Cruz mocks Trump's hands, foreign policy 'non-strategy'
By NICK GASS
Donald Trump's big, "beautiful" hands will be no help in pummeling the Islamic State, Ted Cruz said Friday.
President Barack Obama and Trump have the same "non-strategy" when it comes to defeating the Islamic State, the Texas senator remarked at a briefing with reporters in Indianapolis alongside his vice-presidential pick, Carly Fiorina, mocking the Republican front-runner's foreign policy speech this week in which he said he would not reveal his plans to topple the terrorist group in order to be "unpredictable."
“I know it is surprising to Donald Trump, but tweeting ugly pictures at ISIS is not gonna cause them to go away," Cruz said.
Cruz and Trump clashed last month after the Manhattan billionaire retweeted an unflattering image of Heidi Cruz next to a glamour shot of his wife Melania, cryptically threatening to "spill the beans" on Heidi.
"Yelling and screaming and cursing at them and telling them what big hands you have is not going to cause ISIS to go away," he added, with the latter clause an apparent reference to Trump last month disputing the notion that his hands are too small and thus is another part of his anatomy.
April 29, 2016
Lucifer searches
'Lucifer' searches surge after Boehner’s comments on Cruz
By BRIANNA EHLEY
The word “Lucifer” lit up the Internet in the past 24 hours — after news surfaced that former House Speaker John Boehner used the name to describe his former congressional colleague and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
According to Merriam-Webster’s “Trend Watch,” searches for “Lucifer” surged 7,700 percent since Thursday following reports that Boehner was expressing contempt for Cruz, calling him “Lucifer in the flesh” while speaking at Stanford University earlier this week. The newly retired speaker followed that up with saying he had "never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” His comments quickly went viral.
Merriam-Webster's notes that the word commonly refers to "Satan" and further defined it to include "light-bearing" and "Venus."
In the Bible, Lucifer had his beginnings as an angel of light, but was proud and chose to rebel, leading to his fall.
By BRIANNA EHLEY
The word “Lucifer” lit up the Internet in the past 24 hours — after news surfaced that former House Speaker John Boehner used the name to describe his former congressional colleague and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
According to Merriam-Webster’s “Trend Watch,” searches for “Lucifer” surged 7,700 percent since Thursday following reports that Boehner was expressing contempt for Cruz, calling him “Lucifer in the flesh” while speaking at Stanford University earlier this week. The newly retired speaker followed that up with saying he had "never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” His comments quickly went viral.
Merriam-Webster's notes that the word commonly refers to "Satan" and further defined it to include "light-bearing" and "Venus."
In the Bible, Lucifer had his beginnings as an angel of light, but was proud and chose to rebel, leading to his fall.
Benghazi Committee still...
Pentagon rips Benghazi Committee over 'speculation'
A Defense Department official says the House panel's repeated demands for information is straining resources.
By RACHAEL BADE
The Pentagon is pushing back against the House Benghazi Committee, saying its repeated requests for documents and interviews are straining the department's resources — and, to make matters worse, many of the queries are speculative or hypothetical.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen Hedger complained in a letter to the committee on Thursday about its continued demands for information, and implied that the panel is grasping to make assertions based on theory rather than facts.
“[W]hile I understand your stated intent is to conduct the most comprehensive review of the attack and response, Congress has as much of an obligation as the executive branch to use federal resources and taxpayer dollars effectively and efficiently,” the letter reads. “The Department has spent millions of dollars on Benghazi-specific Congressional compliance, including reviews by four other committees, which have diligently reviewed the military’s response in particular.”
Hedger also complained that Defense Department interviewees “have been asked repeatedly to speculate or engage in discussing on the record hypotheticals.”
“This type of questioning poses the risk that your final report may be based on speculation rather than a fact-based analysis of what a military officer did do or could have done given his or her knowledge at the time of the attacks,” he wrote.
Panel Republicans waived off the letter, saying it is “further proof the Benghazi Committee is conducting a thorough, fact-centered investigation.” Republicans have contended that the Pentagon has been stonewalling, causing the investigation to drag on. They threatened Defense Department with subpoenas in hopes of getting swifter answers.
“It’s unfortunate it took the threat of subpoenas for the Pentagon to make witnesses available earlier this year,” said a committee spokesperson. “This delayed the committee from learning a tremendous amount of new information from several witnesses, and when they refer the committee to others in the department, the responsible thing to do is to interview them. What is DOD so afraid of? Why are they supposedly unable to find their own employees?”
Hedger blasted the subpoena threats in his letter, saying the Pentagon is “concerned by the continuous threats from your staff to subpoena witnesses because we are not able to move quickly enough.”
The letter details the Pentagon's own reluctance to fulfill a series of new requests that officials believe are unnecessary. Officials are asking the panel for a meeting to discuss them.
In one example cited by the letter, the committee is seeking an audience with a man who posted on Facebook that he was a mechanic on an air base in Europe the night of the attack. He claimed that planes could have been deployed.
The panel wants to talk to him, but the Pentagon says “those claims are easily dismissed by any one of the multiple high-level military officials already interviewed.”
Panel Democrats, meanwhile, note that the man used the following hash-tag in his post, suggesting to them a political motivation: "#ifyouvoteforhillaryyouarebeyondstupid."
The panel also was seeking to talk to a man simply known as “John from Iowa,” who claimed on the radio that he was a remotely piloted aircraft camera operator and said he saw a feed of the attack. When the Department said they couldn’t find him, the committee asked to talk to all such operators on the ground in the area that night, the letter says.
The Department thinks it's unnecessary.
The letter also says the panel had sought to interview four pilots who would have been deployed the night of the attack but were not — only to drop that request.
Panel Democrats, meanwhile, pounced on the letter as further proof that the committee is wasting taxpayer dollars. They said a number of Defense Department officials that the committee has recently asked to interview have already been questioned by other congressional panels looking into the Benghazi attacks, including General Carter Ham, former second commander of U.S. Africa Command.
“The Department of Defense has a critical job to do, which is to keep our nation safe from those who would do us harm. But Republicans continue to squander millions of taxpayer dollars chasing right-wing conspiracy theories and forcing Pentagon officials to waste their time on this partisan fishing expedition,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee's ranking member.
A Defense Department official says the House panel's repeated demands for information is straining resources.
By RACHAEL BADE
The Pentagon is pushing back against the House Benghazi Committee, saying its repeated requests for documents and interviews are straining the department's resources — and, to make matters worse, many of the queries are speculative or hypothetical.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen Hedger complained in a letter to the committee on Thursday about its continued demands for information, and implied that the panel is grasping to make assertions based on theory rather than facts.
“[W]hile I understand your stated intent is to conduct the most comprehensive review of the attack and response, Congress has as much of an obligation as the executive branch to use federal resources and taxpayer dollars effectively and efficiently,” the letter reads. “The Department has spent millions of dollars on Benghazi-specific Congressional compliance, including reviews by four other committees, which have diligently reviewed the military’s response in particular.”
Hedger also complained that Defense Department interviewees “have been asked repeatedly to speculate or engage in discussing on the record hypotheticals.”
“This type of questioning poses the risk that your final report may be based on speculation rather than a fact-based analysis of what a military officer did do or could have done given his or her knowledge at the time of the attacks,” he wrote.
Panel Republicans waived off the letter, saying it is “further proof the Benghazi Committee is conducting a thorough, fact-centered investigation.” Republicans have contended that the Pentagon has been stonewalling, causing the investigation to drag on. They threatened Defense Department with subpoenas in hopes of getting swifter answers.
“It’s unfortunate it took the threat of subpoenas for the Pentagon to make witnesses available earlier this year,” said a committee spokesperson. “This delayed the committee from learning a tremendous amount of new information from several witnesses, and when they refer the committee to others in the department, the responsible thing to do is to interview them. What is DOD so afraid of? Why are they supposedly unable to find their own employees?”
Hedger blasted the subpoena threats in his letter, saying the Pentagon is “concerned by the continuous threats from your staff to subpoena witnesses because we are not able to move quickly enough.”
The letter details the Pentagon's own reluctance to fulfill a series of new requests that officials believe are unnecessary. Officials are asking the panel for a meeting to discuss them.
In one example cited by the letter, the committee is seeking an audience with a man who posted on Facebook that he was a mechanic on an air base in Europe the night of the attack. He claimed that planes could have been deployed.
The panel wants to talk to him, but the Pentagon says “those claims are easily dismissed by any one of the multiple high-level military officials already interviewed.”
Panel Democrats, meanwhile, note that the man used the following hash-tag in his post, suggesting to them a political motivation: "#ifyouvoteforhillaryyouarebeyondstupid."
The panel also was seeking to talk to a man simply known as “John from Iowa,” who claimed on the radio that he was a remotely piloted aircraft camera operator and said he saw a feed of the attack. When the Department said they couldn’t find him, the committee asked to talk to all such operators on the ground in the area that night, the letter says.
