Liberal Talk Radio

I’m not sure I get this NYT op-ed by Patricia Weitsman on the dangers of coalitions. I think her argument is that the current “coalition” fighting in Iraq is costing us money and not gaining us any of the global legitimacy that the word “coalition” is supposed to buy. And in that sense, she’s right. [...]

Ladies, Homeland might be cramping your style but not all is lost, the Thursday Styles section explains: Enforcement has loosened slightly since restrictions were imposed by the Transportation Security Administration on Aug. 10, after a group of people suspected of plotting midair explosions with simple carry-on liquids were arrested in England. But the guidelines remain, [...]

It turns out that ethanol is big in the Midwest. But there are still some kinks they need to work out: Standing next to his pickup truck at a service station here, Robert Beck squeezed a yellow nozzle and filled up with the corn-based fuel blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline that [...]

Sorry for the dearth of posts the last couple of days. The old Movable Type website finally bit the bullet. (note to would-be bloggers: BerkeleyDB = bad!). So I took the opportunity to switch the whole site to WordPress, mostly because of the awesome podPress plugin that powers the podcasts, but also because I don’t [...]

Seattle’s Museum of Flight and military spending, the human cost of the Israel-Lebanon conflict, and finally, is this the beginning of the end of the housing bubble?

More proof that Bush-o-nomics has left the average American running straightforward into the past. The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic [...]

There’s a great piece (start at the bottom of page 2 and continue) in the Observer this week about the “trend piece” — you know, the kind of New York Times story that takes three examples of a behavior and calls it a trend (e.g., Laptops). It’s great reading if you’ve become jaded about this, [...]

Now that the stem cell issue has been overtaken by science, what is there left to fear from the Bush Regime? God willing, “stem cell” will soon go the way of all the other arcane topics that at one time or other occupied so much mental space: Biologists have developed a technique for establishing colonies [...]

Even in an article titled “Laptop Slides Into Bed in Love Triangle,” this seems rather like a stretch: Most couples experts said the act of taking an electronic device to bed did not by itself threaten a marriage. “It depends on the relationship,” said Marcy Levine, a marriage and family therapist in San Francisco. “If [...]

Listening to a great story on NPR about the growing strength of the Minuteman Project. Hmmm. Gun toting fringe group dedicated to civil order and racial purity? Now where have I heard that before? I don’t mean to be alarmist, but these guys are getting a little scary. BONUS COMMENT: Hippies are the liberal equivalent [...]