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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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
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”
When President Obama made his pitch for the health care overhaul, he framed it this way: “Insurance reform; making sure that you can have choices in the marketplace for health insurance, and making it affordable for people; and reducing costs.” It was a pitch aimed at consumers: More access, more choices, lower prices. But over at InsureBlog, certified underwriter Bob Vineyard scans the health insurance market in Georgia and finds that, in the post-PPACA insurance market, there have definitely been changes—but not the ones Obama promised. From the highlight (lowlight?) reel: All but two health insurance companies have withdrawn from offering maternity benefits
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ObamaCare: It’s Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Worse
Human Events , still Ronald Reagan’s favorite publication, has interviewed Reason’s Nick Gillespie as part of Lisa De Pasquale’s ongoing feature, De Pasquale’s Dozen (for an archive, go here ). Snippets: 1.

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You’ve Seen Ocean’s Eleven. Now Experience Gillespie’s Dozen.
Here’s Jill Lawrence at Politics Daily : After talking to five economists, I can give you the bottom line: Spending the money differently probably wouldn’t have changed our circumstances much. But the economists took diverse paths to that conclusion, and they have varying opinions about where to go from here…

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It’s Not the Size of the Stimulus.
Ring in Labor Day with this news: The U.S. shed another 54,000 jobs in August, slightly advancing the 9.6 percent unemployment rate

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The Summer of Recovery Is Over; The Fall of the Economy Is Here
How to make a libertarian’s head explode : a bank bailout… in Afghanistan .
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Reason Morning Links: Scanners Edition