Liberal Talk Radio

I haven’t blogged about this much, but Puget Sound is pretty damn polluted. The cause? Storm runoff, mostly. Oil and grease from the city streets are dumping the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez into the Sound every two years. Intesnse! Fortunately, we have solutions for storm runoff: Bioswales. There are a few scattered throughout Seattle [...]

Eric Schlosser (he of Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness fame) has a great op-ed in the NYT today about the horrid conditions facing the migrant workers who provide you with those oh-so-awesome (meaning, really bland and flavorless) beafsteak tomatoes during the winter. Migrant farm laborers have long been among America’s most impoverished workers. Perhaps [...]

Gov. Gregoire has called the legislature into special session to restore the 1% cap on property tax increases, caving into Republicans and Tim Eyman right before an election year. Goldy’s pretty hot and bothered over it, but why? I mean, doesn’t he realize that Dino Rossi will be so awesomely outmaneuvered by Gregoire’s clever ploy [...]

Continuing our Shachtman-mania here at BATP, another great article on the Army’s nascent efforts to recruit anthropologists to help understand local culture in Afghanistan and Iraq: In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report [...]

Mitt, quit with the “Sanctuary City” claptrap (besides, it sounds too Mormon) and focus on useful arguments: In other words, as incredible as it might seem, Rudy Giuliani—whose presidential candidacy is steeped in 9/11 iconography—has been doing business with a government agency run by the very man who made the attacks on 9/11 possible. You [...]

Don’t miss Noah Shachtman’s piece in the December 2007 Wired. In their rush to create the next-generation network-centric warfare, U.S. military planners probably didn’t realize that they no longer have a monopoly on high-tech: Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: [...]

CNN has, in its infinite wisdom, bent over and pledged not to ask the Republicans any hard questions — er, “gotcha” questions — during the upcoming YouTube debate. In other words, no firefighers asking Rudy why they didn’t have the radios he was supposed to get them, and above all, no questions about teh gay. [...]

Smart words from our SecDef: “We are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals,” he said. “It is just plain embarrassing that Al Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet [...]

Paternity kits now being sold in drug stores threaten to render Maury Povich’s show pointless: Genetic testing is now available at the drugstore. A company called Sorenson Genomics has started selling a paternity test kit through Rite Aid stores in California, Oregon and Washington. It appears to be the first time a DNA test is [...]

It was pretty clear, as I noted in this week’s podcast, that the GOP establishment would kneecap Mike Huckabee once he got within shouting distance of the nomination. And today, here comes Robert Novak to do exactly that.