The wedge between the establishment GOP and the Tea Party gets driven deeper with each passing day, and got a good whack yesterday when House Republican media darling Peter King had something to say about the Senator from Calgary:
“My sound bite is to say he’s a fraud,” Mr. King said. “I start with that, and then I go on. It takes me two or three minutes to explain it.”
Jumping ahead to that third minute, Mr. King said precisely what he thought of the Cruz tactic: “It is just a form of governmental terrorism.”
There are some Republican voters out there praising Ted Cruz for his one man “filibuster” of Obamacare. These poor uninformed folks think that what Cruz is doing will eventually result in the law being dismantled, or straight up voided by the Democrats and the President. Ted Cruz is their hero. As far as they are concerned he is the only one standing up for them.
But what Cruz is doing is not a filibuster, although he recently called it a filibuster when he explained that he would do everything he could to defund Obamacare. This antic is nothing more than a speech. A speech engineered to guarantee the self infatuated Cruz with as much publicity and as much donations from the uninformed Republican voter as possible.
The Senate Leader Harry Reid, has already laid out the rules to Cruz, and Senate business on the very amendment Cruz is trying to fight will be voted on before the month is out.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is expected to introduce an amendment at some point which will restore the funding of Obamacare to the continuing resolution. A final vote on passage of the stop-gap spending measure is expected to come late Sunday if all the time for debate is used. This leaves the House of Representatives with less than a day to work on the continuing resolution before the Oct. 1 deadline at which point the government would shut down.
But don’t take my word for it Republicans, send in your donations to Cruz today before time runs out! This Cruz missile needs your finances to completely destroy Obamacare!
It’s not enough for Ted Cruz to be wrong, because he is. It’s not enough that he’s offensive, because he is. And it’s not enough that he’s a hypocrite, because he is. The worst part is that he has the whole package, and he’s terribly difficult to listen to. But Ted Cruz represents much more in our era of divided, extremist, conservative government: It’s the end of the line. When people like Ted Cruz make speeches that reference Nazi Germany and compare the present administration to it, you know that the GOP has gone gonzo overboard. This is not a governing party anymore–it’s a collection of conspiracy theorists who happened to win votes in gerrymandered districts and in states where the majority of uninsured people in the United States live, but who have convinced themselves that getting health insurance amounts to treason.
The conservative movement has reached its apogee and is now in its slow, painful, destructive decline. It will bring a good part of the country down with it, but the good news is that at its worst, it only controls the House of Representatives. If it shuts down the government next week, it will lose that in 2014 and if it runs an ultra-conservative in 2016, it will lose that election too.
I’ve heard many pundits and political science professors say that we live in a center-right leaning country, and at this time I’m inclined to believe it. The problem for the Republicans is that they are not center-right: They are far right and represent a minority of the country. Most people don’t want radical change of the sort that the far right is promoting. Many people oppose the health care law for good reason, but to say that it will drag down the economy and that it’s the death knell of our way of life is irresponsible and hyperbolic.
But I guess Ted Cruz had to happen. Even members of his own party are abandoning him. If the shutdown is to be avoided, Democrats in the House will need a bill to support. This is not good for John Boehner or any of the farther rightists.
But it’s the best thing to happen to the country in a while. Perhaps things are finally looking up.
Did you know that Obamacare is everything that’s wrong with the Government? And if you cannot defund or repeal Obamacare, then nothing else matters and the government might as well shut down?
Well that is the stance that Republicans have taken recently since their leader Ted Cruz forced a House vote stating just that – defund Obamacare or shut down the government.
And Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate who ran his campaign on a “morality” and Christianity platfirm joined the Cruz Chorus, demanding that 30 million Americans lose their health care, or else…
In an interview on CNN’s New Day, the host asked Santorum if he supported Cruz’s efforts to defund Obamacare and his government shutdown ultimatum. Needless to say, Santorum agreed, saying that people in Washington are too accustomed to working together to solve problems.
“I would be with Ted Cruz,” Santorum explained. “What happens in Washington, D.C. is that everybody just muddles together and tries to work things out, and when you have a president and a Senate controlled by one party that means, generally speaking, if you want more-limited government, it’s going to be a bad deal.”
And he implied that Cruz’s my way or the highway approach is the way to go. Make the comfortable people uncomfortable.
“I guess, I can say I’ve been accused of putting my party in a bad spot repeatedly when I was in the Senate, and sometimes you have to do that. You have to make people uncomfortable because people do get too comfortable in sort of cutting the deal.”
