Liberal Talk Radio

If we can recast public financing of healthcare as a way to starve the rest of the beast, as Bob Packwood* sort of argues (if you squint) then there might be an opening to finally see it happen: So Americans have a choice. We can spend 40 percent of our G.D.P., and provide services like [...]

So in the evening hours of Thursday, April 23, I was robo-called by Rassmussen to take one of their robo-polls. I admit, I was curious, so I stayed on the line. It took about eight and-a-half minutes, and I scribbled down the questions in the meat of the poll (i.e., not the general “did you [...]

If for no other reason than to focus our sense of outrage on one simple target rather than keep on with this societal splintering: During the campaign, Obama was never shy about his promise to undo the Bush tax policies. But it was easy to ignore his occasional lapses into populist rhetoric and focus on [...]

In case you ever wondered what the real reason for hiring Rahm Emanuel was, it’s likely buried in the President’s television watching psyche: President Barack Obama can’t stand to be without his “Entourage.” Call it a guilty pleasure, or maybe it just rings familiar to him. The HBO series about an aspiring actor features a [...]

As in, “That barbecue is amazing!” Or, “I thought Neil Labute’s new play was just amazing!” So will a terror attack on D.C. hold up as similarly “amazing”? I doubt it. Nothing can surpass what has already happened this season on 24: The commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Tuesday for a deadly assault [...]

Let the celebrities and entrepreneurs Twitter to their heart’s content. Soon real pros will learn the genius of “Haikuter,” the new social networking tool in which you have 140 characters to compose haikus about your present state of mind. An example: I’m finally home I checked the mail and the phone Now I must drink [...]

Oh well. At least we’ll always have Madoff: The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in [...]

Now this is just over the top:

Let’s be clear here. When I said it was important to support the Post-Intelligencer as it adapts to technology, that did not mean you could go and blog the weather. The weird thing about weather is that there’s a pretty simple non-technological way to determine it: look out the window. And if that doesn’t suffice, [...]

Bite it, NCAA Bracketer-In-Chief. You, too, Kornacki: The president’s two first round “upset” picks really don’t amount to much. He has the 11th-seeded Temple Owls, a streaking squad that won last weekend’s Atlantic-10 tournament, knocking off Arizona State, a team whose down-the-stretch underachievement culminated in an embarrassing Pac-10 title game loss to USC (a team [...]