Liberal Talk Radio

This is a couple weeks old, but still interesting: CNN, which had been sucking wind behind the blabbers of Fox News before the election, is suddenly bubbling along on huge numbers, buoyed by debates, primaries and all the dots being connected in between. Almost 3.3 million people tuned in to CNN’s prime-time election coverage last [...]

While searching for something else on the blog, I found this post from almost a year ago on how Bill Clinton will help his wife’s campaign. In light of the past week in South Carolina, that’s not looking too prescient. On the other hand, I’d like to take a bit of credit for using the [...]

Bill Kristol piles on the Clintons in what is actually a pretty good op-ed today: Then on Saturday, in Columbia, pre-spinning his wife’s imminent defeat, Clinton reminded reporters out of the blue that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88. And he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama’s run a good [...]

Obama wins big in South Carolina, the stimulus package and American Empire, and finally: Wal-Mart goes green? Links Mentioned: Ted Kennedy endorses Obama … details on the stimulus … Parag Khanna on the end of hegemony … Wal-Mart’s new strategy

Good piece in the NYT Week in Review on the explosion of global meat supply and it’s attendant stresses on the environment: Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we [...]

I’ll outsource the commentary to the man himself… ….and the rest to Noam Scheiber… Obama took over 80 percent of the black vote, yes, but also about a quarter of the white vote. That stacks up pretty well alongside Hillary’s 36 percent and Edwards’s 29–well enough that Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC could call it “almost a [...]

He’s making sense: “One of the concerns that I have is that we’ll probably end up borrowing this $150 billion from the Chinese,” he said. “And when we get those rebate checks, most people are going to go out and buy stuff that’s been imported from China. I have to wonder whose economy is going [...]

I’ve long harped on the fact that changing land use policies is central to curbing emissions. We simply can’t cut greenhouse gases substantially without changing our living, traveling, and commuting patterns. In that vein, here’s a good bill being debated in Olympia that would tie climate change to the State’s Growth Management Act. If a [...]

Matt Yglesias questions the effectiveness of charitable donations to wealthy universities and arts and cultural institutions, and wonders if we need to restrict the tax exemption: To me, to figure this out we’d need to have some serious estimates about the impact of restricting charitable deductions. How much new tax revenue are we talking about? [...]

If my previous post didn’t convince you that the current stimulus packages being bandied about are ill-conceived, how about hearing it from a Nobel prize-winning economist? We should begin by strengthening the unemployment insurance system, because money received by the unemployed would be spent immediately. The federal government should also provide some assistance to states [...]