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clairemann

Cruz calls out Harris on border crisis, surely 'admin will allow media to film the empt... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...cbp-facilities-at-texas-border

policy Politics gop trump

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday requested that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration grant media access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities at the Texas border. 
  • On Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released photos of the temporary facilities in Texas that are being used to process migrant children after the White House and CBP were pressed over why the media had not been given access to those facilities.
  • The Biden administration has come under scrutiny for the surge of migrants arriving at the border. Capacity at temporary holding facilities has become stretched after the administration said it would no longer expel unaccompanied minor children last month.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Kamala, tomorrow 17 senators are joining me at the TX border. The Biden admin is refusing to allow press to see the CBP facilities," Cruz wrote. "Since you’ve promised to 'release children from cages,' surely your admin will allow media to film the empty cages."
  • "That's their stated justification. Never mind that they are packing thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants in packed facilities. It is reporters and cameramen that pose the COVID threat. And Harris, that's obviously absurd. I can tell you, I've taken border trips," Cruz said during an appearance on "The Faulkner Focus." "I've been to those facilities many times in the Obama administration, in the Trump administration, and they've always let media in. It is only the Biden administration that is engaged in this blackout..."
  • "But the fact that every news station is not outraged -- if Donald Trump had done this and said, ‘No reporters are allowed on the border,’ the media would have rightly lost their minds. And y’all would have been right to," he added. 
criscimagnael

Deal With Ted Cruz Sets Stage for Russia Pipeline Fight in Early 2022 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ted-cruz-biden-ukraine.html

shared by criscimagnael on 22 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • A Senate deal has set the stage for a January vote on whether to sanction the company behind a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, complicating the Biden administration’s efforts to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
  • the new year in Congress will begin in part with a contentious debate about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which the Biden administration opposes but has not used all its powers to stop, for fear of damaging vital relations with Germany.
  • The $11 billion pipeline was completed in September but is awaiting certification to become operational.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The Senate deal, which was reached late Friday night, was a grudging concession by Democrats to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has delayed the confirmation of dozens of President Biden’s nominees to protest what he called Mr. Biden’s weak opposition to the pipeline.
  • Mr. Cruz and others insist that Nord Stream 2 will provide Russia with a cash infusion and dangerous control over Europe’s energy supplies, while potentially costing Ukraine’s government around $3 billion in annual transit fees from a similar pipeline through its territory that Russia could circumvent.
  • “When the Senate reconvenes, we’ll finally have a vote on sanctioning Putin’s pipeline.”
  • It is a vote the Biden administration hoped to avoid. But in exchange, Mr. Cruz agreed to step aside and allow the confirmation of 36 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees, including 28 ambassadors
  • Biden officials said at the time that while they opposed construction of the pipeline, which will pump gas from the Russian Arctic to Germany through the Baltic Sea, the project was nearly complete by the time Mr. Biden took office and virtually impossible to stop. At this point, White House officials say, the cost of friction with the German government outweighs any potential loss to Mr. Putin.
  • some analysts say the pipeline may be less important to Mr. Putin than his longtime designs on Ukrainian territory.
  • A Dec. 7 call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin has done little to soothe the situation, and last week the Kremlin issued a set of demands that Biden officials called largely unacceptable.
  • Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close Biden ally who helped to negotiate the deal, said he would wait to see the final language in the measure and confer with Biden officials before deciding how he will vote. A State Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMr. Coons said he recently met in Berlin with Olaf Sholz, who succeeded Angela Merkel this month as Germany’s chancellor. He noted the new German government’s pledge not to certify the pipeline until well into 2022.
  • “Imposing sanctions on a close ally like Germany when they are moving in the right direction is something that I would not do lightly,” Mr. Coons said.
  • “We need a fully staffed senior team at the State Department and at the United Nations, and ambassadors around the world,” Mr. Coons said. “And while I respect that senators of both parties have the right to use the occasional hold to force a policy discussion, I think this has gotten way out of hand.”
  • criscimagnael on 22 Dec 21
     
