Rep. John Duncan of Tennessee argues that the Air Marshall Service is a waste of money:

Keir Cutler on Shakespeare

Those MSN articles I see when I sign on every morning are getting worse and worse every day. This morning, an article promises to disclose "6 Money Saving Tips from Billionaires." So I read it to discover that all six "tips" are things I do already. So do you. Unless you're a billionaire.

Bill Wilson in the Washington Examiner:

Having failed to deliver a death blow to the industry, Obama’s new strategy is apparently death by a thousand cuts – some of them very deep cuts. Consider a little-known requirement of “Obamacare” called the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR).

Under this new mandate, insurance companies must spend no less than 80-85 percent of their premiums directly on reimbursements for clinical services or “activities that improve health care quality.”

But what happens to the other 15-20 percent of premiums? And who determines what constitutes an “activity that improves health care quality?”

Obviously, that remaining pot of money is where private plans have historically paid operational costs and realized profits – but strict new definitions being forced upon them by the Department of Health and Human Services threaten to cut into that percentage.

For example, if this new mandate is implemented, money that is currently spent on anti-fraud measures will no longer be classified as an “activity that improves health care quality.” That means plan providers will be faced with a choice – either cut profits voluntarily or let the thieves do it for them.

Jonathan Weil on the conflict of interest the Fed has created for itself through TARP:

It’s a classic Catch-22. If the Fed exercises its rights as an investor, it undermines its credibility as a supervisor. If it doesn’t, it’s abandoning its duty to minimize taxpayers’ losses. This shows why the Fed shouldn’t be allowed to hold mortgage-backed securities of this kind in the first place.