Liberal Talk Radio

Philadelphia, a city in which I once resided and which has been sitting in New York (and DC)’s shadow for far too long, got two boosts this week, both from the big neighbor to the North. First came this New York Times article on how Philly is fast becoming the “sixth borough” of New York. [...]

Interesting op-ed in the Post today about yet another side of the mounting health care crisis. The authors argue that the Feds need to take steps to insure health care benefits for retirees in the same way that pension benefits are insured. While the point is well-taken that some retirees are SOL unless their benefits [...]

Props to Bruno for his most excellent post rightly calling the WSJ to task for trotting out the usual right-wing reactionary bogeymen in their recent editorial about health care in Canada. Not much to add, except to remind the good readers that universal health care benefits the economy. Bruno’s been over most of this before. [...]

Is it really such a huge problem that developers and Sound Transit both are eyeing the same property for a U-District light rail stop? We already know the station is going to be eighty feet below ground. Why not build mixed-use retail/residention on top of the station, as they do in every other city with [...]

Reader JB points me to this Wall Street Journal op-ed on Canada’s health-care woes. As per usual, it is a WSJ classic of half-truths and misdirection: But Canada’s public care doesn’t save money. As the satirist P.J. O’Rourke once noted, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs [...]

The hangover episode: weddings in America, the price of poverty, and the merits of the Joint Strike Fighter. Click and listen. We’ll just be over here popping a few Advil… Click here to download. Subscribe to the podcast (requires iTunes 4.9).

Read this article if you want to get an idea for how frustrating and awful it is to work in Congress. Even if you don’t care about any of that crap, you should read it anyway, because it contains classic and rarely-heard (in political writing) phrases like this: Sensenbrenner is your basic Fat Evil Prick, [...]

Another interesting tidbit from Janes. The Chinese Military is rebuilding a Russian aircraft carrier, probably for its own uses. Even at the incredible speed the Chinese seem to be progressing, given, say, another year of repairs, two years of training and lessons learned on the ship, plus three to five years to build a new [...]

Exite@Home, that former broadband provider, is auctioning off 119 domain names as part of its bankrupcy process: MonsterCommerce, for example, has already snapped up a former Excite@Home domain name, plunking down $285,000 for Shoppingcart.com, according to Moniker.com, which is handling the domain name sales for At Home Liquidating Trust. “There are several valuable domain names [...]

Headline in today’s Seattle Times: “Issaquah wants to limit where sex offenders live“. Issaquah is one of Seattle’s sprawliest suburbs, which crawls almost from the Seattle city limits to the Cascade foothills some 30 miles out on I-90. I find it hilarious and sad that sex-offender placement the only kind of urban planning the suburbs [...]