The Department thinks it's unnecessary.
The letter also says the panel had sought to interview four pilots who would have been deployed the night of the attack but were not — only to drop that request.
Panel Democrats, meanwhile, pounced on the letter as further proof that the committee is wasting taxpayer dollars. They said a number of Defense Department officials that the committee has recently asked to interview have already been questioned by other congressional panels looking into the Benghazi attacks, including General Carter Ham, former second commander of U.S. Africa Command.
“The Department of Defense has a critical job to do, which is to keep our nation safe from those who would do us harm. But Republicans continue to squander millions of taxpayer dollars chasing right-wing conspiracy theories and forcing Pentagon officials to waste their time on this partisan fishing expedition,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee's ranking member.
Warmed Up or Not...
Here's Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders
By Kevin Drum
With the Democratic primary basically over, I want to step back a bit and explain the big-picture reason that I never warmed up to Bernie Sanders. It's not so much that he's all that far to my left, nor that he's been pretty skimpy on details about all the programs he proposes. That's hardly uncommon in presidential campaigns. Rather, it's the fact that I think he's basically running a con, and one with the potential to cause distinct damage to the progressive cause.
I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you're provoked, mission accomplished! Here's my argument.
Bernie's explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington, DC, is paralyzed.
But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn't show up. In fact, it's worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States? Stretching things a bit, I can think of two:
* The destruction of the Southern slave economy following the Civil War
* The New Deal
The first of these was 50+ years in the making and, in the end, required a bloody, four-year war to bring to a conclusion. The second happened only after an utter collapse of the economy, with banks closing, businesses failing, wages plummeting, and unemployment at 25 percent. That's what it takes to bring about a revolution, or even something close to it.
We're light years away from that right now. Unemployment? Yes, 2 or 3 percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They've been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.
Like it or not, you don't build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.
Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that's never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?
I don't know, but my fear is that some of them will do the latter. And that's a damn shame. They've been conned by a guy who should know better, the same way dieters get conned by late-night miracle diets. When it doesn't work, they throw in the towel.
Most likely Bernie will have no lasting effect, and his followers will scatter in the usual way, with some doubling down on practical politics and others leaving for different callings. But there's a decent chance that Bernie's failure will result in a net increase of cynicism about politics, and that's the last thing we need. I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie's spiel and then got discouraged when it didn't pan out.
I'll grant that my pitch—and Hillary's and Barack Obama's—isn't very inspiring. Work your fingers to the bone for 30 years and you might get one or two significant pieces of legislation passed. Obviously you need inspiration too. But if you don't want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable. By offering a chimera instead, Bernie has done the progressive movement no favors.
By Kevin Drum
With the Democratic primary basically over, I want to step back a bit and explain the big-picture reason that I never warmed up to Bernie Sanders. It's not so much that he's all that far to my left, nor that he's been pretty skimpy on details about all the programs he proposes. That's hardly uncommon in presidential campaigns. Rather, it's the fact that I think he's basically running a con, and one with the potential to cause distinct damage to the progressive cause.
I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you're provoked, mission accomplished! Here's my argument.
Bernie's explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington, DC, is paralyzed.
But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn't show up. In fact, it's worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States? Stretching things a bit, I can think of two:
* The destruction of the Southern slave economy following the Civil War
* The New Deal
The first of these was 50+ years in the making and, in the end, required a bloody, four-year war to bring to a conclusion. The second happened only after an utter collapse of the economy, with banks closing, businesses failing, wages plummeting, and unemployment at 25 percent. That's what it takes to bring about a revolution, or even something close to it.
We're light years away from that right now. Unemployment? Yes, 2 or 3 percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They've been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.
Like it or not, you don't build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.
Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that's never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?
I don't know, but my fear is that some of them will do the latter. And that's a damn shame. They've been conned by a guy who should know better, the same way dieters get conned by late-night miracle diets. When it doesn't work, they throw in the towel.
Most likely Bernie will have no lasting effect, and his followers will scatter in the usual way, with some doubling down on practical politics and others leaving for different callings. But there's a decent chance that Bernie's failure will result in a net increase of cynicism about politics, and that's the last thing we need. I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie's spiel and then got discouraged when it didn't pan out.
I'll grant that my pitch—and Hillary's and Barack Obama's—isn't very inspiring. Work your fingers to the bone for 30 years and you might get one or two significant pieces of legislation passed. Obviously you need inspiration too. But if you don't want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable. By offering a chimera instead, Bernie has done the progressive movement no favors.
Insanity I say..
Ted Cruz's Dad: My Son Ran for President After God Sent His Wife a Sign
And other tales from Rafael Cruz's world of extreme Christian fundamentalism.
By David Corn
Ted Cruz decided to run for president after God spoke to his wife, Heidi.
That's how Rafael Cruz, Ted's father and a born-again pastor, described his son's decision-making process. Speaking on a syndicated radio show at the end of last year, the elder Cruz recounted that during a Sunday prayer session at a Texas church, Ted Cruz and his family sought God's guidance as to whether the senator should enter the presidential race, and after two hours of praying, God sent a message to Heidi that essentially said: Go for it.
Here's the story, according to Rafael Cruz:
My son Ted and his family spent six months in prayer seeking God's will for this decision. But the day the final green light came on, the whole family was together. It was a Sunday. We were all at his church, First Baptist Church in Houston, including his senior staff. After the church service, we all gathered at the pastor's office. We were on our knees for two hours seeking God's will. At the end of that time, a word came through his wife, Heidi. And the word came, just saying, "Seek God's face, not God's hand." And I'll tell you, it was as if there was a cloud of the holy spirit filling that place. Some of us were weeping, and Ted just looked up and said, "Lord, here am I, use me. I surrender to you, whatever you want." And he felt that was a green light to move forward.
That Rafael Cruz should cast his son's presidential campaign as a divinely inspired endeavor is not surprising. For years, he has been a freelancing evangelical who has promoted an extremely fundamentalist version of Christianity and decried those, including other Christians, who do not share his religious views. He has called for fundamentalist Christians to gain control of most aspects of American society, and he has issued a series of controversial statements blasting President Barack Obama, gay rights activists, and other spiritual enemies. As Mother Jones first reported, he called Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all concept of God" and urged Americans to send him "back to Kenya." He said it was "appalling" to have a gay mayor in Houston and asserted that Satan was behind the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage.
In most instances, it would be unfair to judge a politician based on a relative's pronouncements. But for years—in his Senate race and in this presidential campaign—Ted Cruz has used his father to round up support from tea partiers, social conservatives, and evangelical leaders. The son, naturally, speaks lovingly of his father. Given that Cruz is seeking the presidency by courting the religious right and offering himself as a moral and godly candidate who shares the faith of evangelical voters—and given that he frequently quotes Rafael Cruz on the campaign trail to urge people to vote by God's values—a voter can likely gain some understanding of Ted Cruz's world (and perhaps his worldview) by examining the statements and professed beliefs of his father. And they are extreme.
It's not hard to figure out Rafael Cruz's basic message. He has given scores, probably hundreds, of sermons and talks at religious and political gatherings, and many are on YouTube. His primary theme is that the United States is a "Christian nation" and that only true believers who adhere to biblical principles—that is, who accept the literal truth of the Bible, as Rafael Cruz and other fundamentalists see it—are worthy of guiding the United States forward. He regularly rails against pastors and church leaders who eschew politics and do not enter the political fray to combat the enemy: secular humanism.
Rafael Cruz is an advocate of Christian dominionism, which essentially holds that fundamentalist Christians should take over, well, just about everything. Speaking at a Texas church in 2012, Rafael Cruz told the crowd that God instructed Adam and Eve to go forth, multiply, and, as he put it, "take dominion over all my creation." He said this meant that true-believers ought to dominate all areas of life: "That dominion is not just in the church, that dominion is over every area—society, education, government, and economics." (During that sermon, he also noted that husbands, not wives, should be the "spiritual leader" of their families.) In Cruz's view, those who accept Christ and his word (as Cruz believes it should be understood) will prosper spiritually and financially. In that same sermon, he noted that God not only anoints priests to lead the faithful, but also anoints "kings…to take dominion." By that, he means those who rule a nation, and, he adds, these rulers one day (and he makes it sound as if this day will come soon) will transfer the wealth of the "wicked" to the "righteous."
The senior Cruz sees no difference between the religious and political realms. In a June 2013 speech at a men's prayer breakfast, he contended that Jesus' original followers were not looking for a "spiritual leader" but for a "political leader" who could establish "a physical kingdom on the Earth." And Jesus, he noted, was "bucking the political establishment." (Sound familiar?) "The ministry of Jesus," he claimed, was a "highly political ministry." So religion and politics do mix—a lot. "It's not just a spiritual confrontation," Cruz said. "It's also a political confrontation." Toward the end of that speech, Cruz declared, "We have a responsibility to elect righteous leaders. God is going to hold us accountable if we do not." He added, "And the people will proclaim that Jesus Christ is lord and king of this nation."
