When I saw an online advertisement for a wrinkle cure that costs just ten dollars, I was mystified at first. How could someone cure their wrinkles for just ten dollars? I can barely buy lunch for just one day for that much.

Then it occurred to me: Photoshop! As you can see in these pictures, that ten dollar cure gives you a nice tan, and gets rid of awkward-looking bangs. Sure, you can’t really tell the difference in wrinkles from the first picture to the next, but she sure looks less wrinklicious in the second picture.

But, darn it, Photoshop costs a lot more than ten dollars - even the Photoshop Elements version. Maybe if you go to a Photoshop spa, where a bunch of wrinkly people like you share the cost of the software…

Just seen advertisement: “The New Kids On The Block are back!”… for the first time since the 1990s. They’re now described as “fully-grown men who forever defined what the modern boy band would look and sound like”.

There are circumstances in which the rights of Americans come into conflict with one another, and when that happens people will tend to differ on the priority of one right over another. Take property rights and freedom of expression, for instance. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees Americans’ freedom of speech. But that right has been taken to exist mainly in the public arena; when a person purchases server space and a domain name, they are said to own a website and have a right to moderate the comments of others there. Newspaper owners have the right to accept or decline letters to the editor. Moving away from written media, you aren’t free to budge into your neighbor’s bathroom and hold forth for hours about the relative merits of American League versus National League baseball teams. Your neighbor’s ownership of her home and her bathroom grant her control over what is said and done there. Her property rights trump your speech rights, and if you don’t like it, you’ll have to take your whining about out of her bathroom and back over to your porch where it belongs.

Matters become more complicated when the nature of ownership is blurred and expression moves from words to actions. What if your neighbor rents? Could the actual owner of her bungalow include a provision in the property lease that allows you to at least enter her living room on demand and quote baseball statistics? Could the property owner require tenants to refrain from holding political meetings in the homes tenants rent? Could the property owner ban the placement of political campaign signs in the yard?

What if a property owner prohibited tenants of a property from flying a flag from the home? What if a homeowner association, which has control over the covenants home buyers sign, dictates that home owners in a development cannot fly a flag from their home? Such cases have arisen in the United States, and in those cases property rights conflict directly with freedom of expression — particularly, the freedom to express oneself by flying a flag. Back in 2005, both the House and the Senate passed H.R. 42, the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act, without a single recorded vote in opposition. Republicans and Democrats alike took to the floor in our nation’s Capitol to extol the virtues of free speech in the promotion of patriotism, and to condemn the dastardliness of property owners or homeowners’ or condominium association boards who attempted to prevent residents from displaying American flags. President George W. Bush signed the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act into law. Action on this bill by Republicans and Democrats alike clearly prioritized the right to place a flag on a property over the right of property owners to dictate how their property is used.

On May 28, 2009, the Maine House passed LD 73, An Act To Protect the Right To Use Solar Energy. LD 73 would make it illegal for deeds, covenants or any other contracts (presumably including leases) to prohibit the erection and use of clotheslines to dry clothes using the clean, renewable energy of the sun. The breakdown of this vote was 76 in favor and 65 against. Every Republican member of the Maine House but one was either not present for the vote or voted against the bill.

When it comes to putting up a flag, Republican legislators are gung-ho about putting property rights on the back burner and supporting the right of residents to do what they wish. When it comes to putting up a clothesline, Republican legislators suddenly are very much interested in property rights and rather uninterested in the right of residents to do what they wish. That’s interesting.

Almost a month ago now, I reported on the discovery of a photograph that proves Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Still, the mainstream media has not reported on the photograph. It seems that there is a conspiracy to pretend the evidence does not exist.

Yet, huge numbers of independent thinking Americans have come to view the photograph of baby Barack Obama in Kenya, and we refuse to take it down, no matter how much silent pressure the Council on Foreign Relations and the Project for a New American Century exert. We will not give in.

