Texas Republicans

The Texas Republican Party Platform. As in the platform of the party George Bush ran on. Let's see how it holds up. The sad part is, this is toned down from what it was a couple years ago. See here for the 2004 Texas Republican Party's Greatest Hits. It went into a lot more specifics, the scary kind of specifics. A laundry list of basic government functions to get rid of, clear talk about "Biblical law" and the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, etc. Scary stuff. This is where the current leaders of the Republican Party came from. I think they caught wise and cut out the specifics. That or the specifics are in the PDF version. Yeah, there they are. I'll just go over the short version for now, though.

Point 1 is just words about "limited government", and lip service to the Constitution etc. Mostly irrelevant.

Point 2 is where it starts to get interesting. Straight up we've got an establishment of religion ("We believe that human life is sacred, created in the image of God.") and the hard-line anti-abortion "life starts at conception" stance.

Point 3 seems to be mostly more words made meaningless by their repetition by politicians who don't mean them, but has a dig at affirmative action.

Point 4 is HILARIOUS. "We believe that government spending is out of control and needs to be reduced. We support fundamental, immediate tax reform that is simple, fair, and fully disclosed. We commend President George W. Bush’s principled stand to reduce taxes and stimulate the economy." This is where Jon Stewart would look at the camera and raise an eyebrow, and say nothing.

Point 5 is boilerplate anti-gay marriage. Though it has the interesting phrase "natural man and a natural woman", which I guess means they're against transsexuals getting married, too. And the last line about "The family is responsible for its own welfare, education, moral training, conduct, and property," is really rather Orwellian.

Point 6 is a sentence about "school choice", which presumably means vouchers and homeschooling.

Point 7 is just words about "excessive government regulation", there to throw a sop to the libertarians. Meaningless in practice.

Point 8 talks about "vigorously protecting the sovereignty of the United States". Damn those UN black helicopters.

Point 9 is scary. "We take a principled stand to preemptively defend the citizens of the United States against all foes, foreign or domestic, whose goal is to destroy our American way of life." is the first half, then the second half is a boilerplate about freedom not being free and respecting soldiers. What domestic enemies, exactly, are they feeling the need to pre-emptively defend the American way of life from?

Point 10 is boilerplate followed by code words including "truth in sentencing" and "activist judges".

Mad Science Theory

For a long while, I've thought sexual frustration was one of the main things driving mad scientists. So if they started getting laid, they'd be a lot less likely to want to blow up the world. The last few months of Narbonic have hinted at the same thing, at least in Shaneon's world.

I'm feeling particularly sorry for Madblood, the only kind of relationships he seems to be able to manage are with arch-nemeses. Nd mostly they just play Parcheesi. Find him a nice little cute lab assistant who likes him, and he'd probably end up doing something useful with an arctic base. Maybe that's why Helen's mom cloned Helen, besides all the other crap that comes with relationships.

Hmm. Nobody tell Artie, he'd try and set up a mad scientist dating service to do good, and it'd end up almost destroying the world. Probably because mad scientists don't just tend to go drink when they get dumped.

I wonder if I should post this to snarkoleptics, it doesn't really involve anything useful, though.

Easy Problems

Man, having too man cool stamps to pick from to put on my cool greeting cards isn't much of a problem. I think I'll use superhero stamps on everybody's. That's holiday themed, right? And if anybody has a preference on superheroes, feel free to comment. The Batman stamps are already claimed, I'm afraid.

Also, I have extra cards since I bought a whole box, so anybody who wants a midwinter appropriate holiday card. just say so in the comments. I'll leave them screened so it won't show people's addresses.