It's not ambiguous. For Rafael Cruz, the only legitimate government is one that operates according to his theological views.
Those views tend to be rather harsh. He has referred to the theory of evolution as a diabolical plot mounted by Marxists, "the number one tool for communism to destroy religion, to destroy the concept of God." Evolution, he claimed, "is one of the most effective tools to impose communism." He has repeatedly said same-sex marriage is a satanic scheme, noting in a talk to a Republican group in 2013 that "homosexual marriage…has nothing to do with quote homosexual rights. It has to do with the destruction of the traditional family. So that there is no loyalty to the family. Loyalty is to the government. Government is your god."
Obama, naturally, is propelling much of these underhanded machinations. The president, Rafael Cruz said three years ago, "needs you to see him as God." He's a Marxist, Cruz has charged, and his agenda "is to bring us down to a Third World country" and subjugate the United States to the United Nations. He has said that Obama "will side with the Muslims" and claimed that the Obama administration is "trying to take our God and our gun and if they do that, then they can impose a dictatorship upon us." He insists Obamacare does include death panels. He has blamed liberals for allowing terrorists to cross the border "on a weekly basis" and establish "terrorist cells all across the United States."
His is a dark perspective. The "wicked" are now ruling the country, and they must be defeated by the "righteous," whom he defines as those evangelical Christians who embrace the literal truth of the Bible. ("Every word of Scripture is given by revelation," he said in 2013. "Every word of this book is true. Because if you don't believe one part of it, then none of it might be true.") The righteous, he urges, must be guided by pastors across the nation to rise up and "take every position in office, from dog catcher all the way to the highest position in the land." In a 2013 sermon, according to a partial transcript obtained by Mother Jones, he proclaimed that Satan "rules in the halls of legislation," and said, "We have a responsibility to preserve the biblical foundations of this country." He added, "The world will tell you, 'We're all children of God.' That's not true. Children of God are only those that have been born again through the blood of Jesus Christ."
Rafael Cruz's outlook on the world is exceedingly narrow and unforgiving. The only righteous Christian is the evangelical Christian who is "biblically correct." These Christians must conquer the political world—vanquish those who are in league with Satan—and establish dominion over society by ruling in accordance with their definition of the word of God. And Ted Cruz was directly given the green light from God, via Heidi Cruz, to lead what is, in essence, a crusade to smite wickedness. (At a gathering of evangelicals in Iowa in 2013, Ted and Rafael Cruz joined in prayer with a pastor who said that "every tongue that rises up against [Ted Cruz] in judgment will be condemned.")
Without saying it directly, Rafael Cruz calls for a theocracy. (He has often decried the notion of separation of church and state.) His religious rants are not irrelevant to the Ted Cruz campaign. Ted Cruz has consistently cited his father as a key influence in his life, and he has regularly deployed him as a political representative and surrogate. It's often tough to bring up the subject of a candidate's religious views during a political campaign. But Rafael Cruz's radical fundamentalism—which positions most Americans on the side of wickedness—and Ted Cruz's embrace of his father as not only a parent but a political partner and adviser raise an important question this campaign season: How much of the faith of his father does Ted Cruz share?
And other tales from Rafael Cruz's world of extreme Christian fundamentalism.
By David Corn
Ted Cruz decided to run for president after God spoke to his wife, Heidi.
That's how Rafael Cruz, Ted's father and a born-again pastor, described his son's decision-making process. Speaking on a syndicated radio show at the end of last year, the elder Cruz recounted that during a Sunday prayer session at a Texas church, Ted Cruz and his family sought God's guidance as to whether the senator should enter the presidential race, and after two hours of praying, God sent a message to Heidi that essentially said: Go for it.
Here's the story, according to Rafael Cruz:
My son Ted and his family spent six months in prayer seeking God's will for this decision. But the day the final green light came on, the whole family was together. It was a Sunday. We were all at his church, First Baptist Church in Houston, including his senior staff. After the church service, we all gathered at the pastor's office. We were on our knees for two hours seeking God's will. At the end of that time, a word came through his wife, Heidi. And the word came, just saying, "Seek God's face, not God's hand." And I'll tell you, it was as if there was a cloud of the holy spirit filling that place. Some of us were weeping, and Ted just looked up and said, "Lord, here am I, use me. I surrender to you, whatever you want." And he felt that was a green light to move forward.
That Rafael Cruz should cast his son's presidential campaign as a divinely inspired endeavor is not surprising. For years, he has been a freelancing evangelical who has promoted an extremely fundamentalist version of Christianity and decried those, including other Christians, who do not share his religious views. He has called for fundamentalist Christians to gain control of most aspects of American society, and he has issued a series of controversial statements blasting President Barack Obama, gay rights activists, and other spiritual enemies. As Mother Jones first reported, he called Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all concept of God" and urged Americans to send him "back to Kenya." He said it was "appalling" to have a gay mayor in Houston and asserted that Satan was behind the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage.
In most instances, it would be unfair to judge a politician based on a relative's pronouncements. But for years—in his Senate race and in this presidential campaign—Ted Cruz has used his father to round up support from tea partiers, social conservatives, and evangelical leaders. The son, naturally, speaks lovingly of his father. Given that Cruz is seeking the presidency by courting the religious right and offering himself as a moral and godly candidate who shares the faith of evangelical voters—and given that he frequently quotes Rafael Cruz on the campaign trail to urge people to vote by God's values—a voter can likely gain some understanding of Ted Cruz's world (and perhaps his worldview) by examining the statements and professed beliefs of his father. And they are extreme.
It's not hard to figure out Rafael Cruz's basic message. He has given scores, probably hundreds, of sermons and talks at religious and political gatherings, and many are on YouTube. His primary theme is that the United States is a "Christian nation" and that only true believers who adhere to biblical principles—that is, who accept the literal truth of the Bible, as Rafael Cruz and other fundamentalists see it—are worthy of guiding the United States forward. He regularly rails against pastors and church leaders who eschew politics and do not enter the political fray to combat the enemy: secular humanism.
Rafael Cruz is an advocate of Christian dominionism, which essentially holds that fundamentalist Christians should take over, well, just about everything. Speaking at a Texas church in 2012, Rafael Cruz told the crowd that God instructed Adam and Eve to go forth, multiply, and, as he put it, "take dominion over all my creation." He said this meant that true-believers ought to dominate all areas of life: "That dominion is not just in the church, that dominion is over every area—society, education, government, and economics." (During that sermon, he also noted that husbands, not wives, should be the "spiritual leader" of their families.) In Cruz's view, those who accept Christ and his word (as Cruz believes it should be understood) will prosper spiritually and financially. In that same sermon, he noted that God not only anoints priests to lead the faithful, but also anoints "kings…to take dominion." By that, he means those who rule a nation, and, he adds, these rulers one day (and he makes it sound as if this day will come soon) will transfer the wealth of the "wicked" to the "righteous."
The senior Cruz sees no difference between the religious and political realms. In a June 2013 speech at a men's prayer breakfast, he contended that Jesus' original followers were not looking for a "spiritual leader" but for a "political leader" who could establish "a physical kingdom on the Earth." And Jesus, he noted, was "bucking the political establishment." (Sound familiar?) "The ministry of Jesus," he claimed, was a "highly political ministry." So religion and politics do mix—a lot. "It's not just a spiritual confrontation," Cruz said. "It's also a political confrontation." Toward the end of that speech, Cruz declared, "We have a responsibility to elect righteous leaders. God is going to hold us accountable if we do not." He added, "And the people will proclaim that Jesus Christ is lord and king of this nation."
It's not ambiguous. For Rafael Cruz, the only legitimate government is one that operates according to his theological views.
Those views tend to be rather harsh. He has referred to the theory of evolution as a diabolical plot mounted by Marxists, "the number one tool for communism to destroy religion, to destroy the concept of God." Evolution, he claimed, "is one of the most effective tools to impose communism." He has repeatedly said same-sex marriage is a satanic scheme, noting in a talk to a Republican group in 2013 that "homosexual marriage…has nothing to do with quote homosexual rights. It has to do with the destruction of the traditional family. So that there is no loyalty to the family. Loyalty is to the government. Government is your god."
Obama, naturally, is propelling much of these underhanded machinations. The president, Rafael Cruz said three years ago, "needs you to see him as God." He's a Marxist, Cruz has charged, and his agenda "is to bring us down to a Third World country" and subjugate the United States to the United Nations. He has said that Obama "will side with the Muslims" and claimed that the Obama administration is "trying to take our God and our gun and if they do that, then they can impose a dictatorship upon us." He insists Obamacare does include death panels. He has blamed liberals for allowing terrorists to cross the border "on a weekly basis" and establish "terrorist cells all across the United States."
