Open thread for night owls: Texas Republicans write their platform

It's the season for making fun of state GOP party platforms (actually, the season lasts about a year, so we're well into it); the latest contribution to face national ridicule is from the Texas Republican Party [PDF]. In general, it is par for the course, containing demands to return to the gold standard, ban income taxes, ban most other taxes, ban corporate taxes, hand Social Security over to for-profit corporations, eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency, eliminating the Department of Energy, eliminating the Department of Education, and, let's say, the demand that each village in the land send one virgin a year to be sacrificed in the name of Chuck, God of Thunder and Fossil Fuels. How any of this counts as "conservative" I will leave to more capable minds than mine, since I have long since lost any ability to differentiate between "conservatism" and neo-feudalism or the like.

In a national movement where Batshit Crazy has come to be an outright requirement for higher office, however, sometimes it is the little things that stand out the most. The whole platform was clearly written by whichever small group of Republicans won the Texas annual Batshit Crazy Ron Paul Memorial Thunderdome-Off and Barbeque Weekend competition; even the font they chose to print it in seems a little off'no doubt because serifs are probably French. There are a few sentences about opposing czars, which only became a thing because some Republican somewhere, in the aftermath of the Obama election, decided that calling a passel of assorted, previously uncontroversial bureaucrats czars was now an abomination unto liberty. A bit of Tenth Amendment preening, a random aside declaring that they "strongly oppose" making the District of Columbia a state or otherwise giving it Congressional representation, a truly massive section opposing abortion, contraception, stem cell research and the like, and so on, and so on.

This one's good:

Germane Contents Requirement ' All content of any bill must be germane to the title of the act.

Not only am I for that one, I think it should be backed up by the death penalty. There is a limit to how many anti-environmental bills should be passed off under names like the We Love Jesus Happy Puppy Act, or how many pro-Bush-Tax-cut bills really should be titled Anyone Voting Against This Is Objectively Pro-Terrorist. But I think they may want to have a talk with John Boehner about those things before enshrining them into law (if it were enshrined into law, no doubt the name of the bill would be the Anti-Terrorism Freedom Jesus Apple Pie Hand-Knitted-Sweater Act, because that's how Congress rolls).

Flag Code ' The U.S. flag code should be made into Law and not left to the sole discretion of the President.

I see the flag you glued to your tailgate isn't lit up at night, my ostentatiously patriotic neighbor. Sorry, but it's Gitmo for you.

Human Trafficking ' The Republican Party of Texas adamantly opposes any form of human trafficking.

Um, all right. Good to know.

(Keep reading below the fold.)