Liberal Talk Radio

I love the fact that the son of South Asian immigrants is now governor of what many (myself included) perceive to be one of America’s most racist states. What’s even greater about Bobby Jindal is that I’d probably detest the guy if I ever met him in person — he’s just the sort of hyper-motivated [...]

Every few months or so, a debate flares up about whether either political party (usually the Democrats) has or needs “new ideas.” The latest round has me pretty convinced that this is mostly an issue of semantics: everyone defines “idea” differently. For example, Steve Benen argues that the Democrats have plenty of “ideas,” from Iraq [...]

Or maybe it’s the equivalent of quickly filling in “Cs” in the remaining blank bubbles of your SAT answer sheet. Israel/Palestine — done: President Bush announced an initiative on Monday to shore up the Palestinian president and to begin building a Palestinian state, signaling that his administration will use its remaining months to make a [...]

Saturday Night Live knows how Hillary Clinton must feel: On a recent episode of 30 Rock, an NBC sitcom about the making of a Saturday Night Live–like comedy show, a dilemma arises when the cast’s only black actor goes missing. “Can I play Barack Obama?” asked an opportunistic white cast member. The answer, of course, [...]

Two years after approving civil unions, some Connecticut lawmakers are proposing that the state legalize full-fledged same-sex marriage: The two Democratic leaders of the General Assembly’s judiciary committee say they intend to introduce a bill legalizing gay marriage, even though Gov. M. Jodi Rell has said she would veto such a measure. “This is obviously [...]

Governor Gregoire’s 2007 budget includes a pilot program on public financing of judicial elections. This is an idea that I brought up back in September. Conservative groups that have tried to influence past elections are, predictably, opposed. Just to be clear: I still think judicial elections are fundamentally different from legislative or executive elections, and [...]

Bruno and I devoted part of our show this week to a discussion of Bush’s latest “build it and then figure out how to pay for it” initiative — the plan to build a permanent moon base by 2024. The ever-eloquent Gregg Easterbrook makes the same points I did about the moon base — namely: [...]

One of the through-lines of the current White House Administration has been to gut oversight and audit funding. The party that claims to care about fiscal responsibility has shown surprisingly little interest in making sure that the tax dollars they claim to preciously value are actually being collected and spent effectively. Reaching into the wayback [...]

Washingtonians, you can’t be thanked enough for knocking down I-933 at the polls this year. Via Sightline, take a look at what’s happening in Oregon because of Measure 37, the Beaver State’s answer to 933. It’s nothing less than legalized extortion. What a mess.

Jacob Weisberg says that “free trade has definitely left the building” with the election of what he calls “economic nationalists” (or, more colloquially, “Lou Dobbs Democrats”) like Sherrod Brown who argue against free trade to protect American jobs. However, as David Sirota and Nathan Newman constantly remind us, the free trade consensus in D.C. is [...]