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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 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

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

How to make a libertarian’s head explode : a bank bailout… in Afghanistan .

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Reason Morning Links: Scanners Edition

“[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!

Via Washington Examiner columnist Mark Hemingway comes news that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who once denounced homosexual Cubans as “faggots” ( maricones ) who served the interests of imperialism, has “taken blame” for his revolution’s “excesses” against gay Cubans, which once included sending sexual counterrevolutionaries to prison camps. After offering a string of lame excuses—he was too busy thwarting American plots to stop sending his citizens to prison for being gay—Castro stopped short of actually apologizing. As Hemingway notes , Castro’s persecution of gays (and black Cubans) hardly stopped in the 1970s, as this Reuters stor y suggests, with gay bars routinely shut down by the state security service and organizers of a 2008 gay pride march  thrown in jail

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A Caudillo’s Own Story

Few essays attracted as much attention from right-wing readers this summer as “America’s Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution” by Angelo Codevilla. Now that very long article has been expanded into a very brief book, called The Ruling Class

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New at Reason: Jesse Walker on The Ruling Class

The American Medical Association and 90 other medical groups have just come out against a proposed tax code change that would allow trial lawyers to deduct certain litigation expenses, a change that might encourage those lawyers to file additional lawsuits. As Fox News reports: The coalition of medical groups sent [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner a letter Wednesday, stating its case, including a recent report by the AMA that found 95 medical liability claims were filed for every 100 physicians and that 65 percent of the claims are dropped or dismissed. Average defense costs range up to more than $100,000 and take physicians away from patient care

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The Trial Lawyer Tax Break?

Later this month an FDA advisory committee is scheduled to consider whether the agency should require a prescription for Robitussin, NyQuil, and other medications containing dextromethorphan (DXM), a cough suppressant that has dramatic psychoactive effects in large doses.

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Tripping Over Robo-Tripping