Liberal Talk Radio

As the Sonics fight for more of tax money, Josh Feit reminds us why the deal’s such a stinker. We’re going to pay for $200M in remodels, double the square footage, and somehow only gain 425 seats. Jeebus, that sounds like a waste of taxpayer money. There will be some expanded luxury boxes, of course. [...]

The Dubai Port fiasco almost makes you want to have sympathy for the president, the way that congressional Republicans are abandoning him en masse to score cheap xenophobia points. Almost. You could imagine the scene in the Oval Office as if it were unruly House Democrats on The West Wing, with Josh and Toby running [...]

I think David Brooks makes a good point today (Time$ $elect!) about the knee-jerk response to the Islamization of our nation’s infrastructure: This Dubai port deal has unleashed a kind of collective mania we haven’t seen in decades. First seized by the radio hatemonger Michael Savage, it’s been embraced by reactionaries of left and right, [...]

Let me first say that the idea that a state-run company from the United Arab Emirates may run our country’s busiest ports makes for an excellent 24 plot — terrorists infiltrate a foreign-owned company to whom the day-to-day operations of major ports have been outsourced . . . it’s ready made! In fact, if they’re [...]

The Prof and I basically agreed on this week’s show that the Dubai Ports World situation was kind of a red herring. There are far more pressing issues with respect to port security than the fact that a giant UAE-based conglomerate bought out a giant, London-based conglomerate. Well, it looks like the Prof and I [...]

During the 2004 Election campaign, I mentioned on the show a two-birds solution that seemed logical at the time: Jobs were being outsourced overseas, and unemployment in Iraq was fueling terrorism. So why not, I argued, build call centers in Iraq? Let’s make Citibank and Visa put some skin in the game by hiring Iraqis [...]

I am studiously original — and I take my originality very seriously. Which is why it makes me so so so so so mad when my neighbors copy my inimitable style and impeccable taste: “Farmhouse with an edge” was the request we gave to our architect, George Sweeney, who is from Palos Verdes Estates, and [...]

Happy President’s Day! This week, it’s the ABC Episode: Anything But Cheney. We’ll talk about port security, Francis Fukuyama’s post-neo-conservatism essay, Seattle’s debate over the future of the Sonics and Key Arena, and Washington’s newest top-10 cash crop. Episode233.m4a

Or, why the Heritage Foundation is full of hacks. Andrew Sullivan approvingly cites a paragraph from this Heritage Foundation Report: More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning [...]

Triangulation is the new SOP. You can’t get anything done in D.C. without playing against type. That’s why all movie-stars-turned-politicians are Republicans. That’s why Clinton argued for fiscal responsibility and welfare reform. That’s why George Will noted, on Sunday’s This Week, the 20 or so black Republicans running for Congress in ’06. This was just [...]