Franz Dexter, who is a member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, and the International Information Systems Forensics Association, was looking for Barack Obama’s original Certificate of Live Birth when he came across a photograph in the files of the same office in Honolulu where that COLB is kept. This photograph appeared to have an indentation on it made by a paperclip - one that matches exactly the size and orientation of a similar mark on the Obama Certificate of Live Birth. Yet, the photograph had been placed in a separate filing cabinet. Why?

The photograph, shown here, provides indisputable evidence that Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was working with high officials in the Communist Party to conceal the truth about her son’s birth. Vladimir Lenin is shown, studying a Communist monkeywrenching document with instructions about how to fake a Hawaiian birth certificate. In the background, we can see Ann Dunham sitting with the infant Barack Obama on her lap. And who is that waiting with Dunham? Why, it’s Josef Stalin, looking every bit the proud father.

So, it appears that Barack Obama’s real name is Barack Stalin! It also becomes plain that, from the start, baby Barack Hussein Stalin was at the center of an international conspiracy to place him at the center of power in the United States, to promote a Communist agenda. This plan required Barack Obama to be born in Hawaii. No wonder so much evidence of this forgery has been covered up!

But, if Barack Obama was not really born in Hawaii, where was he born? More evidence in this regard is shown in this photograph. First, in the background, we see a road sign written in Arabic. If you know how to read Arabic, as I do, you’ll see that this is a road sign to Mecca.

Now, look back over to Ann Dunham. You’ll see that she seems to be wearing a modest dark head scarf, as would be typical of a Muslim woman. Josef Stalin grew up in Georgia, a place that is home to many Muslim Azeris, so it’s entirely plausible that he was raised Muslim himself. As we know, if a baby boy has a Muslim father, he is born Muslim, and can never stop being a Muslim.

So, this photograph not only contains evidence of the forgery of Obama’s Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth, it also indicates that Obama was born in Kenya as Obama’s mother was on the Hajj, the Muslim holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This supports what we’ve always suspected: That Soviet Communism and Islamofascism are, historically, one and the same. That makes Obama an Al Quaida agent, and as a baby, he would have been in Saudi Arabia at about the same time as Osama Bin Laden.

Now it all begins to make sense, doesn’t it?

When I read the phrase “This site is not to be used in the hunting of vampires or any other type of otherkin,” I admit that I had to suppress a chuckle. Though the site OtherKin.com tends to take itself very seriously (“if it comes down to a fight between a vampire and a “slayer,” I hope you can run fast.”), its self-consciously ominous character is a little silly, when it comes down to it.

Otherkin are people who believe that they are, in some kind of way, not ordinary humans, but somehow, are actually some kind of mythical creature, such as a nymph, a demon or even a Pooka.

I am not one of those people who find the Otherkin interesting because I wonder whether there really are dragons, elves, werewolves and vampires. I don’t believe that there ever have been such things. I also wonder why faeries and undead creatures with special powers would need to have web sites in order to establish a sense of community amongst those of their kind.

I find Otherkin interesting because it’s curious to consider what motivates human beings to believe that they are not human beings, and to accept a mythological identity as the internally-real core aspect of themselves. I also think that it’s remarkable that people are willing to express these ideas to other people and interact in this shared symbolic reality. I have some respect for their imaginations, and I’m glad that we have a culture for people like this, who, though they may not be griffins or changelings, are definitely, really Otherkin.

Oh, and for those of you who feel especially misunderstood, there’s an article just for you: So You Think You’re a Demon… Now What?

Obama seeks middle ground on Guantanamo, reads the headline from Forbes, describing Obama’s justifications for continuing with George W. Bush’s plans to set up a separate, substandard system of justice to deal with people that American society has Obama to be guilty before actually being tried for their crimes.

Middle ground is reasonable, right? It’s just common sense to find the middle ground solution. Everyone knows that.

That’s why Barack Obama has chosen the middle ground between following the Constitution and not following the Constitution, between honoring his promises and not honoring his promises, between following the Oath of Office and not following the Oath of Office, between respecting the legal and human rights of people and not respecting the legal and human rights of people.

It’s so yummy, that middle ground, just like a dinner served to vegetarians that takes the middle ground between having meat and not having meat. We all know how happy they are with that, right? Or, how about having a chicken barbeque where the cook takes the middle ground between cooking the chicken and not cooking the chicken? Mmmmm, give me seconds!

