In a post about Wal-Mart signing on to an employer mandate for health insurance, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein says he was initially skeptical, but then read the joint letter between Wal-Mart, the Service Employees Union International, and the Center for American Progress, and pronounces himself convinced.

He notes, though, that Wal-Mart isn’t doing this for altruistic reasons, and in doing so Klein comes perilously close to grasping the concept of rent seeking and regulatory capture. But then he whiffs.

This isn’t, of course, a story of altruism. By being of use to the administration, Wal-Mart ensures that its concerns will be heard and heeded. By publicly associating itself with health reform, the company repairs some of the damage SEIU and others have done to its reputation in recent years. And, in a more macro sense, by throwing its weight behind strict cost controls, Wal-Mart makes it likelier that it gets the largest of all possible benefits: an eventual slowing in the double-time march of health-care costs.

Klein then almost stumbles onto the point again. But again it eludes him.

But health reform isn’t supposed to be about altruism. And that’s arguably the most important message of this letter. Reforming health reform [sic] isn’t just some liberal president’s agenda item. It’s good business.

Supporting new regulations is usually good business if your company is big enough to absorb compliance costs that could slow down or cripple your competitors. Even better if can you sign on early and win over a few influential opinion makers, interest groups, and politicians so you’ll have some pull over how the regulations are written.

….if Walmart had given, say, the Cato Institute somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million, after which Cato issued a joint letter with Walmart executives calling for the federal government to pass new policies that would hurt Walmart’s competitors, I’m pretty sure people like Matthew Yglesias would be calling Cato a bunch of corporate whores.

But this isn’t the Cato Institute we’re talking about. It’s Yglesias’ employer, the left-wing Center for the American Progress.

So you see, that means it’s all okay.

Can’t remember where I read it first, but someone who isn’t me once posited if the Bill of Rights were put to a vote (under a different name and slightly different wording, of course), it would probably lose in a landslide. Seems about right.

….or better yet, is this a super clever marketing campaign by Firefox?

…why FoxNews.com scaled down its opinion section, killing off my column and several others. They had to create room on the front page for the important stuff.

….there may be some unanticipated flaws in the monkey butler plan.

Sort of appropriate, I think:

…while the five-month old Obama White House Web site has drawn rave reviews for its fresh design and innovation, several experts say it has not moved the White House toward being “the most open and transparent [administration] in history,” as new media director Macon Phillips promised on day one.

Information is harder to find on the Obama Web site than it was on the site created and run by the Bush administration, according to Web site experts.

“It doesn’t seem to be quite in line with the notion of the pillars of government 2.0 being openness and transparency. It seems just the opposite,” said Mark Drapeau, a columnist for Federal Computer Week who writes frequently on the ways that new technologies can be used by the government…

“It’s lots of PR and not a lot of data,” said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, who called the site “brochureware.”

My favorite part:

One of the most noteworthy marks of the site has been its use as a distribution point, and showcase, for the thousands of exclusive photos taken by Mr. Obama’s personal photographers. The main page of Mr. Obama’s Web site revolves around a large window that rotates between four photos, which are often flattering portraits of the president.

The White House has also created a Flickr.com account on the privately run, commercial Web site, and has posted hundreds of photos of the president, often showing him behind the scenes of his official events or during his private moments.

“Once we got here and saw … what [chief White House photographer] Pete Souza and his team were producing it was a no-brainer to see how we could make that more accessible,” Mr. Phillips said.

Good to know they’re at least working hard to make flattering photographs of the president “more accessible” to the public. Who says Obama has dropped the ball on transparency?

Shawn Macomber had a terrific piece in the July print edition of Reason about a town’s efforts to shut down a woman’s pole dancing exercise studio.

It’s now online.

Good, succinct video from the Independence Institute. Health insurance should be more like car insurance. You’re covered when things go very wrong, but when a third party is paying for things like check-ups and routine visits to the doctor’s office, you get some major pricing distortions.

Just a reminder to stop by tonight with your questions for 20/20 co-anchor, Reason reader, and prominent libertarian, John Stossel.

Over at Reason, I have a piece up looking at the lessons we can draw from a British artist’s attempt to build a common toaster from scratch.

A bit self-pitying for my taste, but the gist is spot-on.

I’m thrilled to give you, Agitator readers, the chance to pick the brain of America’s most high-profile libertarian, 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel.  John will take your questions this Thursday at 7:30 pm in a live chat at the site you’re reading.

He’ll also be promoting his new blog, as well as his upcoming 20/20 report on the health care debate.

John was gracious enough to give us some of his time, so let’s give him a good turnout.

