Your customized news for Mon, Feb 20, 2012

HOLLAND, Mich. — This stretch of the Rust Belt might seem like an easy place to find factory workers.

Unemployment hovers above 9 percent. Foreign competition has thrown many out of work. It is a platitude that this industrial hub, like the country itself, needs more manufacturing work.

Google and Yahoo are among companies that are expanding the use of a strategy to fight patent suits that shuns the courtroom in favor of government reviews.

The battlefield opened last year when the two Internet giants, hit with a lawsuit demanding royalties by Paul G. Allen's Interval Licensing, got the case put on hold after asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to scrutinize the patents' validity. Google took the same approach against Oracle, and TiVo is challenging a Microsoft case in a similar fashion.

I thought I was going to write a column about the economics of roasting coffee, but that changed as Chris Paladino recounted his secrets to raising millions of dollars for the American Red Cross.

We'll get to Paladino's Crofton-based Chesapeake Bay Roasting Co. in a minute, but first listen to how this one-time theater major at Rutgers became a money-raising machine.

The Economist is not a fan of Dodd-Frank. The magazine's latest complaints are familiar ones: the law is too bloated, impossibly complex, and burdensome to both banks and the economy at large. But the Economist also admits that it's not just federal officials who are responsible for making the law so cumbersome: the financial firms being regulated have pushed for exemptions and reforms that have, in the process, also made Dodd-Frank more complex.

Apparently, Texas has death panels:

In recent years, the Texas Advance Directives Act has defined one very concrete approach to addressing these dilemmas. When families demand treatments that have an exceedingly low likelihood of success or that sustain life of such low quality that one might reasonably say it is of no benefit to the patient, Texas law allows physicians to refuse to provide such treatments. Under the Texas legislation, demands by families for treatments that appear to meet these criteria are adjudicated by a hospital-based committee, and if the committee agrees with the clinicians, and if other providers cannot be located who are willing to provide such care, then treatment may be withdrawn without the permission of the patient's surrogate.

About 11 years ago, James K. "Jamie" Galbraith recalls, hundreds of his fellow economists laughed at him. To his face. In the White House.

It was April 2000, and Galbraith had been invited by President Bill Clinton to speak on a panel about the budget surplus. Galbraith was a logical choice. A public policy professor at the University of Texas and former head economist for the Joint Economic Committee, he wrote frequently for the press and testified before Congress.