We learn from Samuel Brittan’s column in the Financial Times today that when Winston Churchill was the U.K.’s chancellor of the exchequer in 1925, he wrote in a letter to a British Treasury official that he’d like to see “finance less proud and industry more secure.”

Last night’s announcement by Frank McCourt that he has agreed to sell the L.A. Dodgers is being greeted in Los Angeles with the kind of rapture that would follow the abolition of smog or the resurrection of Marilyn Monroe. From the mayor to his political opponents on the Board of Supervisors to virtually every damned blogger in town, McCourt’s withdrawal has been greeted as the necessary prelude to restoring one of L.A.’s signature institutions—a key component of the L.A. identity—to its former glory.

David Brooks’ column today is one of his better ones—noting that the U.S. is plagued by two kinds of inequality, that which divides the top one percent from everyone else, which is prevalent in our major cities, and that in smaller cities and rural areas, where college grads are doing OK but where the bottom has fallen out for those Americans who don’t complete college or, worse, high school. The gap between the lives of college grads and others has widened not just in terms of income but health, diet, marriage stability, and the percentage of children born and raised out of wedlock.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs hit the bookstores on Monday (or, worse, the websites that have replaced bookstores as the place where people go to buy books), and the more piquant details have already started popping up in the press. Among those details—actually, it’s a good deal more than details—is Jobs’s Manichean view of humankind (at least, those elements of humankind with whom he came into contact). As Michael Rosenwald summarizes it in Monday’s Washington Post:

There are two ways to look at the new four-year contract between the United Auto Workers and General Motors that was unveiled yesterday. The first is to note that by the standards of today's economy, the auto workers got about as good a deal as anyone could imagine. The second is to note that the standards of today's economy don't allow for the kind of vibrant, sizable middle class for which America was once famed -- and which the UAW's contracts in particular did so much to build.

Fully 57 of Mitt Romney's 59 policy proposals to fix the American economy are as indistinguishable as Heinz's 57 varieties of ketchup (and a lot less fun than Hitchcock's 39 Steps). They are absolute standard-issue Republican dogma -- reduce corporate taxes, pass the free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama (have you ever seen a prediction of how many jobs our free-trade agreement with Panama would create, even excluding the number of jobs it would destroy? Does it ascend beyond single digits?), repeal Obamacare, kneecap unions -- utterly usual, utterly unsurprising.

But two are interesting.

David Callahan notes today that with its conversion to an adjunct of the Tea Party, the Republicans -- historic home of the nation's financial elites -- have sent those elites streaming (and screaming) toward the Democrats. David is surely right, and, as he notes, this is the latest step in the decades-long story of Wall Street's partisan realignment -- and the corollary story, which is the Democrats' growing subservience to finance.