Liberal Talk Radio

Thank god high-level discussion among the highest reaches of government has finally caught up with plot points on this season of 24: A previously undisclosed meeting last year of President Bush’s most senior national security advisers was the highest level discussion about how to rewrite the cold war rules. The existing approach to deterrence dates [...]

Another Contrarian prediction seems to be coming true. Watch your head. PS: no word yet on whether the passengers on the plane planned to crash land on a remote Pacific island only to be terrorized by smoke monsters and crazy people.

It looks like the Pacific Northwest’s going to be spared the brunt of the recent mortgage crisis. Cleveland, on the other hand, not so much: Here in Ohio, there are more than 200 vacant houses in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland north of here. In the last two years more than 600 houses in Euclid [...]

In case 24 writers want to raise the bar, here’s something that should really freak you out: For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for [...]

Looks like someone else wants to play with The Precious: Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad outlined an ambitious plan on Sunday to greatly expand its economic and military ties with Iraq — including an Iranian national bank branch in the heart of the capital — just as the Bush administration has been warning the Iranians to [...]

I suppose we have Nouri Maliki to thank for making even the American “Arab Street” sympathetic to Saddam: The execution of Saddam Hussein was big news from the Euphrates to YouTube. But along Bay Ridge’s heavily Arab-American Fifth Avenue, the death of the tyrant was greeted with silence. “I won’t watch it and I have [...]

In other spam news (two spam posts in one day!), I suppose this explains why Nigerians continue to keep at it after all these years: Ed Mezvinsky, a former Iowa Congressman, is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after getting caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams. Initially, Mezvinsky became the victim of [...]

If it’s true that Vladimir Putin ordered the hit on Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-Russian spy, that’s some seriously messed up shit! Also, I heard on NPR today that Litvinenko had just become a British citizen. Meaning that if the Russian government successfully assassinated a British citizen, well… that’s some seriously messed up shit! There have [...]

If you want to get any sleep at all in the next few days, do not read this article on the current sorry state of electronic voting systems. I try not to get paranoid about this, and I honestly don’t believe that the CEO of Diebold is rigging the elections to favor Republicans. Well… I [...]

What a strange time. You can go to work on the subway, feeling satisfied that peace is at hand as you read an encouraging op-ed in the Times by the Hamas Prime Minister, then read the news from Israel that Hamas is organizing a full-fledged army complete with battalions and divisions.