Three more links to make you think...

First: Republicans lie shamelessly and get away with it by portraying all dissenting voices as "socialist liberals".

Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

Second: a Miami Herald columnist explains that illegal aliens are here illegally because it's literally impossible for them to come legally:

Legal immigration quotas were set more than 20 years ago, when the U.S. demand for unskilled and highly skilled workers was much smaller than today's.

The U.S. labor market demands up to 500,000 low-skilled workers a year, while the current U.S. immigration system allows for only 5,000 permanent visas for that category, according to the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration reform advocacy group.

``There is no real line for unskilled workers,'' says Maurice Belanger, the Forum's public information director. ``If you are a Mexican wanting to get a legal visa to work as a waiter in the United States, you would be dead before you get your visa.''

And finally: a Daily KOS writer explains that the "libertarian" 1800s were no golden age, as Libertarians would have you believe, but for most a hellish time when life was nasty, brutish, and short.

No quote from that one: you really need to read the whole thing. I mean it. It sums up most, if not everything, that I had misgivings about when I was part of the Libertarian movement. And his summation- that conservatives currently calling themselves "libertarians" like, for example, Glenn Beck, are nothing but rich people who don't want to pay taxes... that's right on target.

Go, read, and think.