Angle unveils new website

Sharron Angle's new website is so trimmed down that it fails to mention a few things that she said on her older, long-winded website.

What happened to the U.S. Senate candidate's calls for shutting down the Department of Education?

What about the Republican's idea to develop Yucca Mountain as a site for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel?

This is an unpopular proposal in Clark County. The Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Harry Reid has fought for years to kill plans to turn Yucca into a nuclear waste dump.

Angle has said publicly many times that she does not want Nevada to become a nuclear dumping ground either. But she has added that she wants to turn "lemons into lemonade" by making Yucca into a reprocessing facility that could create hundreds of jobs in a state suffering record high unemployment at 14 percent.

At any rate, there's no discussion of Yucca Mountain on the former Reno assemblywoman's new website.

Her campaign has said the new website is meant to be a trimmer, talking points version of Angle's positions.

If her recent public comments are any guide, it's clear she's not backing down from her conservative GOP ideas, including that the federal government is simply too big and that some departments should be shut down. She wants to leave control of education to local governments, for example.

One controversial idea remains on her new website: Angle doesn't drop her plans for Social Security, which she argues Reid and the government are raiding to pay other federal bills.

"We must keep the promise of Social Security by redeeming the "IOU's" that have been written to the Social Security Trust Fund and then putting that money in a lock box that cannot ever be raided again by Washington politicians. The only way we pay for it is by cutting spending," Angle says on the new website.

"We should also create personalized accounts for the next generation that cannot be raided," she adds.

That's a reference to her proposal to let young workers opt out of Social Security and open their own private retirement accounts instead. She has said that seniors and others who have paid into the system should get their full benefit checks as promised, although she hasn't provided details about how this "transition" would work.

Angle's old website was taken down the day after she won the June 8 Republican primary, winning the right to face Reid in the general election on Nov. 2.

For the past few weeks, people going to the website homepage were met with a request to donate money. And they have: more than $1,370,000 as of mid-day Thursday.

That total is more than Angle raised during her entire GOP primary campaign which began nearly a year ago.