Monday, May 26, 2008

Good Liberal Web Sites

At times it seems that the knee-jerk liberal reaction to any real or imagined problem is to propose a new mandate, regulation, subsidy or tax. Accordingly, it's refreshing to find folks who appear to be liberals building web sites that take a free-market approach to solving such problems.

Two such sites I've learned of this year are:

Catalog Choice - Save a tree without hugging it: Sick of receiving unwanted catalogs in the mail? Simply plug in your name and address, select the catalogs you don't want anymore, and in some mysterious way this web site will notify the companies sending them to cease and desist from doing so. So far it seems to have worked for the ones I plugged in. (h/t Lynne)

Free Rice - Learn stuff while feeding the hungry: This site tests your vocabulary. For every word you get right, the sponsors will donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. In other words, you get to feel good about playing games. I doubt the free rice approach will do anything to drive down high rice prices, but hopefully some of it will get to the folks most in need. Even if it doesn't, at least we can all learn some new big words. (h/t NPR)

Do you know of any other "good liberal sites" you'd recommend? If so, leave a comment.

4 comments:

Eddie said...

I would post some but I just can't tack those two words together....

Sharon said...

I challenge the assertion that the free rice site is liberal. It's a marketing ploy by their sponsors to get eye balls. what's more capitalistic than that?

David said...

Regardless of who advertises on the site, I generally don't consider folks who want the U.S. government to "give away" .7% of our GDP to be friends of the free-market. Nor do conservatives typically make a habit of urging support for the United Nations and get featured on NPR as a result.

Unknown said...

Is it too late to comment on this?

I'd like to nominate Nora's blog. ;)

Also Slate is definitely liberal but their Today's Papers feature is a great daily roundup of the top stories in the top five papers.

I also like Kausfiles (also hosted at Slate) for political analysis/commentary.