Old historical arguments can be settled with the middle ground too. The Americans and the British, instead of disagreeing about which side of the road to drive down, can both agree to have everyone drive down the middle of the street.

The middle grounds brings people together in that lovely space called compromise, like when a thief and the person he is stealing from agree to compromise, and let the thief leave with half the stuff he was originally going to take. Happy times. Compromise is best, of course, when it happens between a man and wife, like when a husband compromises with a wife who wants to have a sexual affair with the nextdoor neighbor, and the couple agrees that she can just cheat every other day. Ain’t we got fun? We’ll find compromise with insurance companies too, so that cancer patients can get half of the chemotherapy they need, and diabetes patients can get half the insulin, and HIV patients get bottles full of medication, only half of the pills are actual medicine, and the other half sugar pills. Wellness!

Creationists and scientists can find middle ground, so that biology teachers instruct their students that all living things on Earth were created by God 6,000 years ago, but that God evolved from a bacteria. Industrialists and the EPA can find compromise, so that corporations dump just half of their deadly toxins into reservoirs of drinking water. Tree huggers and logging companies can come to a consensus, so that all the redwoods along the Pacific coast are cut straight down the middle, leaving the northern side of each tree standing, with the southern side harvested for toilet paper pulp and wood chips.

Thank you, President Obama, for showing us the wisdom of the middle way! I’m going to take this new philosophy to heart tomorrow, and go out in public with my shirt halfway over my head, and my pants around my knees… but only until noon, because I wouldn’t want to be absolutist or anything.

It is time that I, the original force behind Irregular Times, reveal myself. It has always been me creating all the articles and pictures and movies at Irregular Times.

That’s not to say that the other authors are not real. They are real. I created them too.

I, after all, created everything. I am Herbie the Cosmic Iguana, and I created the Universe!

I also destroyed the Universe last Thursday, and then created it again by evening time, which accounts for the troubles you had with your workday.

I have been forced to bow my knee to Irregular Times reader Jacob, who doubts my existence, and instead worships the false deity, God. Let’s just think about this for a moment. If you were to be the creator of the entire universe, would you give yourself such a short, boring name as God, or would you instead choose the funky name of Herbie the Cosmic Iguana? Well, I know what I’d do, which is why I did it! Proves my point!

Anyway, here I am, formally announcing myself in a personal way to Jacob, because, hey, that’s what a real personal relationship with your creator means, you know?

Aw, let’s dispense with the formalities, Jacob. I have a very important family secret about your heritage to tell you, if you’ll just watch my video introduction…

I was planting foxgloves near the foundation of my house this morning. It’s an old foundation, made of blocks of sedimentary rock. Every time I work near it, I think of old things, lost and forgotten things.

So it was that my mind turned to foxglove secrets. Foxgloves are fancied as faerie flowers, herbs that have some connection to the mysterious wee folk of British gardens. They’re poisonous plants as well, being the source of the medicine digitalis, which in large doses can kill. As I dug, my mind started wandering to the idea that devoted gardeners of foxgloves might have secrets - at the very least, secrets for planting foxgloves.

So, I searched for the phrase foxglove secrets, and here’s what I found:

- Over at GardenWeb, a reader asks for secrets for growing foxgloves, and only gets the one real response, that the plants are biennials and self-seeding.
- Fox 4 Flowers offers some more information about foxgloves, including the etymylogical tip that the name foxgloves doesn’t have anything to do with foxes, but is an adaptation of the original name for the flowers: folk’s gloves, referring to the idea that faeries might wear the flowers on their fingers.
- Helen Burke, in her poem Foxgloves, writes that:

I keep some foxgloves in my secret cupboard.
They are as innocent as snow, sweet purple snow,
they can put a spell on you.
But do not fear them… they show you a simple face.

Spells sound secret enough, and what about that secret cupboard? Is it a suicide cupboard? There are easier ways to go than the heart contractions brought on by digitalis, surely.

