Liberal Talk Radio

“I just think reasonable people are more inclined right now to start thinking about ways our country’s future isn’t dependent on . . . oil from a region where there are a lot of very bad actors.”
- Conservative activist Gary Bauer. And no, he’s not talking about Sean Penn’s latest trip to Baghdad.
Seriously, though, [...]

…when first we try to enshrine corporate pork into the tax code:
Washington state’s hopes of wooing an aircraft assembly plant that could be built by a major Boeing Co. rival may get a boost from a package of tax breaks designed for Boeing itself.
France-based European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., the majority owner of Boeing [...]

Via TPM, I see that Washington’s own Rep. Reichert got an earful on Social Security at a town meeting the other night.
I guess now that he actually got elected, he can’t just walk out of the room like he did during the campaign. His constituents expect him to at least show up, [...]

“I don’t think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created.”
- Rich Cizik, VP of the National Association of Evangelicals, as quoted by Bull Moose, wading into the global warming debate.

Noam Scheiber writes this in today’s NYT:
By embracing a robust democratization agenda, the Democratic nominee in 2008 will be able to appeal to his base while also claiming the new, pro-democratization center. The Republican nominee, who has to win the nomination of a party at best indifferent to democratization, will enjoy no such luxury. Mr. [...]

Will Saletan on Tom DeLay’s deathbed conversion:
This is what happens when you approach a tragedy as a politician rather than as a family member. You see quality of life as a slippery-slope abstraction, not as a reality affecting someone you love. You find it easy to impose a standard of documentation that would have forced [...]

Gov. Gregoire’s first budget is full of hikes in sin taxes. I hate sin taxes. What a stupid, bass-ackwards way to fund government.
They should call ‘em “chicken-shit state legislator taxes.” See:
Senate leaders told reporters the sin-and-death taxes will be relatively uncontroversial…

The NYT reports on CNN prez Jon Klein’s latest attempts to go toe-to-toe with Fox. But the devil is in the details:
That gap in average viewing time has had a profound impact on CNN’s ratings: thus far this season, its average audience between 7 and 11 p.m. (775,000) is far less than Fox’s during [...]

Yesterday I referenced a snarky headline in Harper’s on Social Security. Well, today I got to read the article itself, by economist Michael Hudson. It’s a deceptively simple argument, but one worth sharing. Since Harper’s doesn’t make their content available online, I’ll try to summarize.
He starts with a couple of bare facts [...]

Someone on the Sounder commuter train from Tacoma is giving away free WiFi.
Tight. Sit in the front car and log on to his network, powered by a portable battery-powered hotspot and, presumably, a cellular data link.
WiFi on moving vehicles has been a holy grail for a while now. Boeing [...]