Maggie's Farm

Feminists Against Beautiful Women

How To Plan a Fireworks Show

The best Literary Tales Of Real-Life Crimes

Via Insty: The Five Best Inventions of the Founding Fathers

The War on Lemonade Stands! Nanny of the Month (June 2011)

Carpe: How State Income Tax Rates Affect NBA Outcomes

Cory Maye is finally getting out of jail

Sowell: Politics Versus Reality:

It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.

Am Thinker: The Education of a Compassionate Conservative

Barone: Replacing Property as a Source of Wealth Creation

Connecticut’s ‘Anti-Christie’ Malloy Plans Worker Cuts

Joe Biden Warns Teamsters: Vote Dem or ‘You’re on Your Own, Jack’

NYT freaks because CEOs make big bucks. But what about Pinch?

Re our wars: Belmont Club: The return of reality

Obama’s Economists: Each Job ‘Saved or Created’ by the Stimulus Cost $278,000 (So Far)

Obama's labor union problem

Twenty-two states (plus the District of Columbia) currently impose an estate tax or an inheritance tax (Maryland and New Jersey have both).  (h/t Insty)

Re the housing bubble and Fannie Mae:

Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.

Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.

At Driscoll:

At Big Government yesterday, Phillip Dennis asked, “What Has Happened to Liberals In the Past 50 Years?” Here’s one answer: They went from viewing America as a beacon of freedom (or a Shining City upon a Hill, to borrow a phrase popular with both liberal icon JFK and former Roosevelt liberal Ronald Wilson Reagan) worth sharing with a beleaguered world to a Show About Nothing during that time. If only they had Upped Their Game during this period, instead.

Related: “Were the Founders Democrats?” That depends on whether you spell it with a large or small-d.