Liberal Talk Radio

Flexcar users now must pay exorbinant rental car taxes. It’s a funny unintended consequence: taxes on rental cars and hotel lodging are supposed to be gimmes for local governments: you get to tax tourists who can’t vote! But all of a sudden Flexcar has created a whole class of renter-constitutents, and it’s exposing the whole [...]

Mr. Thompson? Mr. Hunter S. Thompson? Your car has arrived: Driver arrested with grenade, meth The driver in the carpool lane didn’t have a passenger, but Federal Way police say he was carrying some odd cargo — some meth and a hand grenade. Around 4 p.m. Tuesday, an officer spotted a pickup headed down an [...]

Next to the MCAs, the next biggest “accomplishment” of the Bush Administration will be having shown by example just how incompetent government can be. This is a feature, not a bug, remember! Apparently the State Department has thrown so much money into training Iraqis, and with so little results, that they had to give up [...]

I’d always wondered how an atrocity like the farm bill continues to exist. Now I know: it’s tied to the food stamps program, thus creating an interdependent block of congressional votes from the Kansas prarie to the South Bronx. Of course, the poor people who use food stamps would probably be a lot healthier if [...]

Mongolia is set to receive $285 million in U.S. aid via the Millenium Challenge account, which may well be the only good idea to come out of 8 years of the Bush Administration. The program gives money to countries who promise to enact pro-democracy reforms. It is difficult, however, to avoid snarkiness after reading this [...]

I love the fact that the son of South Asian immigrants is now governor of what many (myself included) perceive to be one of America’s most racist states. What’s even greater about Bobby Jindal is that I’d probably detest the guy if I ever met him in person — he’s just the sort of hyper-motivated [...]

Unrest in Pakistan, Turkey and Iran. Drought strikes the American South and finally, two newspapers come out against the upcoming Roads and Transit vote. We’ll tell you why they’re wrong. Links Mentioned: Benazir Bhutto returns … Iran gets a new negotiator … the drought in the Southeast, and its implications in the rest of the [...]

1500 beers in the U.S. [and still not a decent Pilsner-style brew among them]

Or, what happens when people who think snarky=intelligent spend too much time in a room alone together, drunk. The Strangler urges a no vote for Rail: Sound Transit/RTID Proposition No. 1 VOTE NO The joint roads and transit ballot measure shackles expansion of Sound Transit’s popular light-rail system to a massive roads- expansion package that [...]

I’m no Beckett scholar, but for some reason I find myself re-reading the second act of Waiting for Godot this am. Personally, I take the play as a denunciation of human inaction arising from the (mistaken) belief that someone (Godot) is going to magically appear and save us, if only we wait faithfully for his [...]