Your Republican Party

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rubicon of Crazy has finally been crossed with Senator Lindsey Graham in the vanguard.

“It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on Tuesday. He was defending Mitt Romney, who, as this morning’s editorial in The Times notes, appears to have the most elaborate history of tax avoidance – offshore tax havens, disputed sheltering mechanisms, complex trusts – of any major presidential candidate in history. 

Invest in the Cayman Islands, Mr. Graham seems to be saying. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

Party before Country.  It's the Republican way!

[T]here is no longer any civic pride in paying [taxes], even among officials supposedly dedicated to public service. As Senator Graham put it, Congress created tax loopholes, so why not take advantage of them?

Without a properly funded government offering services for the people, what precisely is their vision of America?  What exactly is "America" absent her Republic and our democratic practices?  Rollerball-world, I suspect.

The most powerful men in the world are the executives. They run the major corporations which fix prices, wages, and the general economy, and we all know they're crooked, and they have almost unlimited power and money, but I have considerable power and money myself and I'm still anxious. What can I possibly want, I ask myself, except, possibly, more knowledge? 

I consider recent history-which is virtually all anyone remembers-and how the corporate wars ended, so that we settled into the Six Majors: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, FOOD, HOUSING, SERVICES, and LUXURY. Sometimes I forget who runs what - for instance, now that the universities are operated by the Majors (and provide the farm system for Roller Ball Murder), which Major runs them? SERVICES or LUXURY? Music is one of our biggest industries, but I can't remember who administers it. Narcotic research is now under FOOD, I know, though it used to be under LUXURY.