His is a dark perspective. The "wicked" are now ruling the country, and they must be defeated by the "righteous," whom he defines as those evangelical Christians who embrace the literal truth of the Bible. ("Every word of Scripture is given by revelation," he said in 2013. "Every word of this book is true. Because if you don't believe one part of it, then none of it might be true.") The righteous, he urges, must be guided by pastors across the nation to rise up and "take every position in office, from dog catcher all the way to the highest position in the land." In a 2013 sermon, according to a partial transcript obtained by Mother Jones, he proclaimed that Satan "rules in the halls of legislation," and said, "We have a responsibility to preserve the biblical foundations of this country." He added, "The world will tell you, 'We're all children of God.' That's not true. Children of God are only those that have been born again through the blood of Jesus Christ."
Rafael Cruz's outlook on the world is exceedingly narrow and unforgiving. The only righteous Christian is the evangelical Christian who is "biblically correct." These Christians must conquer the political world—vanquish those who are in league with Satan—and establish dominion over society by ruling in accordance with their definition of the word of God. And Ted Cruz was directly given the green light from God, via Heidi Cruz, to lead what is, in essence, a crusade to smite wickedness. (At a gathering of evangelicals in Iowa in 2013, Ted and Rafael Cruz joined in prayer with a pastor who said that "every tongue that rises up against [Ted Cruz] in judgment will be condemned.")
Without saying it directly, Rafael Cruz calls for a theocracy. (He has often decried the notion of separation of church and state.) His religious rants are not irrelevant to the Ted Cruz campaign. Ted Cruz has consistently cited his father as a key influence in his life, and he has regularly deployed him as a political representative and surrogate. It's often tough to bring up the subject of a candidate's religious views during a political campaign. But Rafael Cruz's radical fundamentalism—which positions most Americans on the side of wickedness—and Ted Cruz's embrace of his father as not only a parent but a political partner and adviser raise an important question this campaign season: How much of the faith of his father does Ted Cruz share?
Broker a Kasich-Rubio Ticket
GOP Insider Trent Lott Tried to Broker a Kasich-Rubio Ticket to Thwart Donald Trump
Here's why his plan to "shake up the landscape" failed.
By David Corn
The other day, I bumped into Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate majority leader who's now at the law and lobbying firm of Squire Patton Boggs (its clients include Airbus, Goldman Sachs, and Royal Dutch Shell). He's always polite and chatty—these days he's promoting a book he wrote with former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle called Crisis Point that decries the partisan polarization of Washington and offers proposals for de-gridlocking the city—and he asked me what I was up to. I noted that I had just finished listening to a Donald Trump speech. Lott rolled his eyes. So who are you for? I asked, though I had a good guess. Almost all the former Capitol Hill GOPers who are now lobbyists in DC are pulling for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and, sure enough, Lott declared he's on Team Kasich. And, Lott added, he had been trying to thwart Trump.
How so? I asked.
Lott said he had actively tried to broker a deal between Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another Washington Republican favorite whose presidential campaign did not last too long once the voting started. This was Lott's plan: Kasich and Rubio would agree to run as a ticket, with Rubio in the veep slot, and the pair would keep this quiet and not announce the deal until days before the Republican convention. This dramatic, headline-grabbing move, in Lott's thinking, would dominate the news, as GOPers gathered in Cleveland, and potentially rewrite the narrative of the Republican race. That is, the Kasich-Rubio ticket would be the story, not Trump. This would "shake up the landscape," Lott said.
Lott told me that he had put some time into this idea but, alas, it was now probably dead. Why? First, he said, Kasich's alliance with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), which lasted several nanoseconds, had gotten in the way. That ill-fated deal—under which Kasich would not campaign in Indiana and give Cruz a one-on-one shot at Trump—bolstered Trump's claim that Republican insiders were plotting against him and conniving to undermine the will of GOP voters. Another brokered arrangement, Lott said, would look awful. In essence, the party deal-makers could only get one shot to concoct a stop-Trump deal, and they had blown their chance.
And there was another reason to pull the plug on the Kasich-Rubio plan, Lott said: it now seemed as if Trump would snag the 1,237 delegates needed to obtain the nomination—or get damn close. Lott is one of the growing number of GOP bigwigs saying that if the real estate mogul is close to the magic number, it will be all but impossible to not hand him the presidential nomination. Not even a Kasich-Rubio dream ticket—well, it's a dream for K Street Republicans, at least—could stop Trump, if he's within spitting distance of 1,237.
"But I tried," Lott said.
I later asked a Kasich adviser about Lott's plan, and he said, "The Kasich-Rubio or Rubio-Kasich team has been hanging around for months as a concept that could potentially be very popular with the delegates. I know of no active pursuit of that concept presently perhaps because what I have heard is that Rubio has been making overtures to Trump." (Rubio and Trump! How's that for wonderful political gossip?)
Lott went on to note that he believes Trump could win a general election against Hillary Clinton. "There's something happening in this country, and Trump has tapped into it," he explained. Lott pointed out that when he goes back home to Mississippi he comes across plenty of blue-collar workers who are pissed off about trade deals and immigration. They're for Trump, and some are Democrats. He noted that when he was in Congress he supported every trade deal that came through but now would not. And, he added, did you know this: one out of five households in this country don't have anyone working in a job. His analysis: it's a mess out there, and Trump could well ride populist anger into the White House.
But would Lott vote for Trump over Clinton? "Yes, I would," Lott answered, without any hesitancy. Really? I replied. He said he would have no qualms doing so. But, he added, if Vice President Joe Biden were the Democratic candidate, he would vote for Biden.
"That's not going to happen," I said.
"Yeah," Lott replied. "That's too bad."
Here's why his plan to "shake up the landscape" failed.
By David Corn
The other day, I bumped into Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate majority leader who's now at the law and lobbying firm of Squire Patton Boggs (its clients include Airbus, Goldman Sachs, and Royal Dutch Shell). He's always polite and chatty—these days he's promoting a book he wrote with former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle called Crisis Point that decries the partisan polarization of Washington and offers proposals for de-gridlocking the city—and he asked me what I was up to. I noted that I had just finished listening to a Donald Trump speech. Lott rolled his eyes. So who are you for? I asked, though I had a good guess. Almost all the former Capitol Hill GOPers who are now lobbyists in DC are pulling for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and, sure enough, Lott declared he's on Team Kasich. And, Lott added, he had been trying to thwart Trump.
How so? I asked.
Lott said he had actively tried to broker a deal between Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another Washington Republican favorite whose presidential campaign did not last too long once the voting started. This was Lott's plan: Kasich and Rubio would agree to run as a ticket, with Rubio in the veep slot, and the pair would keep this quiet and not announce the deal until days before the Republican convention. This dramatic, headline-grabbing move, in Lott's thinking, would dominate the news, as GOPers gathered in Cleveland, and potentially rewrite the narrative of the Republican race. That is, the Kasich-Rubio ticket would be the story, not Trump. This would "shake up the landscape," Lott said.
Lott told me that he had put some time into this idea but, alas, it was now probably dead. Why? First, he said, Kasich's alliance with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), which lasted several nanoseconds, had gotten in the way. That ill-fated deal—under which Kasich would not campaign in Indiana and give Cruz a one-on-one shot at Trump—bolstered Trump's claim that Republican insiders were plotting against him and conniving to undermine the will of GOP voters. Another brokered arrangement, Lott said, would look awful. In essence, the party deal-makers could only get one shot to concoct a stop-Trump deal, and they had blown their chance.
And there was another reason to pull the plug on the Kasich-Rubio plan, Lott said: it now seemed as if Trump would snag the 1,237 delegates needed to obtain the nomination—or get damn close. Lott is one of the growing number of GOP bigwigs saying that if the real estate mogul is close to the magic number, it will be all but impossible to not hand him the presidential nomination. Not even a Kasich-Rubio dream ticket—well, it's a dream for K Street Republicans, at least—could stop Trump, if he's within spitting distance of 1,237.
"But I tried," Lott said.
I later asked a Kasich adviser about Lott's plan, and he said, "The Kasich-Rubio or Rubio-Kasich team has been hanging around for months as a concept that could potentially be very popular with the delegates. I know of no active pursuit of that concept presently perhaps because what I have heard is that Rubio has been making overtures to Trump." (Rubio and Trump! How's that for wonderful political gossip?)
