Liberal Talk Radio

Apocalypse Tom owns a 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX, an all wheel drive pseudo sports car that goes faster than Tom reasonably needs to drive and allows him to go over Snoqualmie Pass in winter weather that keeps everyone except chained-up semis and Tom at home.
The WRX has a 15.9 gallon gas tank, and requires [...]

I’ve been pretty amazed at the percentage of people who think the country is on the “wrong track,” which has reached 70% or more in recent polls. But maybe that’s not such an “amazing” concept at all.
Mori Dinauer at TAPPED cites this Washington Post/ABC News poll’s “astounding” finding that 90% of people [...]

Somewhere in Southern California, Mickey Kaus smiles:
The federal government’s civil rights commission is attempting to produce a definitive answer to one of the touchiest questions in the immigration debate: whether new immigrants, especially illegal ones, hurt African-Americans in the workplace.
The hearing Friday is likely to be a lively discussion among the country’s top experts on [...]

Krugman explains:
America came out of the Great Depression with a pretty effective financial safety net, based on a fundamental quid pro quo: the government stood ready to rescue banks if they got in trouble, but only on the condition that those banks accept regulation of the risks they were allowed to take.
Over time, however, [...]

And it’s helpful to remember that, you know, our entire freakin’ economy is based on trucking:
Ricardo Caraballo was having a familiar American experience at the filling station the other day, groaning as the pump clicked up, up, up. By the time he finished it read $505, and his tank was only half full.
A few years [...]

Thank you Dominic Holden for pointing out what should be obvious: if housing prices are up month-to-month, but down year-over-year, they probably haven’t gone up. Housing prices are cyclical. There are months that people tend to buy and sell houses and monts that they don’t. Spring-summer is a particularly busy time.
Thus, [...]

Yes, it’s bad.
Seattle’s even worse.
All of this was predicted months ago by the Professor on our podcast.
That is all.

On this week’s podcast, we talked about how inflation and a general increase in the cost of basic necessities — fuel, health care, etc. — are conspiring to prevent most Americans from seeing any real wage increases. Well, it looks like we can now add food costs to the list:
While had Campbell reported [...]

James Fallows’ piece in the Atlantic — about the Chinese government’s efforts to keep its economy out of control by a really strict policy of buying dollars — is really good. A teaser:
The dollar’s value has been high for many years—unnaturally high, in large part because of the implicit bargain with the Chinese. Living [...]

He’s making sense:
“One of the concerns that I have is that we’ll probably end up borrowing this $150 billion from the Chinese,” he said. “And when we get those rebate checks, most people are going to go out and buy stuff that’s been imported from China. I have to wonder whose economy is going to [...]