Liberal Talk Radio

The Veterans Administration is an amazing health care system. They do a lot with a little. One reason: an elegant IT system using inexpensive open-source software. It’s too bad, then, that the Department of Defens is determined to shove an expensive, unworkable IT system from Northrop Grumman down their throats. God forbid one small aspect [...]

Last week I suggested that an Obama administration, of it were extremely lucky and everything went smashingly, might eek out 3 big achievements in the first term: wind down the war, reform health care, and institute a cap and trade regime to cut carbon emissions. After thinking about it for a bit, it occured to [...]

Given how much I hate the farm bill, I feel obligated to link to this David Brooks column where he praises McCain for opposing it and slams Obama for supporting it. Anyone who thinks Obama can change the world is going to be sorely disappointed by his first term in office. It’s time to start [...]

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 all [...]

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 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 government [...]

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 the right [...]

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 [...]