Lott went on to note that he believes Trump could win a general election against Hillary Clinton. "There's something happening in this country, and Trump has tapped into it," he explained. Lott pointed out that when he goes back home to Mississippi he comes across plenty of blue-collar workers who are pissed off about trade deals and immigration. They're for Trump, and some are Democrats. He noted that when he was in Congress he supported every trade deal that came through but now would not. And, he added, did you know this: one out of five households in this country don't have anyone working in a job. His analysis: it's a mess out there, and Trump could well ride populist anger into the White House.
But would Lott vote for Trump over Clinton? "Yes, I would," Lott answered, without any hesitancy. Really? I replied. He said he would have no qualms doing so. But, he added, if Vice President Joe Biden were the Democratic candidate, he would vote for Biden.
"That's not going to happen," I said.
"Yeah," Lott replied. "That's too bad."
Unprecedented
Here's How Unprecedented Carly Fiorina's Nomination Would Be
By Tim Murphy
Ted Cruz may be mathematically eliminated from clinching the Republican presidential nomination before the convention, but that didn't stop the Texas senator from announcing a running mate on Wednesday: Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race after the New Hampshire primary and previously lost a US Senate race in California, is a notable pick not just because she is a woman, or because she previously criticized Cruz for saying "whatever he needs to say to get elected," but because of her past experience—she would be the first vice president in 76 years to have ascended to the post without previously holding elected office.
The last time a major party picked a vice presidential nominee without legislative or gubernatorial experience was in 1972, when Democrat George McGovern chose Sargent Shriver, who had previously run the Peace Corps and worked on President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty." But you have to put an asterisk next to that, since Shriver was chosen only after McGovern's original running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, resigned amid reports about his previous mental health treatments. Four years earlier, Alabama Gov. George Wallace selected as his running mate Air Force General Curtis LeMay, but Wallace, a longtime Democrat, had chosen to run (and lose) under the American Independent Party.
To find a running mate with no experience in elected office who actually won, you have to go back to 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt named Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace as his second vice president, following eight years of John Nance Garner. Prior to that, Calvin Coolidge tapped Charles Dawes, President Warren Harding's budget director, to be on his victorious ticket in 1924. Dawes had lost a Senate race 23 years earlier and written a hit song in the interim, before being dragged into the executive branch. Dawes himself seemed to recognize his lack of qualifications. "I don't know anything about politics," he said after being selected as Coolidge's running mate. "I thought I knew something about politics once. I was taken up on the top of a 20-story building and showed the promised land—and then I was kicked off."
But okay, both of those vice presidents had some experience in the executive branch. The last true outsider to win was in the 19th century. Prior to becoming James A. Garfield's running mate in 1880, Chester A. Arthur had no political experience other than stints as port collector of New York City and chairman of the state Republican Party. In a nice bit of symmetry with Cruz's campaign, Arthur's future presidential campaign was marred by allegations that he was ineligible because he was born in Canada.
By Tim Murphy
Ted Cruz may be mathematically eliminated from clinching the Republican presidential nomination before the convention, but that didn't stop the Texas senator from announcing a running mate on Wednesday: Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race after the New Hampshire primary and previously lost a US Senate race in California, is a notable pick not just because she is a woman, or because she previously criticized Cruz for saying "whatever he needs to say to get elected," but because of her past experience—she would be the first vice president in 76 years to have ascended to the post without previously holding elected office.
The last time a major party picked a vice presidential nominee without legislative or gubernatorial experience was in 1972, when Democrat George McGovern chose Sargent Shriver, who had previously run the Peace Corps and worked on President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty." But you have to put an asterisk next to that, since Shriver was chosen only after McGovern's original running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, resigned amid reports about his previous mental health treatments. Four years earlier, Alabama Gov. George Wallace selected as his running mate Air Force General Curtis LeMay, but Wallace, a longtime Democrat, had chosen to run (and lose) under the American Independent Party.
To find a running mate with no experience in elected office who actually won, you have to go back to 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt named Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace as his second vice president, following eight years of John Nance Garner. Prior to that, Calvin Coolidge tapped Charles Dawes, President Warren Harding's budget director, to be on his victorious ticket in 1924. Dawes had lost a Senate race 23 years earlier and written a hit song in the interim, before being dragged into the executive branch. Dawes himself seemed to recognize his lack of qualifications. "I don't know anything about politics," he said after being selected as Coolidge's running mate. "I thought I knew something about politics once. I was taken up on the top of a 20-story building and showed the promised land—and then I was kicked off."
But okay, both of those vice presidents had some experience in the executive branch. The last true outsider to win was in the 19th century. Prior to becoming James A. Garfield's running mate in 1880, Chester A. Arthur had no political experience other than stints as port collector of New York City and chairman of the state Republican Party. In a nice bit of symmetry with Cruz's campaign, Arthur's future presidential campaign was marred by allegations that he was ineligible because he was born in Canada.
Ground Game
Donald Trump's Ground Game Is Much Better Than We Thought
Exhibit A: Pennsylvania.
By Pema Levy
Tuesday's Republican primary in Pennsylvania was the ultimate test of the three campaigns' ground organization. And the candidate who's been most widely impugned for his ground game came out on top by a vast margin.
Donald Trump won the Pennsylvania Republican primary with 57 percent of the vote. But that was only half the battle in the Keystone State. Unlike voters in most states, who select the candidate of their choice (or a slate of delegates listed under that candidate), GOP voters in Pennsylvania see only delegates' names on the ballot. The delegates they elect to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are not obligated to support any particular candidate at the convention. That means that for the candidates, getting sympathetic delegates elected is just as important as winning the popular vote.
The Trump campaign nailed this challenge. According to ABC News, at least 41 of the 54 unbound delegates in Pennsylvania will back Trump. Runner-up Ted Cruz has the support of just three delegates in the state, while nine remain uncommitted.
Pennsylvania's system of directly electing delegates presented a challenge for the campaigns. A Republican voter in Pennsylvania needed to know not only his or her choice for president, but also which candidates for delegate would support that person in Cleveland this summer. That required the campaigns to do two things: ensure that sympathetic delegates made it onto the ballot (or at least identify the supportive candidates) in each congressional district, and launch a substantial information campaign so voters would know which delegates to choose.
Trump was not expected to perform well in this regard. His campaign, which has built its success on a massive press and social-media presence, has been criticized for its lack of ground organizing, which presaged trouble in the crucial delegate-wrangling stage in the latter part of the race. The Cruz campaign has been getting credit for its behind-the-scenes maneuvering to send pro-Cruz delegates to the convention in Cleveland; in states like Colorado, for example, Cruz's delegate strategy won him nearly every delegate from the state and left none for Trump.
But in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign educated its supporters better than the Cruz campaign, and the results showed.
Pennsylvania will send 71 delegates to the national convention: 17 at-large delegates and three delegates from each of the 18 congressional districts. Let's look at one of these districts, Pennsylvania's 4th Congressional District. The three pro-Trump candidates for delegate here beat out 12 other candidates.
Local Republican leaders in the 4th Congressional District witnessed a highly organized Trump campaign. In the final days of the race, the Trump campaign mailed a slate card to Republican voters in the state that listed the pro-Trump delegate slates in each district. Alexander Shorb, the chairman of the York County GOP who ran as an uncommitted delegate candidate in the 4th District and lost to the pro-Trump candidates, visited polling locations throughout the day. He estimates that 80 percent of pro-Trump voters showed up to the polls with their slate card or with the names of the pro-Trump delegates on their phones. For those who came unprepared, teams of Trump volunteers were stationed at many polling locations, giving out information on the Trump slate to supporters in line to vote.
"There was a Trump supporter handing out literature only for Donald Trump at almost every polling location in York County," says Shorb. "I went to the heaviest [trafficked] polls and there was not one person handing out Cruz material at any one of them. So as far as a ground game, he had none."
Cruz "has been kind of getting a lot of credit for peeling off some delegates here or peeling off some delegates there," he continued. But in his county, Shorb doesn't know of any Cruz mailers. "What I saw from him wasn't anywhere close to the sophistication of the Trump campaign."
Charlie Gerow, another uncommitted candidate in the 4th District, believes that Trump's ground operation in the state was largely run by volunteers. "But they were exceptionally well organized in the last 48 to 72 hours of the campaign," he said, pointing to the direct mailings and the Trump supporters at the polling locations. "They put money behind it," he said of the campaign's operation. "To have mailed into every congressional district took significant resources, and they did it."
Gerow has been elected as a delegate to the Republican Party's last 10 national conventions. But it quickly became clear to him Tuesday that he might lose this time around to the delegates backing Trump. A few days before the primary, an elderly woman in his neighborhood asked him for a ride to the polls, so early Tuesday morning he drove her to her local precinct to vote. "We are driving back to her house and she put her little hand on my arm and she said, 'I'm so sorry I couldn't vote for you today,'" Gerow recalls. "She had the little Trump card in her hand."
Exhibit A: Pennsylvania.
