Miscellany

1)L'affaire Frum. Painful moments of irony. But it's still sad if this is true.

2)Religions exemptions in the health care bill?

3)Iqbal, Twombly, and strange bedfellows on civil rights litigation.

4)I have some interest in the subject of this debate between Randal O'Toole of Cato and Matt Yglesias. I hate sprawl, like walkable urban neighborhoods, and also am generally not a friend of regulation. So it would be convenient if bad government policies produced the kind of sprawling suburbs I love to hate. O'Toole suggests things are not so simple. I'm not blown away by his Maricopa County code example -- if I'm understanding him correctly, ONLY developers with at least 160 acres of land can build things as densely as they want, which of course restricts lots of smaller scale developments. That said, I don't actually know anything about this subject, not having studied municipal laws across the country as closely as O'Toole has, so it's possible I'm entirely mistaken. In any case, I certainly don't want to use regulation to make other people live in neighborhoods of the kind that I like.

5)Quotable: "He cited the case of a painter whose stock in trade had been portraits of Lenin. The man was now earning his living churning out religious subjects. But, my friend added, so ingrained were his earlier habits that every time he painted the face of Jesus, he wound up with a likeness of Lenin."

6)My libertarian purity test score is 77. What's yours?