Liberal Talk Radio

Happy to be back in Seattle, after a wonderful visit to the East Coast. So I’ve finally woken up and smelled the syndication. That is, I got an RSS reader and I’ve started reading blogs and news via RSS instead of via the web. As a Mac user, I’m using NetNewsWire Lite, which seems to [...]

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday today and not spending TOO much time on the internet (though spending Christmas on the internets is an interestingly weird experience). Thanks to all of you who read the site and listen to the show. Peace and Blessings be with you all.

Sen. Arlen Specter had a great quote on NPR yesterday on this issue of domestic spying and FISA courts. The president has argued that congress gave him this authority in 2002 when they authorized “all necessary force” in prosecuting the war on terror. But then later the White House says that when they briefed the [...]

Thanks to the Contrarian for pumping out so many kilobytes on the transit strike. One thing that occurred to me the other day is what role, if any, labor has in working towards changing the stalemate over pensions and health care and other benefits. It’s clear that the current system is deeply flawed. If you [...]

Something obvious that occurred to me long after yesterday’s post about liberal-left-progressive cocooning regarding the New York City transit strike is how much worse it was to try to spin it as some sort of workers’ revolt (tangential parenthetical to liberal-left-progressives who spin: Don’t do it; it’s what makes Contrarians). Which is to say, while, [...]

Thank God it appears that transit workers are going to return to work while its union and the MTA continue to negotiate. That said, I’m finding it hard to believe how cocooned some people are about this strike: I’ve been pretty surprised and somewhat disappointed by the hostility among some here to the striking transit [...]

The problem with the kind of arguments put forward in the link Bruno talked about is that they tend to gloss over specifics in favor of extrapolating some general principle. In this case, blindly supporting the striking New York City transit workers, who right now are illustrating the worst example of “the power of unions”: [...]

In NYC for the holidays, and I can’t bring myself to find much sympathy for the transit workers. The city’s pretty bolloxed up right now, and it couldn’t be a worse time. The weather’s cold, and people are trying to trickle down and spend money in these last few days before the holidays. These guys [...]

Google has put together a fantastic compilation of search terms for ’05. Check it out. As far as Google News searches, Janet Jackson is still on top, if you know what I mean. It’s still funny how many people use Google search for things that they could’ve found simply by typing the word followed by [...]

Hope the traffic isn’t too bad for Bruno as he flies into the New York area, because City transit employees have walked out, staging the first system-wide strike since 1980: City subway and bus workers stormed off the job early today, paralyzing the nation’s busiest transit system and leaving millions of commuters in an abyss [...]