Radical Republicans

An interesting tidbit from TIME® about the Republican April Fools' budget. You may remember; the one w/ the three or four circles & a line joining them? As we know budgets & all iterations of economics are bullshit, we paid little to no attention at the time, & someone else may have revealed all this a mo. ago., but this booster shot of schoolin' won't hurt. Much.

It's a radical document, making Bush's tax cuts permanent while adding about $3 trillion in new tax cuts skewed toward the rich. It would replace almost all the stimulus — including tax cuts for workers as well as spending on schools, infrastructure and clean energy — with a capital gains–tax holiday for investors. Oh, and it would shrink the budget by replacing Medicare with vouchers, turning Medicaid into block grants, means-testing Social Security and freezing everything else except defense and veterans' spending for five years, putting programs for food safety, financial regulation, flu vaccines and every other sacred government cow on the potential chopping block.

Looking more like the Party of Hoover each day. Which is what the larger TIME® story is about. We haven't read to the counter-point yet, but it's heading in the direction of "Yes, it's over."

A former talking Republican head (Who came across as a strident jerk on the tube, by the way.) Ed Rogers

recently decided to quit being a talking head: "I had a meeting with myself, and I said, Do we really need more white lobbyists with gray hair on TV?" But it's not clear that more diverse spokesmen or better tweets can woo a new generation to the GOP; support for gay rights is soaring, and polls show that voters prefer Democratic approaches to health care, education and the economy. "The outlook for Republicans is even worse than people think," says Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. "Their biggest problem is that they really believe what they believe."

That can be an insurmountable problem.