How is purple snow innocent? If I see snow that’s purple, I don’t think of it as innocent, or sweet, unless it’s in a snowcone. Is Burke talking about going to a carnival?

I also want to know, if snow is innocent, what it is innocent of. Has snow been accused of a crime that it did not commit? And what about rain? Is Burke suggesting that rain is guilty of something?

I think I’m going to use this line the next time it rains, as people are preparing their umbrellas: This rain looks guilty to me.

The indiscretions of the rain may be the closest I get to foxglove secrets today.

The lies about Barack Obama’s citizenship began to unravel last October, when Anabaptist minister Ron McRae telephoned Sarah Hussein Obama, Barack Obama’s paternal grandmother, and asked her whether Barack Obama had indeed been born in Kenya, rather than in Hawaii, as had been claimed. Obama’s grandmother confirmed that yes, Barack had been born in Kenya, at the Obama family’s Communist collective farm and militant reeducation camp outside of Nairobi.

This phone call had been dismissed as just part of an elaborate right wing conspiracy theory, but this morning, Americans for Freedom of Information released the following photograph, which shows the the newborn Barack Obama being held by his mother, Ann Dunham, with Sarah Hussein Obama, at the Obama Commune, in front of a road sign which clearly reads, “Nairobi”. The last time I checked, there was no city of Nairobi in Hawaii!

This photograph also clearly documents that Ann Dunham was an associate of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and an active member of revolutionary Communist circles. Barack Obama’s Communist rise to power seems to have been planned from the start.

Many questions are raised by this new piece of evidence. Why was Che Guevara present at the birth of Barack Obama? Is it true that Guevara was the true father of Barack Obama? If so, did Sarah Obama, Barack’s “grandmother”, know about the relationship, indicating that the Obama Commune was not only a terrorist training camp, but also a free love sex resort?

Also, what implications does this photograph have for President Obama’s plan to take away all of our guns and create a North American Union by building a superhighway and creating an Amero currency to replace the American dollar? What is Ron McRae’s relationship with Raila Odinga, and do the two now plan to get married in Maine? Will Celeste and Loren Davis be invited to sing the Internationale? Will Ron McRae wear white?

Dandelions and coffee run against each other, historically. Both come from the eastern hemisphere, but from very different places. Coffee grew originally in the Ethiopian highlands, their berries nibbled by goats. Dandelions grew, and still do, as they do across North America now - in great grassy areas, among the rocks, they scatter with the wind, coming up wherever their seeds fall.

Dandelions were brought here for eating as salad greens, and then were abandoned, now to be treated as weeds. Coffee was for drinking, but didn’t really catch on in the British colonies until the American revolution made tea traded through England unpatriotic.

Today, will coffee and dandelions swap places again, with dandelions overtaking the Starbucks brew in popularity? Maybe, if Americans learn to drink down the bitter root and fend for themselves.

Just as the source of tea became problematic for Americans in the late 1700s, the source of coffee is becoming progress in our own time. Coffee is grown in the tropics, mostly on land where rainforest has been cut down, mostly harvested by workers who are paid a pittance for their work. Even fair trade organic coffees sold in the USA aren’t really sustainable. They’re shipped hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles. They’re not a local food.

I love drinking coffee, but the more I think about all the energy and exploitation that goes into a cup of joe, the more I want to try cutting back. That’s where dandelions come in. Dandelion root, it turns out, can be roasted and brewed just like coffee.

There are a couple of ways to get dandelion root. One way is to pay for it. Bouncing Bear Botanicals sells it for six dollars for 114 grams. Brew Organic is asking three dollars for just an ounce. That seems a bit steep, considering how easily dandelions grow, doesn’t it?

I suggest, unless you live in a relentlessly paved city, or one of those extreme desert environments in the USA where dandelions don’t grow, that you get out a shovel and dig the dandelion roots up yourself. I have plenty, and I also have some neighbors who I know wouldn’t mind me digging the dandelions out of their lawn.

