So rifling through the MP3s on my laptop, I discovered that the “You and Me” song from the Romeo & Juliet soundtrack is one of those songs I can no longer listen to without triggering an emotional malestrom — a distinction it shares, rather absurdly, with “Barbie Girl.” (No, not because of any impossibly proportioned […]

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Kentuckian Donald Stites is trying to stop Sanitation District #1 from seizing his land via eminent domain for a sewage treatment plant. The catch: he’s got to post a $3m bond — what the District claims a delay will cost them — in order to get an appeals court hearing. If he loses the case, […]

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Paul Krugman’s NYT Column “The Bully’s Pulpit” and a post by Josh Marshall at TPM both lambaste a recent memo [Word] put out by the National Republican Congressional Committee that urged reporters not to use the term “privatization” to refer to Social Security reform plans involving personal investment accounts. Now, Krugman and Marshall are clearly […]

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John Powers has a column in the L.A. Weekly comparing America’s two most intensely partisan middlebrow political mags: The Nation and The Weekly Standard. He points out that the former — a classical liberal mag in a better era, if you can believe it — is painfully dreary, while the latter is punchy and fun. […]

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So a couple of things bothered me about a recent Zogby Poll [RealVideo] on Social Security that Cato commissioned. The first is that we see two pretty clear results: people under 55 are overwhelmingly in support of partial privatiz… whoops, sorry, there might be Republicans with weak hearts reading… “personal accounts.” But those over 55 […]

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Some months ago, I began (fitfully) working on a book — a guide to the deployment of libertarian arguments — primarily in the context of formal debate rounds, but also, at least partly, in friendly argumentation. Having been a bit sidetracked by the whole moving-to-D.C. business, I put it on the back burner temporarily, but […]

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Yeah, I know I’m arriving pretty late to this little ball, but I thought I should do an LFB column on the topic… With the Taliban in tatters and UBL reduced to bouncing on stalagmites for kicks, it’s becoming increasingly clear to GOP strategists that actual ground fighting in our perpetual war for perpetual peace […]

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Just when I’m starting to appreciate the charms of our nation’s fair capital, I go and do something silly like return to Manhattan. It’s only upon arriving after a while away that I realized — surprised, and then surprised to be surprised — how much five years there had made even NYC feel like home. […]

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The Cato Blog Mafia (viz., Brink Lindsey, Radley Balko, and Gene Healy) proudly present… Blogorama II: The Legend Continues. You, your blogger friends, your blog-reading friends, and any sexy people you can drag along are invited to appear on Thursday, September 19 at 7pm. The blog bash will, once again, take place at the Rendezvous […]

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Since I’ve already wasted some of your precious neurons on my comic book preferences, here are some other things I’ve been into lately. Text Systems of Survivial (Jane Jacobs) : Polished this one off last week; the always intriguing Jacobs purports to identify two moral “syndromes,” corresponding to the arenas of commercial and “guardian” life […]

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