Bill Moyers @ BU

Inaugural event of the Howard Zinn memorial lecture series.
Video is here
Transcript here

Most chilling: "On . . . "thinkprogress.com" - you can find out how the multi-billionaire Koch brothers - also big oil polluters [er producers] and Tea Party supporters - are recruiting "captains of industry" to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. . . Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch's ‘secretive network of Republican donors' are two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That's right: 2 of the 5 votes [in the recent Citizens United decision] to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so."

Reminds me of the scariest photo (at least for moi) in the Ann Frank museum - that of the German Supreme Court Justices pledging allegiance to Hitler. If members of our Supreme Court are in bed with these folks, what hope have we?

Second most chilling: "The Koch brothers have contributed significantly to efforts to stop the Affordable Care Act - the health care reforms - from taking effect. Justice Clarence Thomas has obviously been doing some home schooling, because his wife Virginia claims those reforms are "unconstitutional," and has founded an organization that is fighting to repeal them. Her own husband on the Supreme Court may one day be ruling on whether she's right or not ("Play the cards fair, Reuben; I know what I dealt you.") There's more: The organization Virginia Thomas founded to kill those health care reforms -- also a goal of the Koch brothers, remember -- got its start with a gift of half a million dollars from an unnamed source, and is still being funded by donors who can't be traced."

How can Judge Thomas possibly claim impartiality if/when these cases to repeal the health care law come before him when his own wife seeks to undermine them?

On a lighter note - the final performance of the Nutcracker went fairly well - amazing what a little subdividing will do to help sort out the fingers. This AM I have to bring the car in for an oil change & hope they can fix the review mirror on the passenger side - it flaps in the wind, which makes seeing anything in it problematic at best. Then off to tootle & begin to get the Tchaikovsky (yes, again) Symph. 2 ready for rehearsals in January.