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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

“[T]he most striking thing when you start to look into the bullet train is how little planning or thought has gone into the thing,” a great man once said .

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SF Chron: Put a Bullet In This Train!

* Late reviews of Carly Fiorina/Barbara Boxer debate: Sac Bee ’s Dan Walters says Boxer won . OC Register ’s Brian Joseph calls the whole debate a ” dud ” and a “letdown,” while 58 percent of Register readers give the win to Carly in a web poll.

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California Roundup: Who Won? Who Pays? Who’s Stoned? And More

From today’s USA Today : A new report on the condition of the USA’s state highways finds that they are in the best shape they have been in nearly 20 years. The annual study by the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based, libertarian, non-profit think tank, credits road improvement progress man by states and decreased wear and tear as commuters and commercial truckers drove less during the recession. “Lo and behold, we’ve actually been making slow but steady progress on most performance measures,” says report author David Hartgen, professor emeritus of transportation studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

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Reason Foundation Study Produces Surprising Good News: State Highways Are Better Than They’ve Been in a While!

In case you’ve forgotten just how shitty and prison-like high school can be (and why school choice would, like, totally rule!), here’s a dispatch from the frontlines of adolescence: This week, Baltic High School, just north of [Sioux Falls, S.D.], became one of the latest across the USA to ban the rubber bracelet, which has a message some say is in poor taste: “I love boobies.”The bracelets have caused controversy in schools in states including California, Colorado, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin. Some districts allow students to wear them inside-out, and others ban them. “When we had an assembly the first day of school, I basically told the students we are not insensitive to the cause,” Baltic High Principal Jim Aisenbrey says

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We Don’t Need No Breast Cancer Awareness Bracelets in The Classroom…

A roomful of supporters of a California Republican candidate got their money’s worth from Carly Fiorina tonight as the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican Senate nominee faced off for the first (and apparently only) time against Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.

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Repubs Like Outcome of Boxer-Fiorina Debate

* Bankrupt city to make sure every golf cart driver is a government employee: The City of Los Angeles, after spending seven years negotiating the golf cart concession for its seven!!! (7!!!) public courses, drops the private company and decides to get into the golf cart business itself.

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California Roundup: Plastic Bags and Government Golf Cart Drivers Are Up; Illegal Immigration, Bad Surfers Are Down

* Another day, another multi-billion-dollar explosion in government employee pension costs. The University of California system is on the hook for $20 billion thanks to a 20-year-old decision to stop paying into the retirement system (in the belief that it was overfunded). Aside from demonstrating the limits of college-level math skills, this screwup adds more complexity to California’s public sector pension crisis, as UC system employees are outside the purview of the governor and thus are not part of the big pension rollback Gov.

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California Roundup: Professors Can’t Do Math

Did you hear about the Oregon health inspector who shut down a seven-year-old girl’s lemonade stand? How about the California mayor who put the kibosh on a three-year-old’s vegetable stand?

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Reason.tv: Nanny of the Month for August 2010 – Police Chief Busts Guy Who Keeps Drunks Off the Street