's resolution powers, it was sold in a seamless transaction that required no support from the government and fully protected all depositors."

FutureOfCapitalism.com: The depositors of WaMu may have been protected, but the shareholders and senior debt holders suffered quite a bit, as detailed here. The events weren't exactly seamless for them.

Ms. Bair calls the American government actions to prop up and bail out or take over financial institutions "mostly necessary." The natural follow-up question is which ones were necessary and which ones were not, but Ms. Bair doesn't say.

President Clinton's secretary of labor, Robert Reich, writes about the health care overhaul crafted by President Obama and congressional Democrats:

the current bills won't offer most Americans any appreciable decline in the cost of their health insurance nor clear improvement in the efficiency or quality of the health care they receive, and those who will benefit won't see the benefits until 2014 at the earliest. All this is partly a result of Obama's sharpest break from Clinton -- whose ambitious health care plan drew immediate fire from Big Pharma, the American Medical Association, and health insurers: The Obama White House bought off the medical-industrial complex by promising it fatter profits, bolstered by tens of millions of new paying customers.

The Brooklyn Brewery is getting an $800,000 grant from the state of New York, the New York Times reports this morning. The article doesn't explore why the state's taxpayers who don't drink beer, or who prefer other brands of beer, or who own or work at competing breweries, should have their money taken away from them and given to the owner of this brewery. Many of these taxpayers are less rich than this brewery owner is, making this deal another Reverse Robin-Hood.

Bloomberg News has a report on a Nobel-prize-winning economist at Columbia University, Joseph Stiglitz, having said, as the wire puts it, "the world's biggest economy is suffering because of the U.S. government's failure to nationalize banks during the financial crisis.":

"If we had done the right thing, we would be able to have more influence over the banks," Stiglitz told reporters at an economic conference in Shanghai Oct 31. "They would be lending and the economy would be stronger."

The Senate has reached a deal on a "shield law" to protect journalists from being forced to disclose their sources under court order, reports The New York Times, whose Judith Miller was one of the highest-profile examples of someone who would be protected under such a law. The Times article doesn't remark on the irony of this law being considered by the Senate, given that the Senate itself, and its staff, are some of the biggest leakers to journalists around. Reporters acknowledge this openly: at a Janet Reno press conference when she was attorney general, one reporter put it this way: "it's no secret to anyone at this table that Congress leaks like a sieve. I mean it really is shameless on the Hill." By passing a shield law, the senators and their staffers aren't just protecting the reporters, they are protecting themselves from being exposed as the sources of confidential information. The double standard is particularly glaring at a time when federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission are cracking down on those who allegedly leak or misuse confidential corporate information for insider trading. Hedge fund managers are being led around in handcuffs for allegedly receiving confidential information to make money, while Congress is passing a law to protect the ability of reporters to receive confidential information consequence-free to help sell newspapers.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, today announced $5 billion in "New Markets Tax Credit" awards through the Treasury's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. As is typical, for all the Obama administration's talk of transparency, the names of the actual grant recipients are buried within a PDF document, but one of the services provided here at FutureOfCapitalism.com is to read pdfs for you. Sure enough, Banc of America CDE, LLC gets $70 million to put into real estate, Chase New Markets Corporation gets $40 million to put into financing businesses, and Citibank NMTC Corporation gets $90 million to put into real estate. Given the billions that BofA, JP Morgan Chase, and Citi have already sopped up from TARP, from the FDIC's Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, and indirectly as counterparties to the bailed-out AIG, it's either stunning or predictable that they are back for more. It's certainly part of a pattern -- as we noted earlier, GM went back for a $2.6 million subsidy from the Energy Department after its $66 billion bailout. If these are worthwhile projects, the banks should be willing to back them without 40% tax credits. And if they aren't worthwhile projects, why do them at all? Another pattern: It's not just the Democrats or the Obama administration that is responsible. As the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund Web site notes, "The CDFI Fund was established by the Riegle Community Development and Regulatory Improvement Act of 1994, as a bipartisan initiative." Sure enough, that act passed the Senate on March 17, 1994 by unanimous consent, and passed the House on August 4, 1994 by a vote of 410 to 12. The "yea" votes included Newt Gingrich as well as then-Rep. Charles Schumer.

FutureOfCapitalism.com on George Soros's announcement that he will spend $50 million to get university economics departments to stop teaching "unwavering belief in unchecked free markets": October 27, 2009, 11:27 a.m.

National Review's "The Corner" on same: October 29, 2009, 2:41 p.m.

Club for Growth report of National Review Corner item: October 30, 2009, 8:54 a.m.

Senate Republicans offer 10 stimulus projects to remember, among them "$300,000 for mapping radioactive rabbit feces" and "$30 million for a spring training baseball complex for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies."

Mark Perry of Carpe Diem on the book price wars:

It's only in the bizarre world of antitrust that any price you charge can be considered illegal. If your price is lower than your competitors, you could be charged with being a "predator" for anti-competitive "predatory pricing." If your price is "too high" you could be charged with anti-competitive monopoly pricing, "price gouging," or "ticket scalping." And if your price is the same as your competitors, you could be charged with collusion and anti-competitive price-fixing.

The New York Times has an editorial this morning supporting the idea of the Pelosi Tax, a 5.4% tax on the income of joint filers over $1 million (and single filers over $500,000). "The wealthy prospered enormously from tax cuts under the Bush administration. It is fitting that they pay a heavy share of the cost of health care reform," the Times says. It is at least the 11th tax increase that the Times has supported in the past seven years. We noted two of the others at FutureOfCapitalism.com here and here, and the other eight are enumerated in a New York Sun editorial that noted, "for the Times and the American left that its editorial positions represent, tax increases aren't the last resort, but the first answer to every problem." To find the flaw with the reasoning in their argument for the Pelosi tax, the editorialists of the Times need look no further than the family that owns their newspaper. The price of a share of New York Times Class A stock went from $34.56 on January 19, 2001 to $5.91 on January 20, 2009. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., with 2008 total compensation of $2.4 million, might be subject to the Pelosi tax, but it'd be hard to make the case that he prospered enormously during the Bush administration.

The basic question of Alexander's Essay is encrusted in some somewhat offputting rhetoric (gratuitious use of the president's middle name, reference to his administration as a "regime"), but it is nonetheless an important one: where in the Constitution does it give the federal government authority to mandate individual health insurance or bail out or take over banks, insurance companies, and automakers? The essay reports that Speaker Pelosi, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer were all asked the question, with some illuminating responses that haven't gotten much press attention. The essay also reports on Rep. Michele Bachmann's effort to press the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on where the Constitutional authority for his extraordinary actions has come from. And it reports:

President Obama's FDIC chairman, Sheila Bair, and his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geither, are openly disagreeing over how to fund losses associated with the failure of a financial giant. The debate, in essence, is about whether a so-called Goldman Tax should be imposed before ("ex-ante") or after ("ex-post") another crisis:

Here's Ms. Bair: