Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Is it just me or did I wander into spring today? I guess that’s o.k. since we skipped spring this year. So spill your secrets on this open thread.
Should conservative think tanks be called echo tanks instead? Another ideological purge at a conservative institution:
The libertarian Cato Institute is parting with two of its most prominent scholars. Brink Lindsey, the institute’s vice president of research and the author of the successful book The Age of Abundance, is departing to take a position at the Kauffman Foundation. Will Wilkinson, a Cato scholar, collaborator with Lindsey, and editor of the online Cato Unbound, is leaving on September 15; he just began blogging politics for the Economist.
I asked for comment on this and was told that the institute does not typically comment on personnel matters. But you have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term “Liberaltarians” to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas. (Disclosure: I attended some of these dinners.) In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right’s fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic—just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle, a book by AEI President Arthur Brooks which argues that economic theory is at the center of a new American culture war.
So could the GOP purge have anything to do with this?
Former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) will come to Pennsylvania tomorrow, Aug. 24, to formally endorse Admiral Joe Sestak’s candidacy. The two-term Nebraska Senator will speak about Joe’s independence and focus on doing what’s right for Pennsylvania’s working families.
Hmmmm…I wonder how much this will help Sestak. What will probably help Sestak is Pat Toomey’s past as an advocate for killing Social Security and Medicare.