Has the GOP lost its mind? Ctd.

You'll get my 100-watt incandescent bulb when you pry it from my cold dead table lamp, buddy. Believe it or not, the Republican-controlled House voted today to withhold funding from a 2007 law that increases efficiency standards for light bulbs. Per the NY Times, the new standards would require most light bulbs to be 60 percent more efficient by 2020. To Republicans, however, that's a dystopian "thoughtcrime" worthy of Orwell's 1984. Evidently, better bulbs "have become a symbol of what conservatives see as an unnecessary intrusion by the federal government into the market." Today we scratch our heads over the fact that educated elites once led witch hunts to stamp out "Satanic threats" to Christendom. How, we wonder, could people possibly be that stupid? But since there is clearly less than six degrees of separation from the wild-eyed witch hunters of old and today's conservative "incandescenistas", maybe it's not so hard to fathom after all. Ironically, Orwell captured the essence of these folks in his description of Parsons, an employee at the Ministry of Truth in 1984: "Parsons ... was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms - one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended." A chillingly accurate portrait of too many folks in what passes for the Grand Old Party today, is it not?