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Javier E

Niall Ferguson, Ted Cruz, and the Politics of Masculinity - Garance Franke-Ruta - The A... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...275580

masculine politics gun policy

shared by Javier E on 09 May 13 - No Cached
  • today I think we see more and more expressions of cultural identity from white men qua white men, as they seek to claim a place of their own in the multicultural firmament. Sometimes this identity is described as being Southern, or rural; other times, as Lewis puts it, it's about "redneck" culture. He contrasts this with having "a cosmopolitan background," a.k.a. hailing from a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse urban community.
  • What they all share is a philosophy in which a certain construction of masculinity is, in style and substance, superior to the that of their opponents, whom they see as somehow soft, feminized, and lacking in legitimacy.
  • The argument of gun culture is an argument against a vision of masculinity that is seen as feminized, but it is also an argument deeply skeptical of the ability of government to provide security, and one that valorizes the gun-owner as a heroic, or potentially heroic, individual.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Armed groups of men have always been a major force in world history, whether sanctioned by the state or not. The idea that the moral power of grieving parents could overcome the identity gifts -- the sense of security -- that arms give to the men who cherish them is not just ahistoric; it misunderstands the fundamental dynamics of how power works in human society, and the politics of masculine identity in America. Even in a democracy, the only thing that can overcome force is force.
  • There are other ways of creating change. Public shaming also has a power.
  • The gun conversation can be changed by the one type of force more powerful than an organized group of people with arms -- the power to make people feel ashamed of themselves and ostracized by the group they care most about.
  • America has undertaken more vigorous shaming campaigns for far less harmful social behaviors than keeping a sloppy hold on guns, such as getting pregnant as a teen, or smoking, or letting babies ride in cars outside of car-seats. And it would mean asking gun owners to rethink how they store, share, and sell their legally purchased weapons.
  • legal gun owners are the second-largest source of guns flowing to criminals, with 37 percent of them coming from family or friends of the individuals locked up in state prisons.
  • I don't believe that a small group of grieving mothers -- even with strong political backing -- has the power to transform a conversation that's at core about how millions of men define themselves. Only the men of the relevant communities can do that
bodycot

How Cruz and Trump learned to like each other - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...trump-ted-cruz-allies-233622

shared by bodycot on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
    • bodycot
      bodycot on 16 Jan 17
       
      Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
maddieireland334

Senator Mike Lee Fears Enrolling Women in the Selective Service Could Lead to Mandatory... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...484571

Mike Lee Women Military US Policy

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • (a) Lord, save us from this herd of retrograde, sexist swine; (b) Thank heavens a few leaders are still willing to stand up to such PC nonsense; (c) Wait! There hasn’t been a draft since 1973.
  • Back in February, after White House contenders Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio voiced support for the move, National Review denounced this “step toward barbarism.” “Men should protect women,” the magazine asserted. “They should not shelter behind mothers and daughters.”
  • And presidential wannabe Ted Cruz was aiming straight at his base’s paternalistic gut when—after calling Christie, Bush, and Rubio “nuts”—he raised the specter of his own wee daughters being forced into military fatigues and decried the very notion as “immoral.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Specifically, the senator has become convinced that the push to register every young American for the draft, women included, is in fact a stalking horse for Big Government’s push to establish a system of compulsory national service.
  • One is the move (championed by Senator John McCain) to open the draft to women. The other aims to create a “National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service” that would “consider methods to increase participation in military, national, and public service in order to address national security and other public service needs of the nation.”
  • Today, more funding is made available to create additional Americorps jobs; tomorrow, 18-year-olds are being forced to man soup kitchens in the name of patriotism.
lenaurick

Your Hitler analogy is wrong, and other complaints from a history professor - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...trump-is-hitler

