Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. I’m in Canada so posting may be a little thin.
Where are the new Republicans I keep hearing about? The Texas GOP has a “new” platform that could have been written by the John Birch Society.
We Believe in:
1. Strict adherence to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. and Texas Constitutions.
2. Preserving American Freedom and Texas Sovereignty.
3. Limiting the expanse of Government Power.
4. The sanctity of human life, created in the image of God, which should be protected from fertilization to
natural death.
5. Personal Accountability and Responsibility.
6. Self-sufficient families, founded on the traditional marriage of a natural man and a natural woman.
7. Having an educated population, with parents having the freedom of choice for the education of their
children.
8. Americans having the right to be safe in their homes, on their streets, and in their communities, and the
unalienable right to defend themselves.
9. A free enterprise society unencumbered by government interference or subsidies.
10. Restoring American sovereignty and leadership, and we honor all of those that serve and protect our freedom with peace through strength.
So what does that mean in policy terms?
We recommend a national sales tax (which does not include a Value Added Tax) to replace all other Federal taxes once the I.R.S. is abolished and the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is repealed. However, until such time that the income tax is abolished, we support deductions for private and home schooling, home mortgages, and sales taxes.
We believe the Minimum Wage Law should be repealed.
We oppose the Census Bureau’s obtaining data beyond the number of people residing in a dwelling, and we oppose statistical sampling adjustments in the “mid-decade” census. We urge that U.S. citizens who, because of religion or conscience, are compelled to withhold their full response to any census question, be held guiltless. We support the actual counting of people and oppose any type of estimation or manipulation of data.
…
We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.
We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax. We insist that Social Security benefits be non-taxable. To protect the Social Security System, its funds should not be co-mingled or spent with general revenues or invested in private or public corporate stock.
The Texas GOP would like to pick the parts of the Constitution that they like and throw out the parts they don’t like. Isn’t it interesting that all these words like “freedom” and “safety” means screw you, I’ve got mine.
Yesterday Rudy Giuliani went a bridge too far with Mika Brzenzinski:
Brzezinski: Giuliani “vomit[ed] out complete, baseless lies” about Obama’s oil spill response
I guess we already know that Giuliani is a liar (remember when he said 9/11 didn’t happen under Bush?) but infotainment shows continue to put Giuliani on as some kind of expert on something (and it’s not keeping mistresses).