McClatchy summarizes the long list of policies where President Obama has reneged on campaign promises—either in letter or spirit—and adopted the policies of his predecessor. We’ve covered many of them here, but they range from a broad application of the state secrets doctrine to invocations of executive privilege to the Defense of Marriage Act to a host of other issues related to transparency and disclosure.

My own hunch is that presidents try to keep campaign promises that expand the government and their own power, and either back down from or are unwilling to expend much capital on promises that make government smaller and more accountable, thus limiting their own power.

Looking over PolitiFact’s report card on Obama’s campaign promises, that seems to be about right thus far. By my count (and some of this is certainly subjective) of the of the 31 promises the site says Obama has kept thus far, 20 in some way grow or expand the federal government. Just six make the government smaller, more transparent, or more accountable. The remaining five have no effect, or amount to a wash.

Of the six campaign promises PolitiFact says Obama has unquestionably broken, five would have limited his own power, provided tax breaks, or provided more accountability and transparency to the federal government. One was mostly symbolic (recognizing the Armenian genocide). So far, he hasn’t broken a single promise that would grow or expand the government, though he has compromised on a few, and many have been stalled.

PolitiFact also gives Obama more credit than he deserves on some promises. For example, Obama’s promise that “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” was broken when he signed a bill raising taxes on cigarettes to pay for an expansion of the SCHIP program. PolitiFact calls this a “compromise.” But “not any of your taxes” seems pretty clear. Obama didn’t say, “not any of your taxes, so long as you don’t smoke” or “so long as you don’t have habits the government finds distasteful.”

In short, I think it’s safe to say that Obama has been willing to spend plenty of political capital on his promises that vastly expand the size and scope of the federal government, and relatively little on promises related to eliminating waste, putting limits on his own power, or making the government more transparent and accountable.

It’s worth emphasizing that this analysis isn’t holding Obama to some libertarian standard of the ideal president—I’m not looking at how many of his total policies grow government versus how many limit it or hold it accountable. It’s holding him up against his own campaign promises. That is, even when you assume the positions of left-of-center, big government Obama-the-candidate as your baseline, Obama-the-president comes up short.

I’m with James Joyner. The right-wing blogs’ drummed-up outrage over Obama going to get some ice cream with his kids as the Iranian government cracked down on protesters yesterday has to be about the dumbest thing since . . . well, since the last time the right-wing blogs drummed up some silly outrage.

There’s violence and suffering going on all over the world, all of the time. Is the guy never supposed to take his kids for ice cream, lest he appear indifferent to it all? And where were the howls of right-wing outrage when Bush was clearing brush in Crawford during various world crises? Also, isn’t taking some time off the job to spend time with your kids something right-wingers generally celebrate?

I do agree that the media fawns over Obama. And while I admire the guy for being normal enough to make the occasional burger or ice cream run, the press doesn’t need to cover it every time he does. But juxtaposing Obama’s ice cream cone next to the woman shot by the Basiji is quite a bit worse than ignoring the protests to go get ice cream, it’s exploiting the deaths of the protesters to score cheap, partisan political points.

There are legitimate reasons to be outraged about Obama’s first several months. This is just foolish.

Andrew Sullivan has some pretty amazing coverage of the last 24 hours.

I just watched the video on YouTube of the female protester who was shot in the heart. Crushing. Terrifying. Brought tears to my eyes. But thank goodness it was captured and posted.

We may never know with 100 percent certainty whether the election was fixed, though it sure seems that way. But one thing we sure as hell know now, the Iranian government’s reaction to those protesting the results has shown it to be wholly and morally illegitimate.

Government has been murdering its own citizens for as long as we’ve had government, particularly when the people begin to pose a threat to those in power. The difference is that now, the entire world is watching. Iran’s brutality is on display for everyone to see, archived for history, in a way that we didn’t have even in Tiananmen, and haven’t had for most of human history. That, at least, is progress.

Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup last night. We had a nice turnout of about a dozen people. I also learned this morning what a high-altitude hangover feels like (hint: it’s less pleasant than a normal-altitude hangover).

I just taped a segment on the Nanny State for a Denver PBS program hosted by the Independence Institute. I’m giving a speech this afternoon, then will enjoy cigars and booze tonight, and shooting tomorrow, as part of the Institute’s annual “Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms Party.”

Two bear cubs, Denali National Park, Alaska.

My flight has been delayed. I should get into Denver at around 6pm, so by the time I get into the city, check in, and unpack, I may not be able to get to the meet up until about 7:30.

Feel free to get started without me, though!