politics US history education

shared by lenaurick on 24 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Recently, writers and pundits have been on a quest to find historical analogs for people, parties, and movements in our own times. Trump is like Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon; the imploding GOP getting rid of one ill-suited candidate after another is like Robespierre in the French Revolution, who stuck the executioner in the guillotine because there was no one left to behead. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was like Robert E. Lee.
  • Oh, and how Obama was like Hitler? But that's so 2015.
  • Really? Trump is like Hitler? The egotistical buffoon who sees himself as his own primary foreign adviser and changes his views on abortion three times in one day is like the despicable human being who oversaw the death of 6 million Jews? Hitler comparison has become so common over the years that it has its own probability factor known as Godwin's Law.
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  • History is alive, and she has a lot to teach us. I quote William Faulkner (what history professor hasn't?) who famously declared: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."
  • History is not a deck of cards from which to randomly draw for comparative purposes. It is an immense repository of human thinking, doing, and being that can and should help us be slightly less narrow-minded and shortsighted than our forefathers and foremothers sometimes were. Good uses of history require more substance, unpacking, and analysis than a few quick sound bites can provide.
  • People aren't always sure what to do with history. But the laziest use is to make facile comparisons between then and now, this person and that.
  • Mostly these comparisons are shallow and not rooted in any depth of meaningful knowledge of the past. They rely on caricatures and selective historical tidbits in a way that, indeed, just about anyone can be compared to anyone else.
  • These comparisons tend to come in two forms: those meant to elevate, and those meant to denigrate. Both use historical comparisons to accomplish their goals
  • By associating their 21st-century political agendas with the 18th-century American rebels, modern Tea Partiers collapse the distance between then and now in order to legitimize their cause.
  • Slavery is another popular go-to comparison. But ... sorry, Kesha: Recording contracts are not like slavery. And Republicans: ”Neither is the national debt, Obamacare, income tax, or gun control. Or the TSA, global warming, or Affirmative Action.
  • In fact, presidential hopeful Ben Carson's comparisons to slavery were so common that he was parodied as suggesting that even buying a Megabus ticket is like slavery (which, sadly, is almost believable).
  • History as critique, honest assessment, and self-examination. Thinking long and hard about the treatment of Native Americans, past and present. American imperialism. Slavery, and its intertwining with the rise of modern capitalism. Xenophobia. Suppression of women's rights. These stories need to be told and retold, painful as they may be.
  • People who make historical comparisons don't actually believe that Ted Cruz is like Robespierre. But then why bother? The reason there aren't longer expositions of how exactly Trump is like Hitler is because, well, very quickly the analogy would break down. Male ... popular ... racist ... oh, never mind. These analogies are usually politically motivated, shallow, and intended to shock or damn. It's just lazy, and more politics as usual.
  • When we say that Trump or Obama is like Hitler, we slowly water down our actual knowledge of the very historical things we are using for comparison. When people link their frustration with the Affordable Care Act or gun control to slavery, they greatly diminish the historical magnitude and importance of a horrific historical reality that irreversibly altered the lives of 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans who were forced across the Atlantic to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries. Scholars speak of a "social death" that came from the incredible violence, emotional damage, and physical dislocation that took place during the Middle Passage and beyond.
  • The GOP's current crisis mirrors the French Revolution? Ted Cruz is like Robespierre? Please. You are granting way too much historical importance to the self-implosion of a political movement that rose to power over the past 30 years on a platform of moralistic piety, militarism, anti-abortion, and xenophobia.
  • One charitable reading of why people make these comparisons is that they fear we will end up in unpleasant and unfortunate situations that are like past circumstances. Behind the charge of Trump being a fascist is the fear that Trump, if elected president, will rule unilaterally in a way that oppresses certain segments of the population.
  • The only problem is that history really doesn't repeat itself. If anything, it remixes themes, reprises melodies, and borrows nasty racist ideologies. There are no exact historical analogs to today's politicians — jackasses or saviors.
  • "History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes." And it is in the rhyming that history still plays an important role.
  • Historian William Bouwsma once noted that the past is not the "private preserve of professional historians." Rather, he argued that history is a public utility, like water and electricity. If Bouwsma is right, the kind of history most people want is like water: clear, available at the turn of a knob, and easily controllable. But really, history is more like electricity shooting down the string of Franklin's fabled kite: wild, with alternating currents and unexpected twists, offshoots, and end results.
  • Voting for Trump won't bring about an American Holocaust, but it could usher in a new yet rhyming phase of history in which US citizens and immigrants from certain backgrounds are targeted and legally discriminated against, have their civil liberties curtailed, and even get forcibly relocated into "safe" areas. Hard to imagine?
  • American history, as Jon Stewart brilliantly reminded us, is at its core a series of events in which the current dominant group (no matter how recently established) dumps on the newest immigrant group. Catholics. Jews. Irish. Asians. They've all been in the crosshairs. All of them have been viewed as just as dangerous as the current out-group: Muslims.
  • Flippant comparisons also belittle and ignore the way that historical trauma creates immense ongoing psychological pain and tangible collective struggle that continues through generations, even up through the present.
  • If simplistic comparisons cheapen the past and dumb down our public discourse, using the past to understand how we got to where we are today is actually productive. It increases knowledge, broadens our perspective, and helps connect dots over time.
  • If Americans truly want to understand this GOP moment, we need not look to revolutionary France, but to the circa-1970s US, when the modern Republican Party was born. I know, Republican pundits like to call themselves the "party of Lincoln," but that is mostly nonsense
  • To compare Trump to Napoleon or Hitler is to make a vacuous historical comparison that obscures more than it reveals. But it is actually constructive to try to understand Trump as a fairly logical outcome of some of the cultural impulses that drove the moral majority and the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells us how we got here and, potentially, how to move forward.
  • Done well, history gives us perspective; it helps us gain a longer view of things. Through an understanding of the past we come to see trends over time, outcomes, causes, effects. We understand that stories and individual lives are embedded in larger processes. We learn of the boundless resilience of the human spirit, along with the depressing capacity for evil — even the banal variety — of humankind.
  • The past warns us against cruelty, begs us to be compassionate, asks that we simply stop and look our fellow human beings in the eyes.
  • Why, then, is Obama-Washington still on my office wall? Mostly to remind me of the irony of history. Of its complexity. That the past might not be past but is also not the present. It is a warning against mistaking progression in years with progress on issues. It is a reminder that each one of us plays an important part in the unfolding of history.
Javier E

