Liberal Talk Radio

Eduardo M. Peñalver argues in the Wa-Po that the bursting of the housing bubble combined with high gas taxes might mean the end of sprawl. I’m not that optimistic, but it’s an argument we need to hear more often. With all the cockamamie ideas out there for reducing global warming (”huge mirrors in [...]

Talking about Charlie Wilson’s War and America’s involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Will writes:
Ultimately, I have to disagree with both parties, and with both non-interventionist Democrats and neo-conservative Republicans. America’s involvement in the world should be based on America’s national interest. All other considerations are less important. Was the covert war propagated by [...]

The key insight of Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? was that rural, conservative voters were inexplicably voting for a party — the Republicans — who went against their economic interest. Frank thought it absurd that these poor people would vote for a party that, when you really looked at their record, was [...]

Josh Patashnik has some interesting thoughts on where we are and where we might be going in the post-bipartisan era.

Thanks to the Contrarian, as always, for holding down the fort while the rest of us are on Christmas vacation.
Right now I’m in California, where I can see several new housing developments that were supposed to have been built by now have been put on hold. The market here, a couple hours northeast of [...]

I have to say that I didn’t tear up or choke back anything in the final scenes of Juno, like A.O. Scott says he did; the film was too glib and slick to be believable — not to mention unfunny (not that it was unfunny, but it wasn’t consistently humorous, just grating like someone who [...]

Does the Daily News need help moderating the comments on their website? From a story about a horrific spate of murders Christmas Eve, these beauties:
BLACK ON BLACK CRIMES. 80% OF THE CRIMES COMITTED AGAINST BLACK PEOPLE IS CAUSED BY BLACK PEOPLE. MEANWHILE, WHILE THE DUMB BLACK OR LATINO ARE KILLING THEMSELVES, THE WHITE MAN IS [...]

We’ll be taking this week off, folks. Podcasting and blogging will resume after the first of the year. Probably very soon after the first, but we’ll see what logistics dictate.
Thanks for listening in 2007!!

Mark Schmitt on Obama:
But let’s take a slightly different angle on the charge that Obama is “naïve” about power and partisanship. Suppose you were as non-naïve about it as I am — but your job wasn’t writing about politics, it was running for president? What should you do? In that case, your responsibility is [...]

The military finally decides that if you can’t beat them, join them:
[Lieutenant Colonel C.J.] Wallington, a division chief in the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That’s because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac [...]