By Pema Levy
Tuesday's Republican primary in Pennsylvania was the ultimate test of the three campaigns' ground organization. And the candidate who's been most widely impugned for his ground game came out on top by a vast margin.
Donald Trump won the Pennsylvania Republican primary with 57 percent of the vote. But that was only half the battle in the Keystone State. Unlike voters in most states, who select the candidate of their choice (or a slate of delegates listed under that candidate), GOP voters in Pennsylvania see only delegates' names on the ballot. The delegates they elect to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are not obligated to support any particular candidate at the convention. That means that for the candidates, getting sympathetic delegates elected is just as important as winning the popular vote.
The Trump campaign nailed this challenge. According to ABC News, at least 41 of the 54 unbound delegates in Pennsylvania will back Trump. Runner-up Ted Cruz has the support of just three delegates in the state, while nine remain uncommitted.
Pennsylvania's system of directly electing delegates presented a challenge for the campaigns. A Republican voter in Pennsylvania needed to know not only his or her choice for president, but also which candidates for delegate would support that person in Cleveland this summer. That required the campaigns to do two things: ensure that sympathetic delegates made it onto the ballot (or at least identify the supportive candidates) in each congressional district, and launch a substantial information campaign so voters would know which delegates to choose.
Trump was not expected to perform well in this regard. His campaign, which has built its success on a massive press and social-media presence, has been criticized for its lack of ground organizing, which presaged trouble in the crucial delegate-wrangling stage in the latter part of the race. The Cruz campaign has been getting credit for its behind-the-scenes maneuvering to send pro-Cruz delegates to the convention in Cleveland; in states like Colorado, for example, Cruz's delegate strategy won him nearly every delegate from the state and left none for Trump.
But in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign educated its supporters better than the Cruz campaign, and the results showed.
Pennsylvania will send 71 delegates to the national convention: 17 at-large delegates and three delegates from each of the 18 congressional districts. Let's look at one of these districts, Pennsylvania's 4th Congressional District. The three pro-Trump candidates for delegate here beat out 12 other candidates.
Local Republican leaders in the 4th Congressional District witnessed a highly organized Trump campaign. In the final days of the race, the Trump campaign mailed a slate card to Republican voters in the state that listed the pro-Trump delegate slates in each district. Alexander Shorb, the chairman of the York County GOP who ran as an uncommitted delegate candidate in the 4th District and lost to the pro-Trump candidates, visited polling locations throughout the day. He estimates that 80 percent of pro-Trump voters showed up to the polls with their slate card or with the names of the pro-Trump delegates on their phones. For those who came unprepared, teams of Trump volunteers were stationed at many polling locations, giving out information on the Trump slate to supporters in line to vote.
"There was a Trump supporter handing out literature only for Donald Trump at almost every polling location in York County," says Shorb. "I went to the heaviest [trafficked] polls and there was not one person handing out Cruz material at any one of them. So as far as a ground game, he had none."
Cruz "has been kind of getting a lot of credit for peeling off some delegates here or peeling off some delegates there," he continued. But in his county, Shorb doesn't know of any Cruz mailers. "What I saw from him wasn't anywhere close to the sophistication of the Trump campaign."
Charlie Gerow, another uncommitted candidate in the 4th District, believes that Trump's ground operation in the state was largely run by volunteers. "But they were exceptionally well organized in the last 48 to 72 hours of the campaign," he said, pointing to the direct mailings and the Trump supporters at the polling locations. "They put money behind it," he said of the campaign's operation. "To have mailed into every congressional district took significant resources, and they did it."
Gerow has been elected as a delegate to the Republican Party's last 10 national conventions. But it quickly became clear to him Tuesday that he might lose this time around to the delegates backing Trump. A few days before the primary, an elderly woman in his neighborhood asked him for a ride to the polls, so early Tuesday morning he drove her to her local precinct to vote. "We are driving back to her house and she put her little hand on my arm and she said, 'I'm so sorry I couldn't vote for you today,'" Gerow recalls. "She had the little Trump card in her hand."
Fewer Kids
Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here's Why
Rates of teen pregnancy have plummeted over the last ten years, according to a new report.
By Nina Liss-Schultz
The number of teenage women having children has hit an all-time low, thanks in large part to increased contraceptive access and use among Hispanic and African American teenagers, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For decades, the United States has had higher rates of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. But recent increases in access to contraception, particularly to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as IUDs and implants, have helped women of all ages reduce the chances of unintended pregnancy. Since 2002, LARC use has increased five-fold, with most of that change being due to greater use of IUDs.
Though the CDC stopped short of completely attributing the drop in teen births to contraceptives like LARCs, according to the report "preliminary data" suggests that the use of evidence-based reproductive health services, including contraceptives, is what has led to the huge drop in childbirth among young women over the last ten years.
The drop was particularly notable among Hispanic and African American teenagers. Birth rates for young Hispanic women fell 51 percent since 2006, and for black teenagers 44 percent. That's a big deal, because Hispanic and African American teenagers have historically had much higher rates of teen pregnancies than their white counterparts. Ten years ago, the birth rate for Hispanic teens was nearly 80 births per 1,000 women, but the rate for white teens was around 25. Now, the rate for Hispanic women is closer to 40.
Still, even though the number of white teens having children has also decreased, black and Hispanic teens still have twice as many pregnancies as their white peers. According to the report, that's because social inequalities, like income and education, and employment opportunities, remain low in communities of color and influence rates of teen pregnancy.
"The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences," CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post. "But the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies."
Rates of teen pregnancy have plummeted over the last ten years, according to a new report.
By Nina Liss-Schultz
The number of teenage women having children has hit an all-time low, thanks in large part to increased contraceptive access and use among Hispanic and African American teenagers, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For decades, the United States has had higher rates of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. But recent increases in access to contraception, particularly to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as IUDs and implants, have helped women of all ages reduce the chances of unintended pregnancy. Since 2002, LARC use has increased five-fold, with most of that change being due to greater use of IUDs.
Though the CDC stopped short of completely attributing the drop in teen births to contraceptives like LARCs, according to the report "preliminary data" suggests that the use of evidence-based reproductive health services, including contraceptives, is what has led to the huge drop in childbirth among young women over the last ten years.
The drop was particularly notable among Hispanic and African American teenagers. Birth rates for young Hispanic women fell 51 percent since 2006, and for black teenagers 44 percent. That's a big deal, because Hispanic and African American teenagers have historically had much higher rates of teen pregnancies than their white counterparts. Ten years ago, the birth rate for Hispanic teens was nearly 80 births per 1,000 women, but the rate for white teens was around 25. Now, the rate for Hispanic women is closer to 40.
Still, even though the number of white teens having children has also decreased, black and Hispanic teens still have twice as many pregnancies as their white peers. According to the report, that's because social inequalities, like income and education, and employment opportunities, remain low in communities of color and influence rates of teen pregnancy.
"The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences," CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post. "But the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies."
Gleefully Releases Mute Button
Out of Office, Ex-Speaker John Boehner Gleefully Releases Mute Button
By CARL HULSE
John A. Boehner never minced words as House speaker, but he usually leveled his insults behind closed doors. Now a private citizen, Mr. Boehner is going public, and the results can be spectacular.
On Wednesday, the former speaker gleefully unloaded on Senator Ted Cruz before a crowd at Stanford University, colorfully describing the Republican presidential contender from Texas as “Lucifer in the flesh.”
“I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” said Mr. Boehner, who has made previous disparaging remarks about Mr. Cruz in both public and private, though without comparing him directly to Satan.
An affronted Mr. Cruz, fighting in Indiana to keep his presidential bid alive, responded that he barely knew Mr. Boehner.
“If I have said 50 words in my life to John Boehner, I’d be surprised, and every one of them has consisted of pleasantries,” Mr. Cruz told reporters, noting that he had never really worked with Mr. Boehner.
And therein lies the problem. Mr. Boehner, who suffered as Mr. Cruz wooed rebellious House conservatives into a punishing government shutdown in 2013, saw Mr. Cruz as a self-aggrandizer who put himself above the institution of Congress and even the good of his party. To an institutionalist like Mr. Boehner, there is no greater offense.
Mr. Cruz, on the other hand, saw Mr. Boehner as a handy symbol of Washington deal-making and the standard-bearer for what Mr. Cruz deplores as the “Washington cartel,” a much more ominous way of describing the political establishment. It was destined to be a nonrelationship forged where Lucifer resides.
While Mr. Boehner no doubt enjoyed the attention accorded his biting remark on Mr. Cruz, it worked out for Mr. Cruz as well. He got the opportunity to again burnish his anti-Washington credentials and position himself as a warrior against Mr. Boehner and Donald J. Trump, who Mr. Boehner said in the Stanford talk was a “texting buddy.” Mr. Boehner said that they had golfed together, and that he would vote for Mr. Trump if it came to that, but not for Mr. Cruz.
