The Daily Digest

Belize, 2005

I'm always skeptical when someone says that Saudi Arabia is modernizing, just slowly. (I guess it depends on whether your definition of "slowly" means at the pace of a snail or turtle.) And yet, an op-ed in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, which argues that King Abdullah is "sidelining the traditional clergy in favor of the merchant classes and more progressive religious voices," merits consideration.

Any libertarian can tell you why farm subsidies are egregious, but few do it so plainly, so concisely and so cogently as John Stossel.

Karl Rove once said that the press is "less liberal than it is oppositional." Exactly.

Reason's Jacob Sullum concretizes the McCain-DeMint consensus about Congress's recent ethics reform: "If a pickpocket becomes a mugger, he becomes more open and honest, but that doesn't make him more admirable."