We are the empire: Military interventions, "Star Wars" and how we're the real aliens - ... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...nd_how_were_the_aliens_partner

military repression US army empire culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.
  • Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the “Terminator” films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers.
  • In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.
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  • the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries — the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.
  • . In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.
  • It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a “Star Wars” storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.
  • Think for a moment about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.
  • As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in The New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.
  • American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in “Star Wars.”
  • Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first “Independence Day” movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life?
  • Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue?
  • Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The United States has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).
  • unlike the evil empire of “Star Wars” or the ruthless aliens of “Independence Day,” the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft and motherships with it.After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.
  • Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.
Javier E

Donald Trump's Christian Soldiers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trumps-christian-soldiers.html

christianity christian demagogue religion culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Of all the reasons it once seemed unthinkable that Donald J. Trump might be the Republican nominee, one of the strongest was the G.O.P.’s reputation as the party of religious conservatives.
  • Trump was a different kind of figure: Not merely lukewarm or unorthodox, but a proud flouter of the entire Judeo-Christian code — a boastful adulterer and a habitual liar, a materialist and a sensualist, a greedy camel without even the slightest interest in squeezing through the needle’s eye
  • And yet: Despite his transparent irreligiosity, Trump has won easily across the South, one of the most religious portions of the country. Among both self-identified evangelicals and Catholics, he’s consistently polled as well as the evangelical Ted Cruz and the Roman Catholic Marco Rubio.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • This week two influential conservative Catholic scholars, Robert George and George Weigel, put out an open letter to their co-believers, urging them to reject Trump as “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”
  • some clarity is also needed about what it means, exactly, that Trump is winning religious voters.
  • Trump is not the first choice of most active churchgoers. Indeed, active religiosity is (relatively speaking) one of the bulwarks against Trumpism, and his coalition is strongest among the most secular Republicans
  • 38 percent still described themselves as weekly churchgoers.
  • As with the wider conservative coalition, Trump is heightening conservative religion’s internal contradictions and fracturing it along pre-existing fault lines
  • Trump is losing the most active believers, but he’s winning in what I’ve previously termed the “Christian penumbra” — the areas of American society (parts of the South very much included) where active religiosity has weakened, but a Christian-ish residue remains.
  • The inhabitants of this penumbra still identify with Christianity, but they lack the communities, habits and support structures that make the religious path (somewhat) easier to walk. As a result, this Christian-ish landscape seems to produce more social dysfunction, more professional disappointment and more personal disarray than either a thoroughgoing secularism or a fully practiced faith
  • his occasional nods to religious faith — like, say, his promise to make store clerks say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” — are well tailored for voters for whom Christian identity is still a talisman even when an active faith is all but gone.
  • among Americans who do still have an active faith, Trump has exploited the widening gap between what many conservative Christians assumed about the relationship between their country and their faith, and what the last 10 years or more of social and political change have revealed about the nation’s drift
  • Evangelicals have for decades believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they’ve woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction.
  • If this is really a post-Christian society, they seem to be thinking, then Christians need to make sure the meanest, toughest heathen on the block is on their side. So it makes sense to join an alliance of convenience with a strongman, placing themselves under his benevolent protection, because their own leaders have delivered them only to defeat.
  • the lure of the strongman is particularly powerful for those believers whose theology was somewhat Trumpian already — nationalistic, prosperity-worshiping, by turns apocalyptic and success-obsessed.
  • With the steady post-1960s weakening of traditional Christian confessions, the preachers of this kind of gospel — this distinctively American heresy, really — have assumed a new prominence in the religious landscape. Trump, with his canny instinct for where to drive the wedge, has courted exactly these figures
  • he’s wooed televangelists and prosperity preachers, and pitched himself to believers already primed to believe that a meretricious huckster with unusual hair might be a vessel of the divine will.
  • Which he is not, save perhaps in this sense: In the light of Trumpism, many hard truths about American Christianity — its divisions, its failures, its follies, its heresies — stand ruthlessly exposed.
sarahbalick

