Liberal Talk Radio

Terror in Mumbai, the collapse of Seattle banking and an update on the new Obama cabinet. Links Mentioned: A timeline of the Mumbai carnage … SAM and WaMu … some early warning signs of trouble at the Seattle bank … Obama’s new Labor secretary?

This article from Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe is a few weeks old, but I’m just getting to it. It’s really interesting: At the household level, the look of want is different today than during the last prolonged downturn. The government helps the unemployed and the poor with programs that didn’t exist when the [...]

So the Bangkok airport has been shut down by the People’s Alliance for Democracy of Thailand. Am I the only one who wants to abbreviate this organization as PAD-THAI?

Indeed, it would be interesting to nominate a pregnant woman as Secretary of Labor. Do you think her husband will get freaked out when she leaves the house every morning for work and says, “Honey, I’m going into labor!”

Obama’s cabinet takes shape, international finance explained (finally!), and the proposed auto industry bailout. Links Mentioned: Romney on the bailout … Sorkin on Chapter 11 for GM

I’m just getting to this New York Times magazine article, “After the Imperial Presidency” (I usually only get to read the magazine after my wife’s had a week to read it and another week to do the crossword puzzle), and I found it both better and worse than I expected. I was expecting to read [...]

The indicators are here and the stats are in: [A] “counterintuitive” finding is more interesting, and thus more likely to get published, than an intuitive one. But maybe lots of our intuitive ideas are correct and the “counterinuitive” selection bias is obscuring that. Certainly this is a problem in punditry and (especially) magazine writing, where [...]

Contra Frank, in the coming Decade of Contrarianism, the time is obviously ripe for a Bus Rapid Transit opera . . . Conceptually Contrarian jumping-off point: The absurd resurrection and reevaluation of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s career.

These are actual headlines . . . What’s So Special About a Team of Rivals? What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? What’s the Point of Daylight Time? The black-white Oughts (both George W. Bush’s us-versus-them and the opposition’s are-you-f-ing-kidding-me response to it) will give way to a decade of contrarianism, where everything you know [...]

Further proof that Americans did the right thing on November 4 comes from the most recent Al-Qaida vid.  Master of the Caveman-in-Chief’s privy chamber calls Obama names (and not nice ones): In al-Qaida’s first response to Obama’s victory, al-Zawahri .,.. called the president-elect—along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—”house negroes.” Speaking in [...]