Liberal Talk Radio

I was on vacation this weekend… we’ll have something up by the end of the day! Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, read this awesome article from the April 2006 Popular Mechanics on the ridiculous toys in the U.S. Defense budget. Why are these toys ridiculous? C’mon, don’t make me break out the Seawolf!

I think Studio 60 finally hit its stride last night, approaching the heady, cheesy blend that characterized the early seasons of The West Wing. Nate Corddry continues to steal the show, despite the fact that the storyline made me wince a bit — his seemingly-a**hole dad turns out to just be worried sick about Nate’s [...]

Bruno, to your post on Bush’s (apparent) intention to weaponize space … Ha! Not only “Commander Cody in Space,” but, possibly, the abrogation of yet another treaty by Bush. The “Outer Space Treaty,” drafted in 1967 by the US, Soviets, and others, is generally interpreted as forbidding any efforts to militarize  space. From Wiki: The [...]

I have to be honest with you — I hated this book when I read it in college. Of course, I hated most things about the formal study of international affairs — I always felt there was something inherently wrong about pinhead academics casually discussing things like genocide and populist revolution (these were people who [...]

… Or, How to Screw Up Three Wars at Once. Remember Afghanistan?  Benighted crap-hole of a country hard between Pakistan, Iran, the CIS, and hell?  The place where they play polo with dead goats for fun … but, oh, yeah, they’re ready for Democracy? Anyway, if you care, we’re losing Afghanistan, too. International forces defeated [...]

I’m not sure I get this NYT op-ed by Patricia Weitsman on the dangers of coalitions. I think her argument is that the current “coalition” fighting in Iraq is costing us money and not gaining us any of the global legitimacy that the word “coalition” is supposed to buy. And in that sense, she’s right. [...]

A new software project called the GPU wants to make it easy to do distributed computing (you know, the thing where your screen saver searches for aliens or folds genomes). But the creators want to modify the license so that the military can’t use it: A “patch” apended to the top of the license says [...]

The Prof’s post below gave me an idea. Those of you who listen to the podcast know that we’re always wont to give the Department of Defense a hard time for its screwed-up priorities. For a detailed analysis of the outdated, cold-war-era priorities that guide the $500-billion-a-year Defense budget, read Fred Kaplan here. The U.S. [...]

Forgive this bit of web nerdery, but I had no idea that U.S. aircraft carriers were big enough to have their own domain name: http://www.stennis.navy.mil/

I have to say that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a stupid policy. I think most people would agree, and there’s been some effort in the House and Senate to repeal the policy. Both Kevin Drum and Steve Benen note that the number of discharges invoked under the policy has gone up 11% this year, [...]