Liberal Talk Radio

I know that many of our loyal readers have been apprehensive, because they feel like a massive, secret, warrantless government effort at telecommunications surveillance doesn’t go far enough to keep us safe. What’s needed, these patriots say, is a massive, secret effort to monitor financial transactions, including transactions that Americans make overseas. Well, not to [...]

As I mentioned on this week’s show, we’re definitely building permanent (sorry, “enduring”) bases in Iraq right now. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.
The Professor wisely noted that this is because the Iraq war has ceased to be about Iraq and is now about creating a forward operating position for the coming showdown with [...]

(But not about that craptastic game this morning — fire Bruce Arena!)
Happy, that is, about Seattle finally realizing that property taxes go up when you make good investments, and that you can use the resulting “tax increment” to finance those investments.
“Tax increment financing” (TIF) has been around for 20+ years, but for some reason it’s [...]

Well, I can tell the Prof’s gonna be happy about this:
owntown landowners could see their property values jump by a collective $400 million to $600 million if the Alaskan Way Viaduct is replaced with a tunnel that opens up the waterfront, according to a new study commissioned by the city of Seattle.
Mayor Greg Nickels is [...]

Listening to this Mother Jones Radio episode on my walk home today, it occurred to me that there’s another consequence of the wired world that may give smaller, local businesses an edge.
They were interviewing Michael Pollan (whose blog is great, and, unfortunately, behind the TimesSelect firewall), food author, and Joel Salatin, a farmer [...]

I’m not really all that interested in tax credits for hybrids, mostly because, at the end of the day, they just incentivize driving. Car-centric urban development is the real boogey man here. The suburbs make you and your fat ass die in a car crash, and all the hybrid tax credits in the [...]

I’m still on the fence about nuclear energy. We know that coal-fired plants warm the earth and release toxins that prematurely kill hundreds of thousands of people every year, whereas, in terms of human health, nuclear energy has the potential to be completely safe, environment wise, until of course a reactor melts down. [...]

While the governors of New Mexico and Arizona fret over sealing off the Mexican border, up North the governors are trying to keep the border nice and loose:
Washington state and British Columbia urged their national governments Tuesday to delay — and perhaps scrap — a requirement for passports at border crossings.
Gov. Chris Gregoire of Washington [...]

Can’t resist a dig on the fair Emerald City.
Apparently, the fractiousness and preference for nuance reductio-ed ad absurdem so endemic in Seattle’s political and arts communities exist in the gay community as well. Instead of one Pride parade, this year, dueling organizers plan two.
What is it about this city?

Anhueser-Busch has a PR disaster on its hands.
AB paid $40 million for rights to be the exclusive beer sponsor of this year’s World Cup. Apparently, those rights extend to the kinds of powers normally reserved for mad Roman despots:
As many as 1,000 Dutch World Cup fans had to turn in their pants [...]