Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee wants to abolish the IRS. Unlike Ron Paul, who also wants to abolish the IRS but wants to replace it with nothing, Huckabee wants to replace income taxes with a national sales tax. This means that every item you buy will have a 23% tax. There is much debate whether this is a good idea or not, and who the winners and losers are from such a plan. I encourage you to do the research and make your own opinions. I did some research today on www.factcheck.org, and found this interesting excerpt:

here are several good economic arguments for the FairTax, unless you earn more than $200,000 per year, fairness is not one of them.

I just watched a really interesting segment of Now on PBS. It was about problems with voting in the United States and how the Department of Justice is no longer interested in enforcing laws that guarantee every eligible voter gets to vote.

Instead it seems the Department of Justice has been co opted by the neo-conservative arm of the Republican Party to work on making sure non-Republican voters can not vote. As a result the arm of the DOJ that is supposed to protect Americans’ right to vote has seen half of its career lawyers leave during the Bush Administration years. During the past five years the DOJ hasn’t brought on a single lawsuit in favor of voters whose right to vote have been illegally denied. It’s the first time in history that’s happened.

The Republican Party is actively engaging in several different practices that aim to remove seemingly “unrepublican” voters from the voter registries across the country but specifically in battleground states. What kind of a democratic institution would do that? China does that. Russia does that. Saddam Hussein did that.

What’s even more sad than catching the Republicans with their pants down giving it to the American public while they’re on their knees is that nobody but the PBS is covering it. Not a single mainstream media outlet is reporting on the issue other than in passing. Here you have the ruling party actively, and almost certainly illegally, preventing eligible voters from voting, for years, and people don’t even know, because nobody is talking about it.

What the hell.

-TPP

Ed Kilgore makes a valid point in discussing “down ballot” races and the perceived polarizing effect of a Hillary Clinton candidancy:

Negative as well as positive enthusiasm towards candidates is often overrated, since “bonus votes” are not rewarded for the intensity of voter preferences. And as [Tom Schaller of New Republic] notes, Obama-hatred or Edwards-hatred might well emerge on the Right if either of those men won the nomination. But the anecdotal case you often hear about Clinton is that she is polarizing in an unbalanced way: her nomination would strongly motivate conservatives who think she’s a dedicated socialist and one-worlder, while discouraging progressives who think she’s a warmongering corporate puppet. (You even hear the reverse argument made about Edwards, i.e., that he’s usefully perceived by Republicans and independents as more “centrist” than he actually as they are, such theories about HRC’s effect on the electorate would have more power if there was any objective evidence for them. So far, polls testing various Democratic candidates against Republican rivals in specific states (mainly those conducted by SurveyUSA) show her doing as well as or better than Obama and Edwards in most states, and doing quite well in red and purple states. To be a “drag” on the ticket down-ballot in a lot of states, you have to actually lose them, and lose them badly. To put it most simply, it’s hard to get too obsessed about the down-ballot “damage” that might be inflicted by a candidate who’s currently running four points ahead of Rudy Giuliani in Kentucky.

I have no doubt that whoever gets the Democratic nomination, the Repub attack machine will slash and burn the nominee. Polarization via divisive wedge issues is what Repubs and its vast noise machine do best. In considering GOP candidates, you won’t hear much about how their candidates divide America. Proof?