Recent posts on Iraq and Heidegger have attracted attention from some new commentators, some of whom have interesting blogs of their own. I’ve added two to the blogroll.CalPundit (Kevin Drum) writes informed and witty comment from a generally left perspective. He has a nice piece on the estate tax, a progressive measure that Australia foolishly repealed in the 1970s. Armed Liberal, as the name implies, is a liberal (in the US sense) opponent of gun control, and has recently had some interesting posts on “citizens vs consumers”.

An amusing coincidence is that Kevin wrote to me expressing surprise at my observation that my name is routinely misspelt. Meanwhile Armed Liberal mentioned me as “Oz economist John Quiggen”. But since I found out that Google checks for misspellings, I’m not too fussed about this anymore. The saying used to be “It doesn’t matter what they say about you, as long as they spell your name right”. Now it’s “It doesn’t matter what they say about you, or how they spell your name, as long as they link to your blog”.

UpdateNathan Lott also goes for “Quiggen”. I’ve linked to a long and interesting piece on terrorism, which I’ll think more about and perhaps respond to.