John Kasich, last Republican Trump rival, quits race - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-36201042

republican trump john race

shared by sarahbalick on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • John Kasich, last Republican Trump rival, quits race
  • Ohio Governor John Kasich has dropped out of the presidential race after struggling to gain traction against Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
  • "As I suspend my campaign today I have renewed faith, deeper faith that the Lord will show me the way forward,"
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Mr Trump holds a commanding lead and is closing in on the nomination
  • Several senior Republicans said on Wednesday they would not back him, with some saying they would prefer to vote for Mrs Clinton.
  • Ted Cruz's withdrawal from the race on Tuesday night meant John Kasich's long-shot path to the nomination - deadlocked delegates in a contested convention turning to him as a compromise candidate - was definitively closed.
  • Texas Senator Ted Cruz dropped out of the race on Tuesday after losing heavily to Mr Trump in the Indiana primary.
Javier E

How Jeb Bush Triggered an Iraq War Watershed - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...riggered-an-iraq-war-watershed

iraq war origins partisan consensus politics history mideast

shared by Javier E on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • It was one thing when John Kasich and Chris Christie said they would not have invaded Iraq - guys who would run as relative moderates and either aren't running or don't realize they're not running for president. (Rand Paul said the same but that's no surprise.) But now we have Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz saying they would not have either. Rubio is the big tell here since he among all the 2016 contenders is angling for the support of the neoconservative foreign policy intelligentsia. If he can say categorically that it was a mistake, the debate is probably really finally over.
  • With everything that has happened over the last dozen years, including events of just the last year, it's very hard to say that the invasion was a good idea. But people say lots of things that are either hard or downright ridiculous to say. Indeed, we should note that as recently as two months ago, Rubio was saying just the opposite, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
  • In the years just after the war, support for the war was an article of faith for most Republicans. That fixed much of the public debate in place. Many elected Democrats, meanwhile, were trapped by their own votes in favor of Bush's authorization to use force.
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  • In the 2008 presidential race, the Iraq 'debate' was largely fought over who was right about the surge.
  • We all sort of know that the ground has shifted on this issue. We can see it clearly in public opinion polls. But it is as though it's been years since we actually had a show of hands - especially among national Republicans. Good idea? Bad idea? As I was writing this, Jeb Bush himself has now come forward and, on the fourth try, said the Iraq War was a mistake. What I've called that showing of hands seems to show virtually no one of any consequence standing up for the decision to invade. Maybe we all kind of knew that that was where people had gotten to. But seeing people say it is a transformative event.
  • the ground has shifted not just on the facts of the issue, but on what is in many ways a more consequential front: Time has passed and Republicans simply don't feel the same sort of partisan responsibility for the conflict. It's drifting back into history. The sense of ideological and partisan commitment has just loosened - the intuitive reflex that says our guy did it so it must be right and I need to defend it
  • Cruz and Rubio especially are fighting for base Republicans. If they were still committed to the wisdom of the Iraq War, they wouldn't be saying this. And yet they are. That is a major watershed in the country's reckoning with the war. If Republicans running as hawks say it was a mistake, then the debate is really over.
  • with a consensus in place that the Iraq War was a bad idea, the whys and hows of just how we made this decision are up for discussion in a very new way.
Javier E

