Liberal Talk Radio

Faster Legacy in practice — a sidenote from a story about the recent elections in South Korea:
The results on Wednesday reflected voters’ deep dissatisfaction with the liberal administration of President Roh Moo-hyun, who is limited to a single five-year term by the Constitution, and his handling of the economy. By turning to Mr. Lee [Myung-bak], [...]

Watered down and everything, but it finally went through:
The legislation calls for a 40% increase in fuel efficiency for new cars and light trucks by 2020, for a fleetwide average of 35 miles per gallon. It also requires a fivefold increase — to 36 billion gallons — in the amount of alternative homegrown fuels, [...]

Big effin’ deal, the Senate votes to ban cloned meat.
Corn-fed, antibiotic-laden, manure-filled factory beef is still perfectly legal, though.
Mange!

It’s not so much the idea that John Edwards knocked up someone but rather that a campaign aide would actually try to cover up for Edwards in such a ridiculous way. That basically makes me not want to trust not only Edwards but anyone surrounding John Edwards, no matter how “selfless” they come off in [...]

The Politico has a story today alleging that our own Patty Murray, the preschool teacher-turned-Senate-powerhouse, may be staging a coup of sorts on the Senate Appropriations Committee, making 90-year-old Robert Byrd the “chairman emeritus,” and herself “acting chairwoman.”
Sopranos fans will immediately recognize the scenario from Season 1, where Tony puts Junior at the [...]

The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” bowdlerized:
BBC Radio 1 has said it will stand by its ban on the word “faggot” from the Pogues’ 1987 Christmas hit Fairytale of New York to avoid offence.
The word, sung by the late Kirsty MacColl as she trades insults with Shane MacGowan, has been dubbed out.
But MacColl’s mother, [...]

Ethanol production is helping to kill marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, as nitrogen fertilizers make their way down the Mighty Mississippi:
“Corn agriculture practices release a lot of nitrogen,” said Donald Scavia, a University of Michigan professor who has studied corn fertilizer’s effect on the dead zone. “More corn equals more nitrogen pollution.”
Farmers realize [...]

The other day I was going to compare Huckabee to Kerry, in that he was a “safe” sort of establishment candidate that emerged at the right time in 2004 — and ultimately was a bad idea — but things just got sped up to the point where now he’s being compared to Howard Dean. [...]

Trying to calculate the carbon impacts of your foods is mostly a fool’s errand. You might fret that your “organic” tomatoes come from China, arriving at your local whole foods “soaked in diesel fuel” as Michael Pollan likes to say. As This NYT op-ed says, we just don’t have enough information to make [...]