Sarah Palin is angry and she wants everyone including her employer Fox News, to know it.
An avid supporter of Ted Cruz and his pointless efforts to defund Obamacare –legislation that passed both the House and Senate, signed into law by the President and found to be legal by the Supreme Court – Palin took to Twitter to demand that Fox News give up the names of their anonymous Republucan sources, who are criticizing Cruz.
On his Fox News Sunday show, host Chris Wallace made the point that after booking Cruz on his show, he received complaints from a list of Republicans, all against Cruz and his defunding campaign.
Said Wallace;
“This has been one of the strangest weeks I’ve ever had in Washington, and I say that because as soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions not from Democrats, but from top Republicans — to hammer Cruz.
Palin apparently didn’t believe Wallace was telling the truth, and demanded that he release his list.
Like everyone is doing these days, Wallace ignored Palin’s demand.
In a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, Ted Cruz has convinced the Republican party that defunding Obamacare is their only ticket to relevancy and thus, the White House in 2916. And they have apparently bought into his assumption that the Demicratic controlled Senate and the president will void their own law.
These things will never happen of course, but leadership is lacking in the Republican party. And anyone who steps up to the plate with an idea – no matter how farfetched that idea is as in the case of Ted Cruz – that person will be followed.
Amanda Carpenter, an aide who once worked for Sen. Jim DeMint and has now joined with Senator Ted Cruz to spread lies and deceit about ObamaCare, experienced some rather low and unnecessary backlash from a high profile Democrat.
Amanda shared a heated exchange with Allan Brauer, the communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County. In one of her tweets, Amanda praised the work of Ted Cruz, saying “GOP beat gun control, changed Obama’s mind on Syria, is holding the line on amnesty. We can defund Obamacare, too!” To which, Allan Brauer responded, “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.”
Following the tweet, Mr. Brauer experienced some backlash from others on twitter, causing him to issue the following tweet defending his stance – “being attacked on Twitter for wishing one of Ted Cruz’s pubic lice to experience the pain her boss is inflicting on Americans.”
I certainly disagree with Ted Cruz and all he stands for, so chances are my views align more with Allan Brauer. But I cannot understand or defend the unthinkable hate that came from Mr. Brauer in response to Mrs Carpenter’s tweet. No matter what we feel about the opposition, we must still realize that certain commentary cannot be accepted in a civilized society.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) praised a former conservative senator best known for his opposition to African American civil rights and gay people on Wednesday, suggesting that the nation would be better off if Congress were still filled with lawmakers who shared his beliefs and positions.
“It’s every bit as true now as it was then,” Cruz said at a fundraiser hosted at the Heritage Foundation. “We need 100 more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.”
Helms, the longest serving senator from North Carolina, is renowned for speaking out against civil rights, voting rights, gay rights, and abortion — causes that Cruz himself has embraced in his short senate tenure.
The late Helms, who died in 2008, famously led a 16-day filibuster to prevent the Senate from approving the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, described the Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress,” organized against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and opposed any “federal financing of AIDS research and treatment,” arguing that “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.” “Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches,” Helms was once quoted as saying and he sought to block a nominee “because she’s a damn lesbian.”
Cruz is less inflammatory, but remains committed to Helms’ causes.
We all know where Ted Cruz was born. For those who have no idea, Ted Cruz was born in Canada. The reason this is important to know is because Ted Cruz stands a good chance of being the Republican nominee to run for President of the United States in 2016. And the reason this is really important to know is because of a group of Republicans who call themselves ‘Birthers.’
Birthers, as you may know, are those Republicans who believe that President Obama is not really the President of the United States, because they insist without any facts whatsoever, Mr. Obama was born in Kenya. So how do these lost, sad souls qualify Canadian born Ted Cruz to be president, while at the same time disqualifying American born Barack Obama?
Well they claim Ted Cruz’s mother was an American, so that immediately makes Ted an American, no questions asked. But what about Barack’s mother? Wasn’t she an American too, born in Kansas? Of course she was. So the “American mother” argument doesn’t fly. There must be other qualifiers, and thanks to the Texas Tribune, we know the other qualifiers are.
According to these Birthers, Cruz “has the Hollywood look” to be President. Another Birther suggests that Republicans will vote for Cruz simply because he is a Republican and that’s what they do. It’s a party thing she said. But it was the qualifier of the third Birther that took the ignorance to a whole new level. She advises us that Canada is not considered “foreign soil,” at least not in her view!