Republicans for Campaign-Finance Reform: Lindsey Graham, Chris Christie, and Ted Cruz -... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...390912

campaign financing money politics reform influence

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • “I’ve told my six-year-old daughter, ‘Running for office is real simple: you just surgically disconnect your shame sensor,’” he said. “Because you spend every day asking people for money.
  • Starting with the attack on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law in 2003, opponents have won an accelerating series of victories against similar laws. The result has completely changed the world of campaign finance. Citizens United struck down limits on independent expenditures. SpeechNow made it possible for contributions to be largely hidden. Aggregate limits on personal contributions were swept away by McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014
  • even as it fails to rise to the top of most voters' agendas, majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents have voiced concern about the corrupting influence of money in polls, and the public generally supports spending caps.
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  • The Koch brothers have put together a coalition that intends to spend almost $1 billion in 2016. Some donors complained after McCutcheon that they'd no longer be able to hide behind limits when they didn't want to give, but the overall landscape has clearly shifted toward those writing the checks.
  • Members of Congress get the shaft, too, spending up to 12 hours a day dialing for dollars. The simple drag of having to do all that seems like a potent reason for candidates to push back
  • For extremely wealthy donors who want to elect candidates and influence issues, their newfound power is a godsend. After spending $92 million on super PACs in 2012, Sheldon Adelson can summon any Republican candidate he wants and has their ears to discuss Israel, his pet issue.
  • The candidates who are doing best at fundraising, or for whom super PACs are likely to raise money effectively, are staying tactfully quiet on the issue.
  • she also called last week for a constitutional amendment to create limits or mandate transparency for campaign cash.
  • Peter Schweizer has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs
  • Shadowy organizations funded by multimillionaires, many of which scrupulously cover up their sources of donations, are going to pour huge amounts of money into trying to sway the democratic process—all in an attempt to prove that huge, insufficiently transparent infusions of cash from wealthy donors can corrupt a public servant’s policy decisions. Is this irony lost on the donors and the candidates they back, or does it simply not bother them?
sgardner35

Ted Cruz apologizes for Biden joke - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...ed-cruz-joe-biden-joke-apology

shared by sgardner35 on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • While the line is often well-received on his campaign trail, this time it fell flat. Biden's son, Beau, passed away from brain cancer on Saturday.
  • "It was a mistake to use an old joke about Joe Biden during his time of grief, and I sincerely apologize. The loss of his son is heartbreaking and tragic, and our prayers are very much with the Vice President and his family," Cruz wrote.
Javier E

How Ted Cruz Gave Away The GOP's Muslim Strategy - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...d-cruz-ben-carson-muslim-obama

politics obama muslim election 2016

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • both Carson and now Cruz are referencing the widespread belief amongst conservatives that Obama is secretly a Muslim but is concealing his true beliefs for nefarious reasons, possibly to impose sharia law on the nation. (Any day now.) The last public poll on this belief showed that 86 percent of Republicans are warm to it, with 54 percent believing that Obama is a Muslim and 32 percent saying they are unsure. Only 14 percent of Republicans correctly describe Obama’s religion as Christian.
  • In other words, the belief that Obama is a Muslim is an entrenched “fact” on the right, much like the belief that global warming is a hoax or Planned Parenthood is a for-profit company that makes its money selling fetal parts. Carson and Cruz aren’t really talking about a hypothetical Muslim president in some future world. This is all a coded way to talk about Obama.
  • No one is going to come right out and accuse Obama of being a foreign invader—or maybe just a secret Muslim—who comes to ruin Mom and apple pie, because they want to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. So they just talk in coded language
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This sort of thing also happens to send liberals spinning, since there’s no good way to respond. If you point out that this is just a new way to propagate the lie that Obama is a secret Muslim, you fear giving credence to the idea that there’s anything wrong with being a Muslim in the first place. But if you start by arguing that the anti-Muslim-in-office position is bigoted and unconstitutional, you fear reinforcing the idea that Obama is, indeed, a secret Muslim. After all, why are we debating this thing if it’s not an imminent issue in the real world?
horowitzza