Now, here’s the “recipe” for making dandelion root coffee:

1. Wash the roots. You’re not making mud brew.
2. Chop the roots into sections.
3. Put these root sections into a bowl of water, and shake them all about until the water gets cloudy. Dump this water out into your garden, or on your houseplants. Repeat, until the water doesn’t get cloudy any more. That dandelion sap is really bitter.
4. Do a coarse grind of the raw roots in a food processor, until the roots are about three times the size of coffee beans.
5. Roast the roots by spreading them out in a thin layer on cookie sheets in an oven at a low temperature, something between 225 and 275 degrees Fahrenheit for about 2 hours. Bake some bread at the same time or do a large batch to be energy efficient. Make sure they’re roasted evenly by mixing them about halfway through the process. The roots should turn the color of… surprise… coffee beans. Be careful that they don’t get burned. Brewed cinders don’t taste good.
6. Find an airtight container to store these roasted roots in, until… you grind them up in a coffee grinder and brew them just like you would with coffee grounds.
7. Take what you don’t brew yourself, and sell that in elegant little bags at extravagant prices.

Try it out, and tell me what you think.

Representative James Moran stood before Congress earlier this week and declared it to be Molecular Imaging Week. Here it is, Friday, and I’m just finding out now.

I’m not the sort of person to let a little discouragement stand in my way, so I’ve dedicated myself all day today to the pursuit of imaging molecules.

Now that I’m looking, I’m seeing molecules everywhere! Glory be! That’s really what Molecular Imaging Week is all about, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s not like an invitation for lobbyists from big medical equipment manufacturers to come and get special access to members of Congress or anything like that.

So, please, tell me - what have you been doing to celebrate Molecular Imaging Week?

I was not a good professor. This was not because I could not think well; it was because I did not think well. I had been an excellent student from Grade 1 up through the last year of my PhD program, earning good grades and accolades. The years of my assistant professorship were, from start to finish, a disaster. I accomplished next to nothing, and at the time I did not understand why. It is only with hindsight that I recognize the source of change in my behavior: the substitution of an elaborate system of short-term rewards and punishments for near-absolute freedom and one long-term dictate: “Be brilliant. You have seven years.”

I am prone to bouts of melancholy, periods of time during which I feel ineffective, am inclined to see problems as daunting, lack purpose, and have to struggle to take a positive perspective. I’ve learned that if I engage in physical exercise, these feelings abate. Unfortunately, when I’m mired in melancholy I’m inclined to disregard exercise as a solution, thinking to myself, “Ah, me, if I exercise now the effect will be temporary and I’ll have to exercise all over again tomorrow. Why bother?” When I’ve exercised, this fatalistic lassitude seems silly; when I haven’t exercised, it seems wise.

This afternoon, I had a wall-banger of a headache, mixing nausea, pressure and disorientation with a pain that curled my body in on itself. While I’m in these sorts of headaches, I often have a strong urge to take something sharp and stick it in my ears, my eyes or my nose. It occurs to me during these headaches that if only I puncture my head, all the pain and pressure will drain from my head and I’ll be better. Fortunately, the headaches also bring on an urge to be still, which to date has canceled out the urge to find some kind of skewer and stick it in. That’s good. Unfortunately, this overwhelming desire to be still also keeps me from taking the pain meds that will end my headaches more quickly. When these intense headaches are over and done, as mine is now, I not only have recovered but find that my senses and intellect are actually sharper than before the headache began. There’s a great pleasure in this heightened state of cognition, and since I’m no longer feeling any pain, I’m tempted to say that the agony of the preceding headache has been worth it.

Problems may have logical solutions that can be rationally articulated, but humans are not necessarily or even primarily rational. In my personal life, I find that the quality of my thought is uncomfortably dependent upon the state of my body. What seems rational to me might depend on what I’ve had for breakfast. I am most successful not when I focus solely on cogitation, but rather when I engage in habits of action most likely to produce the sort of thought that leads, in turn, to practical success. Are the people most capable of guiding themselves and others through a course from individual action to focused thought and onward to coordinated achievement the ones we recognize as leaders? Is it fair to say that an institution capable of manipulating human actions, perceptions and choices is an institution that wields power over humanity?

