Sunday's New York Times business section took an in-depth look at the case of Stefan Buck, a Swiss banker who in November was found not guilty by a New York jury in a criminal case related to tax avoidance by his U.S.-based clients. The Times reported: "The Justice Department had now lost the three cases it had tried against foreign bankers who helped Americans avoid taxes. Dozens more cases are pending."

You'd think that maybe having lost the first three cases, the government would consider dropping the "dozens more." The Times article is long and seems thorough, but it leaves mostly unexplored the question of whether there are any career consequences for prosecutors who bring and lose these cases, or who approve bringing them.

In December, in another federal case, a Brooklyn jury acquitted the former top soccer official of Peru, Manuel Burga.

My former Forward colleague Jonathan Mahler's New York Times magazine article about the subway includes this brief account of the boom created by the rezoning of the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood known as Dumbo, which is between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges:

An Oprah Winfrey presidency — and the prospect that it would encounter an anti-Trump style "resistance" — is the topic of my column this week. Please check the column out at the New York Daily News (here), the New Boston Post (here), Newsmax (here), and the New York Sun (here).

Some of the finest minds on the left are at battle stations over the news that a lawyer for President Trump is trying to halt the publication of Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

"Now Trump is threatening the publisher of the book, not just Bannon. We have freedom of the press, he can't stop the book just because he doesn't like what it says," was the way the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, put it on Twitter.

Two lawyers at Gibson Dunn, Ted Boutrous and Teddy Kidder, took to Politico magazine to claim:

For a reminder that complex systems are hard to predict with much precision, it's hard to beat a good winter snowstorm.

Here's a tweet from the National Weather Service's Boston issued at 9:07 p.m. on January 2, 2018.

It shows the "snow amount potential" for the storm that wound up hitting on January 4. For Boston, it listed a "low end snowfall" of 4 inches, an "expected snowfall" of 11 inches, and a "high end snowfall" of 14 inches.

For Worcester, it listed a "low end snowfall" of 2 inches, an "expected snowfall" of 7 inches, and a "high end snowfall" of 11 inches. It gave Worcester only a 6% chance of snowfall in the 12 to 18 inch range.

A map of predicted snowfall the weather service issued at 4:55 a.m. on January 4 included a range of eight to twelve inches for Boston.

An hour and a half after my FutureOfCapitalism post taking issue with James Comey's tweet about the supposed importance to liberty of an "independent Department of Justice and FBI," the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, made a similar point. Senator Grassley's tweet:

Law enforcement shld NOT be independent of constitutional oversight. Like the military, FBI/DOJ accountability to ELECTED leaders is essential for liberty. We are ACCOUNTABLE to the PEOPLE in our representative govt. Hoover FBI was unaccountable/did great harm w abuses of power

Good for Grassley.

The former FBI director, James Comey, tweeted today:

Where are the voices of all the leaders who know an independent Department of Justice and FBI are essential to our liberty? "You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say." — Martin Luther

This seems to me to misunderstand, pretty fundamentally, our constitutional set-up. Whatever "an independent Department of Justice and FBI" may be, "essential to our liberty" is not it. The FBI did not even exist until 1908; liberty existed beforehand. The Justice Department didn't exist as a separate agency until 1870; again, liberty existed beforehand.

Newspapers are warning that President Trump may slap a tariff on newsprint imported from Canada. The situation is the subject of my column this week. Please check the column out at the New Boston Post here, the New York Sun here, and Newsmax here.

Back on November 19, in an item headlined "Subway Salaries," I excerpted some numbers from a New York Times investigation into the city's subway system:

Subway workers now make an average of $170,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is about $100,000 in total compensation annually.

The pay for managers is even more extraordinary. The nearly 2,500 people who work in New York subway administration make, on average, $280,000 in salary, overtime and benefits. The average elsewhere is $115,000.

Now the Times has published a correction:

My column for this week is the annual William Safire-style one with predictions for the year ahead. Last year's installment anticipated the Patriots Super Bowl victory, the stock market rally, President Trump's Jerusalem move, and the departure from Fox News of Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly. This year's version is available at the New Boston Post (here), Newsmax (here), and the New York Sun (here).

When even the left-leaning New York Times thinks excessive regulation of an apple orchard is worth a long news article with a prominent reference to George Mason University's Mercatus Center — well, maybe President Trump is actually onto something important with his focus on deregulation.

The tax bill passed by Congress this week is a pretty big deal, to put it mildly. Who deserves the credit (or the blame, depending on how you see it)? Here is a first pass — if I am missing anyone, the comments function is open:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin: This guy's Yale classmates petitioned him to resign. National Review (here) and the New York Times (here) made fun of him and his wife in the most personal and nasty ways. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page was skeptical of his nomination. With this tax cut, he belongs in the ranks with Douglas Dillon and Andrew Mellon as consequential tax-cutting Treasury secretaries.

Senators Cornyn, McConnell, Scott, and Toomey: Senate Republican leadership and members of the conference committee with the House were able somehow to deliver a bill that every Republican senator was able to support.

The American Enterprise Institute, previously known as a center-right Washington think tank, is out with its second New York Times op-ed in a week opposing President Trump's tax cut bill. I wrote about the first one earlier here, and my point about how "Heterogeneity within think tanks is great" still applies. The second Times piece comes from Nat Malkus, "a resident scholar and the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute," who complains that a Republican provision to allow the use of 529 college savings accounts for K-to-12 private education expenses "creates outsize impacts on the state income tax bases in the 33 states that instituted state tax deductions and tax credits to encourage 529 college savings."

Malkus writes:

Radio Boston, which is a terrific show on WBUR, a public radio station here in Boston, was kind enough to invite me on to talk about the Trump tax bill. My radio-guest muscles are a bit atrophied, but I had fun and was happy to have a chance to have a say. You can listen here.

Is the New York Times required to register with the government under the same Foreign Agents Registration Act that Robert Mueller has cited against former Trump aides Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn? That's the topic of my latest column. Please check it out in full at the New Boston Post (here), New York Sun (here), and Newsmax (here).