Ted Cruz Ad Uses Scorpion to Depict Threat of Islamic Terror - 0 views

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/09/15/ted-cruz-ad-uses-scorpion-to-depict-threat-of-islamic-terror/?ref=politics

politics Islamicterror extremist threat

started by horowitzza on 15 Sep 15 no follow-up yet
sarahbalick

Donald Trump wants Iowa rematch, accusing Cruz of 'fraud' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-35486983

donald trump iowa cruz fraud

shared by sarahbalick on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump wants Iowa rematch, accusing Cruz of 'fraud'
  • Presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a new election in Iowa, accusing the Republican winner, Ted Cruz, of fraud.
  • "Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!" Mr Trump said.Earlier, he wrote on Twitter that Mr Cruz "illegally" won the caucus, but later deleted the tweet.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Mr Pate said Mr Cruz's mailers "misrepresent Iowa election law" and that they were "not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses," but he stopped short of any official action.
  • Mr Trump pointed to the fact that during the caucus the Cruz campaign told voters rival Ben Carson planned to quit the race, which was not true.
  • Mr Trump placed second in Monday's contest, which he called "a long-shot great finish" in an earlier tweet.
  • Mr Cruz's camp is not taking the accusations too seriously.
  • "Reality just hit the reality star - he lost Iowa and now nobody is talking about him, so he's popping off on Twitter," Mr Cruz's communications director Rick Tyler told Politico in an email.
katyshannon

Cruz fires spokesman over 'inaccurate' Rubio video - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...yler-marco-rubio-video-apology

cruz fires spokesman video politics US

shared by katyshannon on 23 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Ted Cruz asked his communications director Rick Tyler to resign Monday after Tyler distributed a video that falsely depicted Marco Rubio dismissing the Bible.
  • The incident comes a day before the Nevada Republican caucuses and in the wake of accusations from rival campaigns in recent weeks about Cruz's campaign tactics. Donald Trump has called Cruz a "liar" and Rubio and Ben Carson have also blasted the Texas senator.
  • Trump, Rubio and Carson have all attacked Cruz for his ethics ever since Cruz's victory in Iowa. Cruz later underperformed in South Carolina two contests later.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Cruz says he spent the morning investigating what happened before making his decision. Campaign manager Jeff Roe confirmed that Tyler had formally resigned."I have made clear in this campaign we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards and integrity," Cruz told reporters Monday, adding that Tyler is a "good man."
  • A former, longtime spokesman for Newt Gingrich, Tyler was a senior aide and one of the Cruz campaign's first hires in the run-up to his presidential announcement.
  • Tyler had apologized late Sunday for the incident."I want to apologize to Sen. Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today," said Tyler, the spokesman, wrote in a Facebook post.The latest dust-up comes as the two senators' campaigns have been clashing heatedly for days about "dishonesty" and "lies" on the trail.
  • Trump immediately sought to capitalize on the moment."Wow, Ted Cruz falsely suggested Marco Rubio mocked the Bible and was just forced to fire his Communications Director. More dirty tricks!," he tweeted.
  • And Rubio's campaign similarly rubbed salt in the wound, praising Tyler's skills but saying he "had the unenviable task of working for a candidate willing to do or say anything to get elected."
  • Rubio said he accepts Tyler's apology, but called for the Cruz campaign to hold someone accountable.
  • The flub by the Cruz campaign comes after Rubio finished narrowly ahead of Cruz for second place in the South Carolina primary Saturday, behind Donald Trump. In the heated contest there, the Cruz campaign was repeatedly accused by both Rubio and Trump for being dishonest and engaging in dirty tactics.
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