"Joe The Plumber" Leaving the GOP?

The Huffington Post indicates that Time magazine says Joe Wurzelbacher, famously known as "Joe The Plumber," is apparently leaving the Republican party.

An edit from the Time article:

Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits.

Is he proposing an alternative at this point?

Joe isn't saying.

Texas Fred today wrote about a third party. The American Conservative Party.

I responded in a comment:

It’s worth examining. With one realization:

WITHOUT changing the ENTIRE WAY we, this nation, CONDUCTS ITS POLITICS, without complete fiscal upheaval and governmental restructuring, without changing any number of laws, ANY party, third, fourth or fifth, runs the risk of getting sucked into the same heady morass in Washington that has corrupted good men and women.
PLUS, you must also change politics and its structure at YOUR OWN local level. I say, and you know it’s true, that your own city council or county board is its OWN “Bootcamp For Corruption.”

Yes, it’s wonderful to theorize about our ideal philosophies. But without REAL and viable POLITICAL CHANGE in terms of the infrastructure of politics, these desires are almost pointless. Along with party or philosophical change there must also be, simultaneously, fundamental structure change.

We somehow have to discover some way to ensure truth in bills (one topic per bill), limit donations, demand and enforce accountability, responsibility (by LAW), balanced budgets (by LAW) and any other number of reforms.

Because what happens locally is only MAGNIFIED in terms of corruption each governmental level climbed. At the local level, for example, a city council member just might like the “take home car” and will do ANYTHING to keep it. That’s just one perk. Imagine a world of nothing but perks and Rock Star, limo, face-time, extremely deferential treatment — with, further, exemptions from rules and strictures enforced upon the electorate. A simple cesspool of corruption.

We can create a third party or embrace a third party. But without all these other measures in place, in time (a shockingly SHORT time) they’ll come to love their own personal plate of steaming corruption and you’ll be left with what you have now: disappointment and the withering and crumbling of our very core fundamental tenets as written in our Constitituion and Bill of Rights.

If we embrace a new party or the same party, our structure MUST CHANGE. Free Cheese is simply, otherwise, too compelling, too alluring, without limits and discipline in place.

So I posit to you all:

IS it time for a Third Party?

BZ