Surely you're familiar with the Placebo Effect!

[ http://skepdic.com/placebo.html ]

Surely you're familiar with the Placebo Effect!

[ http://skepdic.com/placebo.html ]

There's a scene in the 1954 Elia Kazan classic "On the Waterfront", where Father Barry (Karl Malden), a local priest-turned-activist as he comes to grips with what amounts to liberation theology, prods a group of longshoremen to step up and give evidence to a Crime Commission set up to take down the criminal "trigger local" controlling the waterfront:

Fr. Barry: Now, listen, you know who the pistols are. Are you going to keep still until they cut you down one by one? Are you? Dugan! How about you? Are you?

Dugan: One thing you have to understand, Father, on the dock we've always been D and D.

Fr. Barry: D and D? What's that?

Dugan: Deaf and dumb. No matter how much we hate the torpedoes, we don't rat.

Fr. Barry: Rat? Now boys, get smart. I know you're getting pushed around, but there's one thing we have in this country, and that's ways of fighting back. Getting the facts to the public. Testifying for what is right against what is wrong. What's ratting to them is telling the truth for you, can't you see that? Can't you see that? [...]

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I don't dispute that the political elite may be both complacent out of complicity or collusion and paralyzed by fear; the states aren't mutually exclusive.

But I can't tell whether the comments pointing out that Congress, and especially Democratic politicians, likely are at personal risk, or have good reason to believe they are, are suggesting that they're more to be pitied than censured because they are caught in such a bind.

In any case, if it is true that Congress is stymied by intimidation and fear, does this not indeed validate the cliché that "the terrorists have won"?

Allow me to add my alienated voice to the chorus welcoming you back.

Somewhat mysteriously, the veil has parted in the blocking software here at work that has prevented access to comments for months! Perhaps your return has caused a ripple in The Force that is nullifying the censorship.

Or perhaps they're planning to fire my ass, and have cleverly decided to give me more rope!

In any case, good to see you back.

Thanks for still another appropriately-scathing and insightful analysis!

Local network news outlets, which exist to reduce troublesome reality to small and easily digestible bite-sized pasteurized processed media food, have been mewling that the government is taking (emergency) to correct this economic meltdown.

It's particularly gratifying to read a more trenchant analysis focusing on the bipartisan actions that have both caused this crisis, and are conspiring to support a solution most favorable to the plutocracy-- especially at a site that has otherwise become a dedicated media outlet for the Obama campaign.