A Few Links to Consider

by Oly Mike

• Paul Street - read a rather long piece on backfire from Paul this week. Pretty strong stuff.
Here's a better link for the Backfire story. When Facts Don’t Matter Left Reflections on Backfire, Propaganda, and How to Fight (or Not Fight) the Right

• Dean Baker -Beat the Press - heard him talk this week on public radio about how and why there is no crisis of Social Security funding, but there is a crisis of health care and our health care system. Pretty good stuff, but begs the backfire issue from Paul. Facts don't seem to matter, they just seem to harden the flawed belief systems of the opposition. How do we overcome that? How do we win over the tea partiers? Try to sort that one out.

• Clarence Thomas - the cynical choice of the party that claims to hate quotas, Mr. Thomas was appointed to the Bench where Thurgood Marshall once sat. But where Justice Marshall was an inspiring justice, Thomas sits approaching his fifth anniversary without saying a word from the bench. Probably has nothing meaningful to say, but he should probably be impeached and removed from the SCOTUS for failure to disclose his household income that strongly suggests huge conflicts of interest. I would love to see him gone. It would produce the possibility of a 4 to 4 tie on the right wing's judicial activism to further a corporate agenda, but I don't see how that ever happens. The judiciary is almost as far right as the Fox Network these days. A product of a relentless push to seat only "right"-thinking jurists.

Got a car in the garage that needs my attention. Done blogging for now, need to go improve grounds on my latest Jetta project and see if I can get it on the road today.

Blue skies, snow on Baw Faw Peak to the west of me today. Hope you are also looking at a beautiful day.