Liberal Talk Radio

“Conservatives — to the catacombs!” – John Derbyshire, conservative, realizing that either Clinton or Obama will probably destroy the Republicans in November. Take heart, Derb. The political wilderness is actually a pretty refreshing place to be for a while. All you have to do is lob grenades at the other party, free of accountability. Actually… [...]

I just got done telling somehow how if Hillary were elected, Bill Clinton would be one of the greatest ambassadors the Oval Office ever had: Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to [...]

I can’t really watch the whole GOP debate, because it’s at the Reagan Library and the Reagan worshipping is too out of control. But I did flip to it and see the four remaining candidates — Huckabee, Paul, Romney, and McCain — sitting next to each other. And it struck me… what an odd group [...]

A genius idea, methinks. Let stormwater get naturally filtered into the ground, instead of channeling it to a sewage system where it needs to be treated. Downside? Well, it will make it that much harder to find out how much blow you all used last weekend (so maybe that’s an upside, actually?).

Yesterday I linked to a Bob Herbert column that argued for more federal funding for infrastructure, and used Minneapolis’ collapsed I-35W bridge as its central example. Well, this article in today’s NYT says the bridge died of a design flaw, not neglect: The conventional wisdom is that the Interstate 35W bridge, aged and due for [...]

Thank the high heavens, Rudy Giuliani and his band of nutty, nutty advisors will not be getting their hands on the nuclear launch codes any time soon. John McCain, however, is now the front runner, promising, in the words of Joe Scarborough, “less jobs and more wars.” Check it:

I was a bit depressed to read that IT salaries fell in Seattle last year to sixth-highest nationwide, until I plugged the number into CNN Money’s cost of living calculator, and discovered that $80K goes a lot further in Seattle than even the $93K you’d earn in Silicon Valley. One reason to be bullish on [...]

Here’s a good sign the housing market isn’t coming back anytime soon. The real irony here is that the banks shot themselves in the foot with this one. If they hadn’t pushed through the Bankruptcy Bill in 2005 — which made it harder to delcare bankruptcy and walk away from credit cards — home owners [...]

Following up on this post from last week, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle highlights some efforts underway in CA to combat climate change via smart growth: In Oakland, Fruitvale Village demonstrates how infill development, where new land uses are created on sites previously used for another purpose such as manufacturing, can encourage economic [...]

Good Bob Herbert column today: We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement. It’s impossible to calculate all of the benefits from (to mention just a few) the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and helped [...]