Liberal Talk Radio

Read Jon Cohn on why Medicare is awesome and how the only way to make it more awesome would be to cover everyone and have us all pay for it via a payroll tax deduction.

Haiti’s recent food riots have caused several deaths and lots of pain and suffering. This is depressing, and a reminder of what happens when globalization and “free trade” is approached from the point of view of helping the U.S. at the expense of the rest of the world:
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly [...]

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 “process” [...]

I finally got around to seeing Sicko last night, and I’d like to second the Professor’s enthusiastic review from last summer.
I was initially skeptical about what I’d heard about the detour to Cuba, but it was really powerful stuff. And showing a poor, communist country treating 9/11 rescue volunteers better than our own [...]

Big effin’ deal, the Senate votes to ban cloned meat.
Corn-fed, antibiotic-laden, manure-filled factory beef is still perfectly legal, though.
Mange!

Trying to calculate the carbon impacts of your foods is mostly a fool’s errand. You might fret that your “organic” tomatoes come from China, arriving at your local whole foods “soaked in diesel fuel” as Michael Pollan likes to say. As This NYT op-ed says, we just don’t have enough information to make [...]

Smart words from the farmer-turned-President:
It is embarrassing to note that, from 1995 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of cotton growers received more than 80 percent of total subsidies. The wealthiest 1 percent of American cotton farmers continues to receive over 25 percent of payouts for cotton, while more than half of America’s cotton [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece comparing health care plans between Democrats:
Mrs. Clinton charges that Mr. Obama’s plan would leave 15 million people without insurance. Outside experts agree that number is in the ballpark. If people aren’t required by law to buy insurance, many won’t. There are millions of children, for instance, who [...]

How did Malawi end its chronic food shortage issues? Funny you should ask:
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States [...]

An op-ed: in today’s Times does a reasonably good job of summing up the state of American health care, but concludes with this somewhat unsubstantiated swipe at single-payer insurance:
Deep in their hearts, many liberals yearn for a single-payer system, sometimes called Medicare-for-all, that would have the federal government pay for all care and dictate prices. [...]