The closer Washington gets to the labor day break, the more stories like this become news: Playboy ’s Hugh Hefner has a pet congresswoman, and now a tweet about a private fundraising lunch at the Playboy Mansion with California Rep.

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Hugh Hefner, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the NRCC, the Playboy Mansion, and Twitter
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Is that diploma you went into debt for worth the sheepskin it’s printed on? Reason Senior Editor Tim Cavanaugh will talk about the higher education bubble on Neil Cavuto’s Fox Business News show this afternoon. Time: Approx.

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Tim Cavanaugh Talks Higher Education Bubble With Cavuto on Fox Biz
Reporting from Massachusetts, Senior Editor Michael C. Moynihan profiles Republican congressional candidate Sam Meas, a refugee from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge and the self-professed “new face of the Republican party.” View this article

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New at Reason: Michael C. Moynihan on Cambodian Refugee and Self-Described Reagan Republican Sam Meas
The loathesome ex-House Speaker, who has been singularly awful on the Ground Zero mosque issue, reaches down into the septic tank for more : “I think the Congress has the ability to declare the area a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site; this is a war,” he said And if that fails, he said, the state government should step in and use its considerable power to stymie the development.

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Gingrich: Use Government Power to Trample Property Rights of Muslims
Last Sunday night , police in Morganton, North Carolina shot and killed 17-year-old Michael Sipes.

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Noise Complaint Leads to Police Shooting, Killing 17-Year-Old
* Meg Whitman proves that a smart person can always get out of jury duty, is dismissed after five-hour ordeal.

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California Roundup: Teachers Union Warns of Technopocalypse Under New Obama Admin. Testing Plan
The word liberty is used a lot but it’s not often that individuals think deeply about what the word means, says Rebecca Hoffberger, the founder of Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM.) Hoffberger’s goal with AVAM was to create “a grassroots salon that would tackle all the great themes that have ever bedeviled and inspired human kind.” The most recent exhibition, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness featured a wide range of self-taught artists including Saddam Hussein’s personal doctor, Ala Bashir, and a schizophrenic hoarder named Dick Lubinsky. The exhibition provides an unforgettable commentary on an American truism.
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Reason.tv: Life, Liberty & Happiness – Q&A with American Visionary Art Museum’s Rebecca Hoffberger
I was struck by British Defense Minister Liam Fox’s description of the new Medal of Honor video game set in Afghanistan. He called it “thoroughly un-British,” a phrase that presumably refers to something more than the game’s country of origin

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Why Is ‘Un-British’ Bad?
Only time will tell if Operation Iraqi Freedom was a blunder, writes Cathy Young. But it is not too early to say that Americans are not the villains in this story. As Young explains, that role belongs to the dictator who drove so many of his subjects to welcome a foreign invasion, and to the extremists who unleashed carnage on their own.

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New at Reason: Cathy Young on the Legacy of the Iraq War
Frequent Reason contributor Brendan O’Neill is not a fan of Tony Blair’s new memoir: Never mind his claim about seeing the queen washing dishes after a barbecue at Balmoral. Forget his description of John Prescott’s affair as a ‘silly sex scandal’. Put to the back of your mind his ‘drink problem’

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Brendan O’Neill on Tony Blair’s “bitchy memoirs”