Link blag

Arnold Kling: Some Libertarian Basics...

[..] your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people's money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.

[..] being libertarian does not mean you have to have a cold heart. You can be a bleeding heart, but you show it by what you do, not what you advocate forcing other people to do.

NRO: Useful Idiots Caucus...

The awestruck members of the Congressional Black Caucus who lavished praise and gratitude upon Fidel Castro after meeting with the former dictator are either profoundly ignorant or indifferent to evil — perhaps both.

Coates: More on Cuba...

[..] it's weak to act like Castro is consistent with best of the progressive tradition. It's weak to call out Dick Cheney here, and cheer on Castro over there. It's weak to shout apartheid at Israel, and then turn around and applaud Castro. It's weak to say, "Yeah, I hear you but..." Either repressively ruling a country for half a century and then conspiring to pass power to your brother, is wrong or it isn't. We have to choose. Or we have to be jesters.

Ezra Klein: The consolations of polarization...

[..] there used to be a lot of people who believed similar things and came from similar perspectives but were in different parties. A New York Republican was probably closer to a New York Democrat than to a Mississippi Republican. [...] This halcyon era of bipartisanship was a short blip that was primarily the product of a grotesque alliance between the anti-civil rights Dixiecrats and the conservative Republicans who would eventually absorb them. There's very little to fondly recall about that.

A visual guide to deflation

CNN: White House hit by swarm of bees

Daily Mail: The Obamas order delivery... from St. Louis?

VC: Quebec Appellate Court reverses father's grounding of 12-year-old

Baptist Press: Gay marriage in Iowa more damaging than 500-year flood

Obama reaches out to the moderate pirate community