"The human uterus is designed to carry one fetus," a front-page New York Times article avers. Tell it to Rebecca.

The rest of the article is about as wrongheaded. It quotes the head of the women's health and fertility branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Maurizio Macaluso, as saying, "You can't convince a couple that having twins is a bad thing...That's a major communication problem." What a cautionary quotation about giving the government more power to interfere with individuals and their doctors. The government doctor in charge of fertility in America seems to think that twins are bad and that the government's only problem is that it is having trouble communicating that message to parents. Maybe it's not a communications problem but a problem with the substance of the message. In other words, if parents think twins are good but the government doctor thinks twins are bad, maybe it's the parents who are right and not the government doctor.

The New York Times Real Estate section reports on the East 84th-Street Manhattan two-bedroom penthouse apartment of a 26-year-old daughter of a Goldman Sachs broker and a supermodel, which features a 47-inch flat-screen television. It reports that the apartment "is legally hers, turned over to her by her parents." Not until later in the article do we learn that the apartment is "hers," the Times says, "thanks to the miracle of rent stabilization." It isn't such a miracle for the landlord who, at least in theory, owns the apartment, and who doesn't rate so much as a how-do-you-do in the Times account. For the landlord, rent stabilization is less a miracle and more than a curse. The Times estimates that the rent on the space is less than half what a market price would be, costing the landlord more than $25,000 a year in foregone income. The Times article makes reference to a "roommate" of the 26-year-old who lives in the apartment's second bedroom, without probing what, if any, rent the roommate pays, or what exactly the justice is in allowing tenants of "rent-stabilized" apartments to sublet portions of them out at market rates that the law prevents the actual owner of the property from charging.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and a group of New York state senators yesterday announced a plan to "reform" the state pension system by replacing the state comptroller as the board's sole trustee with a new 13-member board. According to the announcment, "The Comptroller would chair the Board and serve alongside six members appointed by the Governor, Attorney General, Temporary President of the Senate, Speaker of the Assembly, the Senate Minority Leader and the Assembly Minority Leader." This isn't really a reform at all, but an effort to distribute the campaign contributions from money managers, donations that are currently directed to the state comptroller, around among a larger group of politicians.

Clifford Asness of Stumblingontruth.com emails some quick thoughts on this morning's award, including: "Chrysler senior debt holders are just relieved he didn't win the Nobel in economics."

"Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks," writes Google co-founder Sergey Brin in today's New York Times. There's another choice he doesn't mention: Bookfinder.com.

Good Gerald Seib column in today's Wall Street Journal: "One of the great, though little-discussed, surprises of the 2008 election was how well Mr. Obama did among the top-income voters who are, in popular stereotype, supposed to be quintessential Republicans. In fact, exit polling showed that Mr. Obama did better among those with household incomes of more than $200,000 than he did among those in the middle-income brackets. He won these wealthiest of voters by 52% to 46%....Now, though, a bit of buyer's remorse may be creeping in among the upper-bracket set."

Maybe we're missing something, but on first impression, there would seem to be a reasonable chance that President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will actually hurt him politically in America and make it harder for him to accomplish some of his domestic agenda, by highlighting both the way he is venerated in Scandanavia and the absurdity of him winning the prize without having actually accomplished anything substantial. The prize committee apparently thought the shift in tone and attitude was enough to merit the prize. Some people will think that is wonderful, others -- a lot of others -- are going to have a first reaction that is, in effect, "you've got to be kidding."

George Will's memorably withering assessment of President Obama's "gaseous rhetoric" in Copenhagen mysteriously avoided taking Mr. Obama to task for one formulation he used in the speech -- the "sacred trust." "To host athletes and visitors from every corner of the globe is a high honor and a great responsibility. And America is ready and eager to assume that sacred trust," the president said. If it sounds familiar, it should. Back in June, Mr. Obama said, "As a nation, we have a sacred trust with all those who wear the uniform: To always take care of them as they take care of us." Back then, he wasn't talking about Olympic uniforms, but American military uniforms. In March, Mr. Obama, or his speechwriters, reached deep for material for a speech commemorating the 160th anniversary of the Department of the Interior and came out with another sacred trust, this one environmental: "For you know, you know that our long-term prosperity depends upon the faithful stewardship of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that we sow. That's a sacred trust..." And in his big speech to a joint session of Congress on September 9 about health care, Mr. Obama said, "More than four decades ago, this nation stood up for the principle that after a lifetime of hard work, our seniors should not be left to struggle with a pile of medical bills in their later years. That's how Medicare was born. And it remains a sacred trust that must be passed down from one generation to the next."

