Common Sense and the sensus communis: anatomy of an American pressure cooker

Gay-Lussac
The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.
This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of [...]

Uncle Sam Contracts Frater Magnus to Safeguard his Healthcare Liberty

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. – Abraham Lincoln
There’s a sucker born every minute. – P.T. Barnum
We, the People, are born every minute. The last ten [...]

Dennis Kucinich responds to The Greatest Speech On Health Care Reform EVAH!

This was posted in the comments earlier but it deserves to be on the front page.  Kucinich is a real liberal which makes him “unelectable” according to the media and the Democratic establishment.

Yes, I know he endorsed Obama last year.  We all make mistakes.  Get over it. He is also [...]

This creek smells funny. How did we get here?

Imagine you were rowing your boat gently down the stream and one of the oars got caught in the hatch. What would happen? Logic suggests that the current would slowly move you downstream as you spun the boat in circles.
O.K. Rowboats don’t have hatches, but Orrin Hatch is a creature and a feature [...]

The Culture of Cannibalism in US Politics: The Cycle of Corruption

Mark Twain, in “Cannibalism in the Cars,” suggested that cannibalism of the body politic is a logical outcome of the practice of the political values of the elected representatives of the United States, in dire circumstances. What would occur, if such dire circumstances did not require a natural disaster, but became a systemic [...]

This was the plan all along

Glenn Greenwald finally gets it:
That’s obviously true. In fact, it’s so obviously true that no matter how dumb one might think Democrats are, they’re certainly not so dumb that they failed to realize that the GOP was highly unlikely to help Obama pass health care reform no matter what the bill contained. From [...]

Buy a clue, Ezra

Ezra Klein in today’s WaPo:
Monday was the day of the liberal revolt on health-care reform. If you want a nice round-up of the commentary, see Mike Allen. What’s been striking, however, is the implicit argument that this is somehow a simple failure of liberal will. Rachel Maddow called it “a collapse [...]

We’re being played (again)

Single payer is off the table and now that ObamaCare is going down in flames they are trying to stampede us into supporting something they call “public option” that isn’t really public option.
When hustlers are running their scams and the mark (that’s us) is getting cold feet, one trick they use is to have an [...]

Christians and health care

Last December on Santa Claus’ birthday I pointed out that Jeebus was a DFH moobat librul. As we watch the Great Astroturf War of 2009 and see the Tea Party movement get their collective panties in a wad over socialized medicine, I think it’s appropriate to review what the man from Nazareth is supposed [...]

Power in the USA: political string theory in US politics

How are power relations shaping the U.S. political sphere? From the primary campaign to the tea parties and the raucous healthcare forums, Americans are out in force. Regardless of their political stripe, are their actions in their own best interest or are they being played? What influences are determining how people perceive [...]