To anyone who knew Mr. Boehner in Washington, the comments, first reported by The Stanford Daily, were no surprise. With a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Mr. Boehner would often hold forth, offering his rather spirited views of individuals and ideas, though not always for publication. And when he was in exile from the leadership from 1998 to 2006, he was a go-to quote for commentary on the poor conduct of those who were in charge.
But when he took over as speaker, Mr. Boehner clammed up a bit, so the surprise is how freely flowing the comments are these days.
Earlier this year, Mr. Boehner, who favored Jeb Bush in the presidential race and later endorsed his home-state governor, John Kasich, essentially single-handedly touched off the Paul Ryan-for-Republican-nominee boomlet while speaking to a trade association in March.
“If we don’t have a nominee who can win on the first ballot, I’m for none of the above,” Mr. Boehner said. “They all had a chance to win. None of them won. So I’m for none of the above. I’m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee.”
Mr. Ryan, Mr. Boehner’s successor as speaker, has been trying to dial back that talk ever since, another victim of John Boehner unplugged.
To his aides, this is all just Boehner being Boehner.
“You know he generally says what he thinks anyway, and being out of office has certainly not made him any less inclined to be that way,” said David Schnittger, a spokesman for the former speaker.
The Stanford speech was a good example. Encouraged to be candid, he was downright loquacious in offering his views on everything from Hillary Clinton — “Oh, I’m a woman, vote for me” — to Senator Bernie Sanders’s being a good guy to the possibility of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. emerging as a last-minute presidential nominee.
He pronounced the conservative Republicans in the Freedom Caucus who bedeviled him on Capitol Hill as knuckleheads and goofballs, a sentiment he has also expressed on prior occasions.
Mr. Boehner had little patience for conservatives he believed did not understand how the House worked and how compromise was a necessity, not a sin, with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats empowered in the Senate.
Mr. Ryan, by contrast, has been more willing to reach out to the same conservatives. And while the results may be similar — a continuing budget standoff for instance — the conservatives do not have their sights set on Mr. Ryan, as they did Mr. Boehner. At least not yet.
Mr. Boehner seems eminently comfortable in retirement, buying a new car after years of being driven around by a security team and traveling the country without the trappings of his congressional position.
“I think my proudest accomplishment is walking out of there the same jackass I was 25 years before,” Mr. Boehner said, according to the Stanford newspaper.
Now that he is out of office, the speaker speaks.
By CARL HULSE
John A. Boehner never minced words as House speaker, but he usually leveled his insults behind closed doors. Now a private citizen, Mr. Boehner is going public, and the results can be spectacular.
On Wednesday, the former speaker gleefully unloaded on Senator Ted Cruz before a crowd at Stanford University, colorfully describing the Republican presidential contender from Texas as “Lucifer in the flesh.”
“I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” said Mr. Boehner, who has made previous disparaging remarks about Mr. Cruz in both public and private, though without comparing him directly to Satan.
An affronted Mr. Cruz, fighting in Indiana to keep his presidential bid alive, responded that he barely knew Mr. Boehner.
“If I have said 50 words in my life to John Boehner, I’d be surprised, and every one of them has consisted of pleasantries,” Mr. Cruz told reporters, noting that he had never really worked with Mr. Boehner.
And therein lies the problem. Mr. Boehner, who suffered as Mr. Cruz wooed rebellious House conservatives into a punishing government shutdown in 2013, saw Mr. Cruz as a self-aggrandizer who put himself above the institution of Congress and even the good of his party. To an institutionalist like Mr. Boehner, there is no greater offense.
Mr. Cruz, on the other hand, saw Mr. Boehner as a handy symbol of Washington deal-making and the standard-bearer for what Mr. Cruz deplores as the “Washington cartel,” a much more ominous way of describing the political establishment. It was destined to be a nonrelationship forged where Lucifer resides.
While Mr. Boehner no doubt enjoyed the attention accorded his biting remark on Mr. Cruz, it worked out for Mr. Cruz as well. He got the opportunity to again burnish his anti-Washington credentials and position himself as a warrior against Mr. Boehner and Donald J. Trump, who Mr. Boehner said in the Stanford talk was a “texting buddy.” Mr. Boehner said that they had golfed together, and that he would vote for Mr. Trump if it came to that, but not for Mr. Cruz.
To anyone who knew Mr. Boehner in Washington, the comments, first reported by The Stanford Daily, were no surprise. With a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Mr. Boehner would often hold forth, offering his rather spirited views of individuals and ideas, though not always for publication. And when he was in exile from the leadership from 1998 to 2006, he was a go-to quote for commentary on the poor conduct of those who were in charge.
But when he took over as speaker, Mr. Boehner clammed up a bit, so the surprise is how freely flowing the comments are these days.
Earlier this year, Mr. Boehner, who favored Jeb Bush in the presidential race and later endorsed his home-state governor, John Kasich, essentially single-handedly touched off the Paul Ryan-for-Republican-nominee boomlet while speaking to a trade association in March.
“If we don’t have a nominee who can win on the first ballot, I’m for none of the above,” Mr. Boehner said. “They all had a chance to win. None of them won. So I’m for none of the above. I’m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee.”
Mr. Ryan, Mr. Boehner’s successor as speaker, has been trying to dial back that talk ever since, another victim of John Boehner unplugged.
To his aides, this is all just Boehner being Boehner.
“You know he generally says what he thinks anyway, and being out of office has certainly not made him any less inclined to be that way,” said David Schnittger, a spokesman for the former speaker.
The Stanford speech was a good example. Encouraged to be candid, he was downright loquacious in offering his views on everything from Hillary Clinton — “Oh, I’m a woman, vote for me” — to Senator Bernie Sanders’s being a good guy to the possibility of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. emerging as a last-minute presidential nominee.
He pronounced the conservative Republicans in the Freedom Caucus who bedeviled him on Capitol Hill as knuckleheads and goofballs, a sentiment he has also expressed on prior occasions.
Mr. Boehner had little patience for conservatives he believed did not understand how the House worked and how compromise was a necessity, not a sin, with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats empowered in the Senate.
Mr. Ryan, by contrast, has been more willing to reach out to the same conservatives. And while the results may be similar — a continuing budget standoff for instance — the conservatives do not have their sights set on Mr. Ryan, as they did Mr. Boehner. At least not yet.
Mr. Boehner seems eminently comfortable in retirement, buying a new car after years of being driven around by a security team and traveling the country without the trappings of his congressional position.
“I think my proudest accomplishment is walking out of there the same jackass I was 25 years before,” Mr. Boehner said, according to the Stanford newspaper.
Now that he is out of office, the speaker speaks.
House Bill
House Bill 2 repeal legislation sent to Senate committee that never meets
By Colin Campbell
State Senate Democrats’ proposal to repeal House Bill 2 appears to be dead just a day after it was filed.
On Wednesday, senators Terry Van Duyn of Asheville, Jeff Jackson of Charlotte and Mike Woodard of Durham filed Senate Bill 784, which would repeal the controversial LGBT law in its entirety. The bill is identical to one filed Monday by House Democrats.
Senate leaders assigned the bill to committees on Thursday. Because of a budget item included, its first stop is the Senate Appropriations Committee. But if it got approval from that panel, its second assigned stop is the Senate Ways and Means Committee – which is something of an inside joke in the Senate.
The three-member Ways and Means Committee hasn’t held a meeting in years. It’s widely known as the graveyard of the Senate – the place where Senate Rules Chairman Tom Apodaca sends legislation that he wants to kill.
So it’s virtually certain that the repeal bill will never make it to the Senate floor for a full vote.
Meanwhile, the House Democrats’ repeal bill has been referred to the Judiciary IV Committee, which is where House Bill 2 had its first hearing in March. That means the committee’s co-chairmen, Republican Reps. Rob Bryan of Charlotte and Hugh Blackwell of Burke County, get to decide if and when the bill gets a hearing. Both legislators are supporters of House Bill 2.
By Colin Campbell
State Senate Democrats’ proposal to repeal House Bill 2 appears to be dead just a day after it was filed.
On Wednesday, senators Terry Van Duyn of Asheville, Jeff Jackson of Charlotte and Mike Woodard of Durham filed Senate Bill 784, which would repeal the controversial LGBT law in its entirety. The bill is identical to one filed Monday by House Democrats.
Senate leaders assigned the bill to committees on Thursday. Because of a budget item included, its first stop is the Senate Appropriations Committee. But if it got approval from that panel, its second assigned stop is the Senate Ways and Means Committee – which is something of an inside joke in the Senate.
The three-member Ways and Means Committee hasn’t held a meeting in years. It’s widely known as the graveyard of the Senate – the place where Senate Rules Chairman Tom Apodaca sends legislation that he wants to kill.