On the wall of my bathroom upstairs, there’s a map of the world - The Earth From Space - published by the GeoSphere Project. The GeoSphere Project publishes images of the world with the hope that if we can see the world, we can learn to live with it sustainably.

This evening, looking at the map, I noticed an archipelago in the Indian Ocean that I had never noticed before. I sat there for 5 minutes, trying to remember the name of this archipelago, and trying to think of why I had noticed it before. It was quite large, after all.

Then I stood up, and I saw that the archipelago was a smudge. A smudge on the plastic laminate protecting the map. I rubbed it out, and now, the smudge archipelago is gone.

Cosponsorship, the act of registering one’s name as an official supporter of a bill, is a common activity in the United States Senate. Although the 111th Congress is less than two months old, 1753 cosponsorships for 495 Senate Bills and 11 Senate Joint Resolutions have been officially registered. That’s an average of 3 cosponsorships per bill, which may not sound like much for a body with 99 members, but there’s actually a fair amount of variation from that mean, with 180 bills having no cosponsors and one bill (the successfully passed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) gaining 54 cosponsors.

Cosponsorship is an important behavior not only because it is associated with the likelihood of a bill’s passage out of committee and on to floor consideration (see Wilson and Young 1997: Legislative Studies Quarterly 12:25-43), but also because it can give us a glimpse into patterns of support for a wide variety of bills. If we only reference roll call votes to characterize patterns of legislative support, then we’re getting a biased picture, missing a majority of the activity that goes on in the Senate. Most bills never get a roll call vote; by studying cosponsorship we can get detailed information regarding patterns of cooperation on issues small and large, popular and unpopular.

At That’s My Congress we’ve been looking at which members of Congress have been more or less active in cosponsorship on an individual basis, but cosponsorship is more than an individual act. It is at least potentially part of a social bandwagon effort to build congressional coalitions for a bill. Advocacy groups certainly speak of cosponsorship this way in their legislative activism. But even if cosponsorship were to be a solitary act based on independent rational calculus, it would be relational in the sense that the similarity of patterns of cosponsorship between two members of Congress indicates the similarity of their policy priorities. Cosponsorship networks — whether they model social ties, policy similarity, or both — are an important object of study.

Perhaps the most intuitive way to measure ties between two Senators in a cosponsorship network is as the number of bills which both Senators have measured. Below is a matrix showing the cosponsorship network of Alaska Senator Mark Begich, California Senator Barbara Boxer, Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl. Data is valid for all Senate bills with a prefix of S. or S.J. Res. (leaving out the procedural Senate Resolutions and Concurrent Resolutions) through March 1, 2009:

Across any row, the number of shared cosponsorships is a good indicator of the behavioral similarity of various pairs of Senators. The maximum value for any row is on the “diagonal,” the cell in which a Senator is compared to himself or herself. In the language of the specified relation, we could awkwardly say that Senator Mark Begich has cosponsored 26 bills that Senator Mark Begich has also cosponsored — or we could say in plain English that Senator Mark Begich has cosponsored 26 bills. In this set, Senator Begich’s behavior is most similar to Senator Boxer’s, with the two cosponsoring 16 of the same bills. Senators Begich and Kaufman have only cosponsored one bill together, while Senators Begich and Kyl have nothing in common.

But what happens if we want to make a comparisons between rows? We know, for instance, that the Senators Begich and Kaufman have cosponsored just one bill in common, and that Senators Boxer and Kyl have cosponsored just one bill in common as well. But looking down the diagonal we know that the overall levels of cosponsorship varies from Senator to Senator: 26 for Begich, 42 for Boxer, 5 bills for Kaufman and 15 bills for Kyl. You could argue that the shared cosponsorship of 1 bill between Begich and Kaufman is more meaningful for Kaufman than it the shared cosponsorship of 1 bill between Boxer and Kyl. For Barbara Boxer, that’s just one bill out of 42, but for Ted Kaufman it’s one bill out of five. Oddly enough, the very same number of shared bills between Senators Boxer and Begich — 16 — means something different from each Senator’s perspective. 62% of the bills Mark Begich has cosponsored (16/26) are also Boxer bills, while 38% of the bills Barbara Boxer has cosponsored are also Begich bills. The share of Boxer-type bills in Begich’s cosponsorship profile is lower than the share of Begich-type bills in Boxer’s cosponsorship profile… but the raw numbers don’t tell you that.