Former John McCain campaign aide Nicolle Wallace told Morning Joe guest host Donny Deutsch that Ted Cruz was being “intellectually dishonest” in his mission to shut down the government in order to defund Obamacare, a strategy she felt was tantamount to lying to his supporters at the cost of the GOP’s national ambitions.
“I watch Ted Cruz up there and I say, ‘Is he not getting the memo from Christie as far as what’s getting you elected going forward?’” Deutsch said. “This ‘party of no,’ this anger, ‘I’m strong, you’re a chicken, I’m strong, you’re a chicken’—who is that talking to? It’s so tone deaf. Party of no, let’s kill Obamacare—versus, you watch what [Chris] Christie’s doing: time after time, decision after decision, moderate, moderate, moderate. Nicolle, am I missing something?”
“The problem with what Cruz is doing is it’s intellectual dishonest,” Wallace said. “[Cruz] was also asked at that event, ‘Why don’t we impeach President Obama?’ And he said, ‘Because we don’t have the votes.’ The true answer, the intellectually honest answer: ‘Because he’s not committed an impeachable offense.’ Ted Cruz is doing a whole lot of fearmongering and lying to the voters. He’s presenting an untruthful case.”
I don’t get it. Excuse my frankness, but President Obama was born in America and the dumb nutjobs in the Republican party to this day cannot acknowledge his citizenship. They even proudly formed a movement called the Birthers and question everything from Obama’s birthplace to his education level to his religion.
And now Ted Cruz, a man born in Calgary Canada. Born in another country. And this man is being pushed by these same nutbags to run for President of the United States!
Their logic makes absolutely no sense. They harp on the fact that Cruz’s mother is an American citizen so that makes Cruz – although he was physically born in another country – his mother’s American citizenship makes him an American too. And they quickly quote the Constitution’s “natural” birth clause to justify their ignorance. But if this argument works for Cruz, then why oh why wouldn’t the same be true for Obama?
According to Donald Trump and the Birthers, Obama was born in Kenya. If that is the case, and we know it’s not because the president has been forced by the nonsense to release his birth certificate on more than one occasion, but let’s play their dumb game for a second and say that Obama was in fact born in Kenya. His mother – like Cruz’s mother – was an American citizen! So shouldn’t that make our fictional Kenyan birth Obama an American?
The dumbness coming out of the Republican party these days is palpable!
But look away ladies and gentlemen. Don’t pay any attention to the obvious hate mongers. Even Ted Cruz, a favorite of the Birthers and the Tea party groupies is calling his Canadian birth a non issue.
“Because I was a U.S. citizen at birth, because I left Calgary when I was 4 and have lived my entire life since then in the U.S., and because I have never taken affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship, I assumed that was the end of the matter,” Cruz said.
Well I guess that settles it. Cruz has spoken. His Canadian birth means he is an American and the President’s American birth means he is a Kenyan.
The Dallas Morning News wrote in a story posted late Sunday night that Cruz likely remains a Canadian citizen, by virtue of being born there to an American mother. Having never renounced that citizenship, Cruz was technically a Canadian and an American citizen, according to legal experts.
Cruz said his mother told him that he could claim his citizenship if he ever wanted to, but that he never pursued it and thought the matter was settled.
Legal experts say that Cruz is a Canadian citizen regardless of whether he asked for it or not.
The Texas senator credits his father with shaping his views on immigration, and talks about following the rules: ”In my opinion, if we allow those who are here illegally to be put on a path to citizenship, that is incredibly unfair to those who follow the rules.” But Raphael Cruz acknowledged on NPR that he bribed a Batista official to get out of Cuba.
“I came to this country legally,” Cruz’s father says. “I came here with a legal visa, and … every step of the way, I have been here legally.”
In an interview near his home outside Dallas, the elder Cruz says that as a teenager, he fought alongside Fidel Castro’s forces to overthrow Cuba’s U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. He was caught by Batista’s forces, he says, and jailed and beaten before being released. It was 1957, and Cruz decided to get out of Cuba by applying to the University of Texas. Upon being admitted, he adds, he got a four-year student visa at the U.S. Consulate in Havana.
“Then the only other thing that I needed was an exit permit from the Batista government,” Cruz recalls. “A friend of the family, a lawyer friend of my father, basically bribed a Batista official to stamp my passport with an exit permit.”
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