Liberal Talk Radio

Nervous about the phone records yet? Don’t worry, it’s strictly limited to tracking down those terrorists.

Let’s have a holla for a young guy making his way up in state politics.
Sitting here working on some additions to the website, watching some awful basketball, when I got a knock on my door. None other than one Jamie Pedersen, running for Ed Murray’s seat in Olympia.
Have to admit that I don’t know [...]

One of my favorite tech-opinion sites, Ars Technica, has an article up on the details of the new NSA surveillance program, reminding us that it’s really just part of the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that congress keeps trying to nix but somehow manages to live on.
You’ll remember that TIA was in the [...]

Sometimes the Prof and I are hard on America’s unions, but it’s all tough love. When it comes to helping the workers of the world improve their lot, there’s no substitute for collective bargaining. Unions help drive up workers’ wages, which forces innovation, by encouraging employers to invest in new technologies. All [...]

Kevin Drum notes that, of the major US telephone carriers implicated in the USA Today story on NSA phone-record data-mining, only Qwest had enough concern to deny the NSA access to their equipment:
According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest [...]

Last november, when the Seattle Monorail re-vote was on the ballot, you knew it was doomed because almost every city councilperson up for re-election that year was casting themself as a “monorail skeptic” who was always “asking the though questions.” Being anti-monorail was politically sexy, so everyone jumped on board (sad, sad pun intended). [...]

Andrew Sullivan makes a great point:
But in the sweep of history, it is fitting that Bush, for the first time in his entire life, actually face the consequences of his own recklessness. It is also important for conservatives to see up-front what abandoning limited government and embracing fundamentalism leads to: the collapse of a [...]

A new Arbitron poll on viewer’s feelings about their cable content shows that almost 20% of cable viewers think that cable content is “frequently offensive.”
You’ll forgive me for asking the hard question: THEN WHY DO YOU PAY FOR IT?
Of course I think that all media should be uncensored, and in the current media arms race [...]

Billmon has a very funny post on the news that Bush’s favorability rating has dropped below 30 in the latest Times/CBS poll:
By way of comparison, the Times/CBS poll gnomes tell us Dick Cheney has a favorabie rating of 20% (he should shoot a few more lawyers in the face) while 34% say they are favorably [...]