To create a standard measure that has the same meaning across all pairs of senators, we can use Pearson’s product moment correlation for each pair of Senators instead. To find Pearson’s correlation between two Senators X and Y here’s what we’ll do:

1. For every one of the 506 Senate bills introduced as of today i, ask the dichotomous questions, “Has Senator X cosponsored bill i?” and “Has Senator Y cosponsored bill i?” We’ll call the answer to the first question Xi and the answer to the second question Yi, and give each a value of 1 if the answer is “yes” and a value of 0 if the answer is “no.”

2. Why a 0-1 variable? One reason is that the mean of Xi for all 506 i Senate bills is equal to the proportion (or, when multiplied by 100, the percentage) of all of the bills that Senator X has cosponsored.

3. Now for each bill i, we’ll subtract the mean of Xi (for all bills) from Xi (this particular bill). That’s called the “deviation” from the mean, and the result is positive if cosponsorship happens and negative if cosponsorship doesn’t happen. We’ll do the same thing for Yi and the mean of Yi to obtain the deviation for Senator Y.

4. Then we’ll multiply the deviation for Senator X on bill i times the deviation for Senator Y on bill i. Why? Well, remember that a positive deviation occurs when cosponsorship of bill i has happened, and that a negative deviation means cosponsorship of bill i hasn’t happened. A positive deviation for X, multiplied by a positive deviation for Y, gives us a positive result. So when both Senator X and Senator Y cosponsor, we get a positive number. How about when both don’t cosponsor? Well, then we get a positive number too. But when Senator X cosponsors and Senator Y doesn’t (or when Senator Y cosponsors and Senator X doesn’t), we’ll multiply a positive number and a negative number, which always gives us a negative number. The end result of all this is a positive number if Senators X and Y do the same thing regarding bill i, and a negative number if they do different things regarding bill i.

5. We’ll do that same calculation over and over again, once for every one of the 506 Senate bills existing as of today. The result is that we’ll have 506 numbers for the 506 bills. Some of the bills will be positive (when Senators X and Y do the same thing), and some of them will be negative (when Senators X and Y do different things).

6. Now add all of those numbers up. If Senators X and Y tend to do the same thing regarding cosponsorship of bills more often than they differ, the sum of all those numbers will be positive. If Senators X and Y tend to diverge in their cosponsorship choice more often, the sum will be negative. If the sum is zero, then that tells you Senators X and Y differ as often as they do the same thing.

7. Here’s where I wave my hands a bit: dividing this result by the product of {the number of bills, the standard deviation of all Xi and the standard deviation of all Yi} standardizes the result so that the biggest possible positive value is 1 and the biggest possible negative value is -1. That’s so the value of the result can be interpreted the same way, no matter how many bills Senator X or Senator Y cosponsored overall.

8. Do this for all possible pairs of Senators, and you’ll have a number for every pair of Senators telling you whether the pair acts the same way regarding a bill more often than the pair acts divergently (a positive correlation) or whether the pair acts divergently more often than it acts the same way (a negative correlation).

So I did that. Rather, I had my computer do that, using a PHP program to access current reports on congressional bills via the online Thomas system and the awesome network analysis program called UCINET to run calculations.

Want to see the results? I could put them in a matrix, just as I did above, but then I’d have 99 rows and 99 columns for the 99 Senators currently seated, with 9,801 number-filled cells. How’d you like to interpret that? Blech. I sure wouldn’t, and besides, the table wouldn’t fit on your screen. Our eyes are simply better at perceiving patterns when they’re presented in the form of a picture, and our technologies are designed better to show such pictures. Pictures of relational data are called sociograms, and they work like this:

1. Every Senator is a dot.
2. Every relationship between two Senators (that meets some standard) is a line between the dots.
3. That’s it.
4. No, really, that’s it.

Let’s look at sociograms of those cosponsorship correlations between United States Senators for the 111th Congress so far. The ones you see below are generated using Netdraw.

