Dan's Picks of the Day

I like to think I get my news from a particularly wide-ranging number of sources, from Middle Eastern newspapers, to American blogs, to the UK bloggertariansphere, to E-zines, to good old, often wildly misleading British broadsheets, and so on and so forth.

I thought I'd try something new today, and pick 5 articles that have been of interest to me, on varying issues, from varying sources, from varying parts of the world. Maybe it'll become a daily, or at least fairly frequent thing - we shall see.

1. The Daily Star (Lebanon) - Qabbani: No Alternative to a Market Economy Some welcome words of economic and political sense from the Lebanese Minister of State Khaleed Qabbani on the virtues of democracy and the market economy.
2. Mises Economic Blog (US) - Or you can just make up stuff, no matter how ridiculous Jeffrey Tucker rightfully lays into an idiot writer for the Huffington Post who, with breathtaking inanity, somehow conflates the economic policies of modern American conservatives as being the same as those proscribed by Von Mises and Hayek. Utter ignorant barminess.
3. Stumbling and Mumbling (UK) - A Review of "The Rotten State of Britain" I often disagree with him but he is always very readable and analytically excellent - Chris Dillow reviews Dr Eamonn Butler's book on the state of our nation and finds it wanting.
4. Russia Today - Georgian Opposition Party Members detained Nine, including the head of a regional office, have been detained on the grounds of possessing weapons illegally. Opposition leader - and former speaker for the Georgian Parliament - said it was an attempt by Saakashvili to "discredit" her party, and I'm inclined to agree with her, because it's the sort of thing he'd do, and also because he authorities have thus far provided no evidence. That's life in good old democratic Georgia. I wonder - are the charges merely trumped up, or totally fabricated?
5. Bishop Hill (UK) - The government's bill of rights and responsibilities Irascible libertarian blogger passes justifiably worried comment on the insidious nature of Jack Straw's proposed "Bill of Rights", and proposes one of his own infinitely simpler and infinitely more adequate for protecting our liberties.