Michael B. Duff

When we bought Toxie , in January of this year, she seemed like a great deal. We paid $1,000. That was 99 percent less than she cost dring the housing boom. Every month, when homeowners paid their mortgages, we got a check. We thought we'd make back our investment before she died. But in the end, we collected only $449.

Affluent and educated voters show no signs of shaking off the Democratic label. Just like the Silk Stocking liberal Republican WASPs of yore, it’s simply not a sign of sophistication to countenance socially conservative beliefs. But there are limits to how much the folks who drive the economy will accept meddling in the economy when it starts to stifle their innovation and whop them in the wallet. Libertarians shouldn’t be afraid to appeal to this segment’s social liberalism—and take credit for being out front on issues of personal freedom decades before those stances became fashionable—and argue that government meddling in the boardroom can be just harmful as meddling in the bedroom. A dose of “liberaltarianism” here may be just what the doctor ordered.

Friday's NYSE SI update now explains the seemingly ceaseless surge in stocks despite constantly deteriorating economic news. The reason: the gross short interest between August 31 and September 15 was completely unchanged! It appears that just as retail investors refuse to allocate capital to stocks regardless of how artificially high the market goes…

For those of you that don't know the meaning of the shoeshine boy reference, JFK's father, Joe Kennedy claimed that he knew it was time to get out of stocks in 1929 when he received investing tips from a shoeshine boy. Ever since, the shoeshine boy has been the metaphor for "time to get out"; for the end of the mania phase in which everyone, even the shoeshine boy, wants in.

In an exclusive interview with National Journal on Thursday, Shepard Fairey expressed his disappointment with the president — a malaise that seems representative of many Democrats who had great expectations for Obama.

The Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled in favor of the patentability of software. Their decision in Bilski v. Kappos further demonstrates that they expect the boundaries of patent eligibility to be drawn more narrowly than they commonly were at the case's outset. The primary point of the decision is that the machine-or-transformation test should not be the sole test for drawing those boundaries. The USPTO can, and should, exclude software from patent eligibility on other legal grounds: because software consists only of mathematics, which is not patentable, and the combination of such software with a general-purpose computer is obvious.

Hats off to David Cameron and Nick Clegg. The phrase "left and right setting aside their differences and coming together to get things done" usually forebodes a disastrous expansion of government reach and power. It's almost miraculous to see the two sides embracing—rather than shedding—their limited government tendencies upon assuming power. Anyone know where I can get a "Daniels-Feingold 2012" bumper sticker?