Republicans - Please Take Back Your Party

[dweller]

by Thom Hartmann

Today's so-called Republicans have established a mind-numbing record at polluting the environment; bloating
government; appointing crony partisans; pushing the nation into debt to fund tax cuts for the rich; legislatively
catering to the world's largest corporations; opposing women's rights; kneecapping states, local communities, and
schools; eviscerating constitutional protections of liberty at home; and devastating our nation's reputation abroad.

They try to re-write history - the biography of Thomas Jefferson on the www.whitehouse.gov website has been
re-written to turn him into a man who had "assumed leadership of the Republicans," while the reality was that
Jefferson's party was the Democratic-Republicans and still exists today, called the Democratic Party. (The
Republican Party is much more recent, having come into national existence in 1856.)

Corporate shills like former Enron lobbyist and current GOP chairman Ed Gillespie would have us think the
Republican party was born in service to corporations. But Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was also
the first president to actively use the power of government in support of striking workers.

In Lincoln's era, the idea of strikes was so novel the word "strike" was put in quotation marks in newspapers, but
Lincoln was often on their side. "Labor," Lincoln wrote, "is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the
fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves
much the higher consideration."

Republicans would do well to revisit the Republican Party's campaign platform of 1872, before the era of corporate
personhood, as it may hold the seeds of their redemption.

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