Hot Coffee, the fast-paced, info-packed exploration of tort reform exposes the real story behind Stella Liebeck, who sued McDonalds after being badly burned by spilled coffee, an incident which wrongly entered the collective consciousness as a prime example of a “frivolous” lawsuit. First time director Susan Saladoff, a civil litigator with 25 years of experience, uses the McDonalds coffee case as the starting point and from there builds a strong case that tort reform, binding arbitration and non-economic damage caps subvert justice and benefit big business.

The seven OccupyMN protesters arrested Thursday are: Peter Leeman, Devin Wynn, Ben Egerman, Katrina Plotz, Merritt Benton, Misty Rowan and Jason St. John. If one of these names, that of Ben Egerman, might sound familiar to you, it’s because the last time he was in the news, it was for glittering Karl Rove when Rove came to the Twin Cities for a book signing two weeks ago

At the end of May, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill that can put Vermont on the path to single-payer health care. As it stands, Vermont’s plan is to cover every resident of the state for actual health care they can use. But the Green Mountain State’s ambitious plan can only succeed if the Federal Government grants several critical waivers of existing health care laws.

I’m most interested in all the assumptions here, that a bunch of Chinese hackers know precisely how the White House email system works. If that’s true, why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over the emails OVP deleted from the first days of the Plame leak investigation? And why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over all those emails hidden on the RNC’s server? Maybe they can also help us find all of John Yoo’s torture emails?

I’m not surprised that Karl Rove has weighed in on the foreclosure fraud scandal with an erroneous op-ed in the WSJ. I’m just a bit baffled why he did so now.

This is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” if it ever was. Rather, as the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote, we have a government “of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%.”

With all three candidates financially viable, how will the race shake out? The presence of Davis makes it harder to claim that this is a referendum on Medicare privatization. However, I do think you can say what Josh Kraushaar says, that this has refocused attention on the actual desires of Republicans, which are broadly unpopular.

Republicans look terrified to actually go through with the shutdown given the focus on women’s health and choice. The question then becomes: who’s forcing the issue?

In his song “American Tune,” Paul Simon dreamed of “the Statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea.” I wonder if it will find a more fitting home in the Nile Delta?

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”