Liberal Talk Radio

After a long hiatus, the Prof and I returned to Drinking Liberally last night where Rep. Jay Inslee was a guest speaker. Good to have a beer with Jay, a solid congressman from Western WA. Jay said he was headed down to Olympia today to file this initiative, requiring WA to get 15 percent of [...]

Reports that Google will provide a Chinese-safe search engine are certainly ominous. Google officials anticipated criticism and explained themselves, in the process establishing the Google Conceit: “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,” [...]

Following up on this idea, the Drudge headline today is interesting: “COMMUNIST GOOGLE: SEARCH GIANT AGREES TO CENSOR RESULTS IN CHINA.” With a big picture of Chinese soldiers that has nothing to do with anything. What’s going on here? Well, Google’s been under fire recently for bucking the Bush Administration on access to its records. [...]

For those into Democracy Porn*, the Palestinian elections underway are an important bellwether. This, however, seems like a rather bad omen: Palestinian gunmen linked to the ruling Fatah movement killed one of their party leaders Tuesday, increasing tensions on the eve of parliamentary balloting and raising doubts about a new pledge by armed groups in [...]

Lefty McRadical heard a knock on the door last week. Looking through the peephole, she was shocked to see her pal Gov. Bill Richardson (D – NM) standing on her stoop along with a dear old friend, Minimum Wage. In truth, Ms. McRadical was more than a little excited to see her old friend Minimum. [...]

On Friday we asked who benefited from — and most likely was behind — the UBL truce tape. Today we have an answer: A Brooklyn-born writer said yesterday he had “no problem” being quoted by Osama bin Laden in his latest diatribe and added he shares the arch-terrorist’s opposition to American foreign policy. “I wasn’t [...]

Good story about Minneapolis’ first female fire chief. I went to grad school with Chief Bonnie’s partner. It was a long time ago and I’d be shocked if either of them remember me … still, it’s neat to hear of people you know doing well, and blazing the still-rough trail to the progressive future. Technorati [...]

This week: The Seahawks are headed to the superbowl. What happens when old-democrat Pittsburgh collides with new democrat Seattle? Plus: our new website hits it big, The battle for lobbying reform escalates, and the Department of Justice gives google the strong arm. Episode229.m4a

While I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easy to get carried away applying sports metaphors to real life, I’m intrigued by this year’s Super Bowl matchup, pitting “Old Blue” Dems Pittsburgh vs. “New Blue” Dems Seattle. In a year that will prove to be a major test of the Democrat’s ability to thrive [...]

Interesting article in the CS Monitor. Lost in all the talk about Republican scandals is the sad-but-true fact that the current Republican government has out-Democrated the Dems at their own traditional game of redistributive politics. What’s even sadder is that this massive spending has done so little to truly help the less fortunate among us. [...]