American citizens who leave the U.S. permanently to live abroad are still required to file U.S. federal income tax returns each year, and report their foreign bank accounts - on pain of penalties such as a fine. In everything I've read about the various health reform bills and proposals being crafted, I have yet to see any mention of a possible effect on the hundreds of thousands of expatriate Americans around the world.

• Will US citizens residing abroad get trapped in an individual insurance mandate, and subject to fines? Or exempted completely?
• If there is a blanket exemption on the basis of living abroad, what type of documentation would be required to prove residence abroad? How would it be collected and verified? (Sounds like a nice niche business for notaries, translators and maybe forgers...)
• If there is no blanket exemption, will expats be required to show proof of insurance in their country of residence?

Perhaps the new jobs generated by the bureaucracy to police this could be financed by the next stimulus package.

Here's Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, as quoted by the Financial Times, responding to Sarah Palin's warning about the weakness of the dollar: "there may be a legitimate debate to be had over the dollar's reserve status, but Sarah Palin is not qualified to participate in it." One may like or dislike Governor Palin, but since when are there qualifying rules on participating in debate in America? This is America, after all. The whole point of a participatory democracy is that everyone gets to participate in the debate. That's what universal suffrage and the First Amendment and a bunch of other bedrock American civic concepts are all about. Ms. Palin, who was elected as a mayor and a governor and selected as the vice presidential nominee of one of America's two major political parties, has at least as much standing to discuss the dollar as anyone else. The suggestion that she lacks such standing is the sort of thing that leads some people to support her almost just out of spite for the press and Washington establishment insiders who have such contempt for her. Update: Mr. Ornstein emails back in response to my query: "that was a snide comment on my part, and I regret saying it. It was part of a larger conversation not simply about the dollar's strength or weakness, but about the larger complexities, including trade balances, populism, the implications in foreign and economic terms of adversarial nations having massive reserves of dollars, and so on. I had not known that Palin had simply raised the question in a simple form in a comment, and I said something I should not have, with wrong-headed implications."

A Republican member of Congress from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, tells the Financial Times, "People are beginning to realize that Obama is a socialist." Charles Krauthammer wouldn't go that far, telling the crowd at Monday night's Wriston Lecture that he thinks President Obama is not a communist or a socialist but a social democrat, "a radical by American standards."

Daniel Henninger's column in today's Wall Street Journal has some zingers, including this: "In the U.S., both Republican and Democratic pols define capitalism as a system with economic activity sufficient to produce campaign contributions." He writes: "The most immediate problem facing the U.S. is not that we have too much capitalism, but that we don't have enough of it."

Reader comment posted on FutureOfCapitalism.com by Mark Zanger, 12:25 a.m., October 7, 2009:

The reference to COOK'S ILLUSTRATED is fraught with unintended irony. Christopher Kimball set up that magazine not to have advertising, so his ads can *never* plummet by 40%. He had decided that there aren't enough food advertisers to support a food magazine in good times, and so food magazines end up running travel stories and other non-food material. He wanted to do a magazine about food and cooking, not one like Gourmet. He learned this lesson by starting a food magazine with advertising called Cook's. It developed to a certain point, and then he sold it to... Conde Nast!

Conde Nast bought Cooks from Kimball solely to fufill it's subscriptions and put Gourmet's circulation over a million so they could use that to get advertising. Conde Nast was so cavalier about Cook's that they did not even bother to renew the trademark, which Kimball re-registered a few years later for $150 or so. This is what Kimball will write in his op-ed.

When I put to an FDIC spokesman the question of whether FDIC chairman Sheila Bair's idea of limiting the claims of secured creditors of financial firms to no more than 80% of their secured credits was intended to apply to just newly issued debt or to apply retroactively to existing secured creditors, he got back to me with the response: "The chairman simply raised the issue as a possible approach. No details were provided."

There's a lively debate just now on the right about tone and civility. Over at the American Enterprise Institute blog, Charles Murray writes:

Our job is to engage in a debate on great issues and make converts to our point of view. The key word is converts—referring to people who didn't start out agreeing with us. We shouldn't be civil and reasonable just because we want to be nice guys. It is the only option we've got if we want to succeed instead of just posture. The Glenn Becks of the world posture, and make our work harder.