FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: 20 Questions, 20 Responses.
Excellent, in-depth discussion of the health care bill as it stands right now in the Senate.

Shawinigan Handshake – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Berlusconi is a wimp. See how real prime ministers handle protesters.

Daily Kos: (Updated because I could) Taibbi is factually wrong on Obama’s economic team.
And the rebuttal to the piece I just posted.

Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering.
via Obama’s Big Sellout : Rolling Stone.

CNN asks, “Israel a rogue state?”.

Local News | Maurice Clemmons, man wanted for questioning, has troubling criminal history | Seattle Times Newspaper.
Thanks for the clemency, Gov. Huckabee.

By January, he will have accomplished more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt.
via Obama is having the best first year of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. – By Jacob Weisberg – Slate Magazine.

Thanksgiving special: more evidence of failure of trip to Asia! – James Fallows.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.
via In House, Many Spoke With One Voice – Lobbyists’ – NYTimes.com.

No good deed goes unpunished when a private citizen is up against the federal drug warriors–those members of the Department of Justice who have been seeking, with increasing success in recent decades, to effectively control the practice of pain relief medicine. But a current drama being played out in federal court in Kansas portends an [...]

In 2008, I went into several schools closed the previous year to find buildings stripped of metal but left with libraries full of books, computer labs upturned, art classrooms full of supplies, and administration offices filled with confidential and sensitive student records.
via SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER – PART 1 – Vice Magazine.

The analysts found no support for the claim routinely made by politicians that American health care is the best in the world and no hard evidence of any particular area in which American health care is truly exceptional.
via Editorial – World’s Best Health Care – NYTimes.com.

If you’re trying to understand all of the reasons why your representatives may support or oppose certain health care reform measures, we can add the money-in-politics puzzle pieces. Here’s a cool tool that brings together data from various parts of OpenSecrets.org to show how much money each current lawmaker has raised from various health-related industries [...]