There are two ways we can go with a sociogram. One is to look at a particular member of the Senate and to use the space of the sociogram to describe every other Senator’s relationship to that focal senator. Here’s just such a sociogram featuring Senator Mark Begich:

This form, the sociometric star, features shorter ties for higher correlations between Senators, since those indicate closer behavioral agreement. I’ve pulled aside the Senators who share absolutely no common cosponsorships with Begich. You’ll see they’re coded in blue and feature no line connecting them to Begich since they are wholly unconnected with Begich when it comes to supporting legislation in the Senate. Such unconnected individuals are called “isolates.”

The other sort of sociogram we can use draws a tie between two Senators when the strength of connection between them meets a certain threshold. In order to show relationships of strong correspondence between senators, correlations of positive 0.33 or greater merit a tie in the sociogram below:

One of the nice things about sociograms is that you can use graphic elements to display additional information. Here, I’ve given Republican senators the color red, Democratic senators the color blue, and Independent senators the color green. And finally, here at the end of our investigation, we can begin to address the assumptions behind those classic political colors. Most news reports on the Congress don’t go beyond such ideas of partisanship in describing the political coalitions in the Senate. Reporters will make blanket statements like “Republicans in the Senate are close to having no voice whatsoever” and references to “the growing strength of Democrats in the Senate”, but we don’t have to assume that the Senate is organized on a strictly partisan basis. Instead, without making any judgment about partisanship, we can look at the actual pattern of cooperation in cosponsorship and see what patterns naturally emerge.

In this sociogram, members of the Senate are made to appear close to one another not because they are members of the same political party, but because of strong cosponsorship bonds they share. Cliques of three, four, six, even ten senators are visible as well, groups within which all senators have a strong record of supporting the same sort of bills. These cliques do not encompass all members of a political party, but rather occur inside them. Senators Kay Hagan, Mark Warner, Ted Kaufman and James Webb form a strong Chesapeake-Carolina coalition of junior senators, but none of them have a strong tendency toward supporting the bills favored by a bigger clique of more senior Democratic senators including Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Barbara Mikulski and Chuck Schumer (among many others). Conservative Senators Lindsey Graham, Johnny Isakson and Robert Bennett have a strong record of cooperation in their support of bills, but do not appear to be coordinating strongly with other conservatives like Sam Brownback or John Ensign.

That said, there’s a split in this cosponsorship network that is undeniable. All of the Republicans who have any strong correlations with other senators have those strong correlations only to other Republicans. All of the Democrats having any strong correlations in cosponsorship with other senators have those strong correlations only to other Democrats. That doesn’t look bipartisan, does it?

Well, looks may be deceiving. Yes, there are large groups of Senators whose support for bills isn’t strongly bipartisan. But remember that ties are reported only above a certain threshold of co-operation. There may be weak bipartisanship among many of these senators happening on an occasional basis. And look again at the sociogram. There are 24 senators who appear as “isolates” because they do not have a strong correlation in their pattern of bill cosponsorship with any other senator. Some of these senators, like Richard Shelby and Michael Bennet, appear as isolates because, frankly, they’re not doing much of anything but marking time and enjoying the Capitol Hill cafeteria.

But other “isolates” have earned low correlations with other senators not for their inactivity but for their high level of independent, eclectic activity. Senator John McCain, for instance, has not only introduced a number of his own bills but has cosponsored a number of bills written by and supported largely by Senate Democrats, Democrats as fiercely liberal as Russell Feingold. These cosponsorships have the effect of canceling out cosponsorships shared with fiercely conservative senators like Jim DeMint, giving John McCain a strong correlation with the cosponsorship record of no one else. That makes McCain, yes, a Maverick. It gives him weak behavioral ties to others. But these are, putting substantive judgment aside, bridging ties, ties connecting parts of the Senate in ways that the more insular ties of strictly liberal or conservative senators don’t.

There’s a lot to uncover in these cosponsorship networks, and a lot to explain as well. Look for more updates, information and analysis of congressional cosponsorship from Irregular Times and That’s My Congress.