So it’s virtually certain that the repeal bill will never make it to the Senate floor for a full vote.
Meanwhile, the House Democrats’ repeal bill has been referred to the Judiciary IV Committee, which is where House Bill 2 had its first hearing in March. That means the committee’s co-chairmen, Republican Reps. Rob Bryan of Charlotte and Hugh Blackwell of Burke County, get to decide if and when the bill gets a hearing. Both legislators are supporters of House Bill 2.
Clinton sex scandal
Wilmore: Bill Clinton sex scandal's no joke
The 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner comedian is sharpening his barbs, mostly for use on Trump.
By Glenn Thrush
Larry Wilmore really likes Bernie Sanders, is okay with Hillary Clinton and finds Donald Trump “interesting” in the coded language of a comedian-journalist of the liberal persuasion attempting to maintain a veneer of non-partisan neutrality.
But when it comes to William Jefferson Clinton – whom he quarter-jokingly referred to as a “super-predator” on the “Nightly Show” recently – whoa.
“As president of the United States, he decided it was a good thing to fool around with a 22-year-old staffer [Monica Lewinsky] in the White House,” a stone-serious Wilmore, the keynote speaker of this weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner told me during an (an otherwise light) interview for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.
“It was predatory behavior, you know,” added Wilmore, who grew up in a Catholic family outside of L.A. “I really supported the Clintons politically, but that really bugged me, that whole Clinton thing… [I]t [still] does, because it's not--even though they both said it was consensual, you're the President of the United States. That's the workplace. You know, that's a young girl. Come on, man. You've got a young daughter. Come on, you don't gotta do that. That's not right.”
Wilmore, a low-key 54-year-old writer, comic and actor, couldn’t be more different that the man he replaced at the Comedy Central late desk, Stephen Colbert, who famously lit up George W. Bush at the 2006 dinner. That roast, which spurred walk-outs from aghast Republicans, prompted event organizers to opt for less incendiary speakers like, well, Wilmore.
If Colbert cloaked his progressive worldview behind a faux-conservative suit-and-tie, Wilmore doesn’t pretend to be anyone other than himself; His comedy comes with an unmistakable moral edge, it colors and sometimes overshadows a professional funnyman’s imperative to be hilarious, as his grudge against the 42nd proves.
Wilmore’s parents, who emigrated from Evanston, Ill. to Pomona, California when he was kid, remain a significant influence. His father, who worked as an L.A. County probation officer until his late 30s, decided – after determining he was board working at a camp for youthful offenders -- to become a doctor, and willed himself through medical school while working. ("I saw a Gray's Anatomy book on his table and I said, 'What are you doing?' And he said, 'You know, I think I'm going to change what I'm doing'").
Wilmore was the class president of a nearly all-white Catholic school – a position, he joked, that will make him feel right at home at Saturday night’s largely monochromatic dinner.
The WHCA podium has become a consequential perch for “serious” comedians in recent years. It can accelerate a rising career (Colbert, Seth Meyers), lend gravitas to a lighter-weight host (Joel McHale), or expose the fault lines between entertainment and politics – like the withdrawal of would-be host Louis C.K. in 2012 after Greta Von Susteren and others savaged him for making (allegedly) misogynistic jokes.
The pressure not to bomb is intense (A couple of years back, I stood backstage with McHale nerves-a-jangle, as he paced back and forth reading his jokes aloud out of a tiny loose-leaf notebook filled with laminated joke-pages). So most hosts affect a carefree I-got-here-by-accident attitude.
Not Wilmore. He’s got the guts to admit he’s pushed for it since performing a well-received set at the Congressional Correspondents Dinner a few years back, when he was Jon Stewart's “Senior Black Correspondent” on The Daily Show. “I call it ‘throwing it out there’--that I really wanted to do this, you know, not knowing if I'd have a chance to do it or be in the position and do it, but really hoping that I would,” he told me during a sit-down in Manhattan last week as he was prepping his final set with a team of writers from his show.
When I ask him why he wanted the gig so much, he says “I don’t know,” then pauses. “I guess it was something that I felt would be a cool thing to have done, especially to do it for President Obama, first black president, the significance of him in that office, and I just wanted to be able to have a chance to do that.”
Wilmore isn’t shy about confronting racial topics on his show (One of the funniest recent segments was a focus group with a handful of black Trump supporters that ended with him asking them how they had lost their minds), and he offers the bluntest possible explanation for his blanket Obama-philia.
“Well, I always said I'm not disappointed with Obama because I voted for him because he was black, and as long as he kept being black, I was a happy man,” he said.
Wilmore then relates the following semi-made-up conversation:
‘Well, Larry, what about Obama’s foreign policy?’
‘Is he still black?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, I have no problem. I am good.’”
Wilmore says he’ll make his share of Obama jokes, and Clinton jokes, but his target of choice is – duh – Trump. He hasn’t talked to Colbert about the speech, but (as of the taping) he planned to quiz Meyers, whose performance he considered to be the gold standard.
He especially loved Meyers’ signature joke, delivered to Trump’s disapproving chin-jutted scowl, that the only “blacks” who really liked him were a “family of white people” named the Blacks.
“His assault on Trump was hilarious,” says Wilmore who has tried – thus far unsuccessfully -- to woo the billionaire developer onto his show. “It was so funny. They kept cutting to Trump, and his reaction was just hilarious. I mean, Trump's face was just--it kept getting funnier and funnier and funnier.”
As he professes to view 2016 as an endless tanker train of comic fuel, Wilmore is worried by the danger he says Trump poses; One of his earliest Trump bits featured him grilling his writers for jokes – and each one giving up, saying the reality star’s rise wasn’t funny.
Moreover, he’s not buying Democratic self-talk that Trump will be a pushover in November – and thinks a lot of voters might opt for an alternative out of sheer Clinton fatigue.
“Hillary is already a known factor to people; there's nothing, like, new about her, and I think ‘new’ means something when you're running for president,” he said.
“It's like the Clintons are coming back into the neighborhood, and there's something about that. And I'm not even judging it on a political level. I'm just judging on just the purest human level.
“There's something about a new family moving into the White House that's kind of interesting, even if you didn't vote for them,” he said referring to the Trump clan.
Up to Clinton...
Trump's camp: Up to Clinton if we go after Bill's sexual past
By Nolan D. McCaskill
If Hillary Clinton accuses Donald Trump of being sexist, the Republican presidential front-runner is prepared to revive his attacks on Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.
Responding to Clinton’s remark late last year that he had a “penchant for sexism” after the real-estate mogul suggested she got “schlonged” by Barack Obama in 2008, Trump said former President Clinton has “demonstrated a penchant for sexism.” He later added that Bill Clinton has a “terrible record of women abuse” and called his past infidelities “fair game.”
Asked Friday if the campaign would bring back that attack, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said it depends on Hillary Clinton.
“This came about because she called Donald Trump a sexist. It boggles my mind that if a woman is criticized all of a sudden that makes you a sexist, and that's just simply not the case,” she told MSNBC. “So if Hillary Clinton or her team wants to go after Donald Trump as a sexist, then he will absolutely bring up that topic because there is a lot to discuss that was not brought out into the public.”
Following Pierson’s television appearance, Trump took to Twitter to call Clinton — “Crooked Hillary Clinton” — “perhaps the most dishonest person to have ever run for the presidency” and “also one of the all time great enablers!”
By Nolan D. McCaskill
If Hillary Clinton accuses Donald Trump of being sexist, the Republican presidential front-runner is prepared to revive his attacks on Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.
Responding to Clinton’s remark late last year that he had a “penchant for sexism” after the real-estate mogul suggested she got “schlonged” by Barack Obama in 2008, Trump said former President Clinton has “demonstrated a penchant for sexism.” He later added that Bill Clinton has a “terrible record of women abuse” and called his past infidelities “fair game.”
Asked Friday if the campaign would bring back that attack, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said it depends on Hillary Clinton.
“This came about because she called Donald Trump a sexist. It boggles my mind that if a woman is criticized all of a sudden that makes you a sexist, and that's just simply not the case,” she told MSNBC. “So if Hillary Clinton or her team wants to go after Donald Trump as a sexist, then he will absolutely bring up that topic because there is a lot to discuss that was not brought out into the public.”
Following Pierson’s television appearance, Trump took to Twitter to call Clinton — “Crooked Hillary Clinton” — “perhaps the most dishonest person to have ever run for the presidency” and “also one of the all time great enablers!”
Loves to Be Hated
Why Ted Cruz Loves to Be Hated
By Jack Shafer
Last night, former Speaker of the House John Boehner captured the nation’s attention by calling presidential aspirant Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” in an appearance at Stanford University.
Having established his Satanic theme, Boehner continued. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
Any other politician would have winced at the characterization, especially coming from a fellow Republican. But given his long-term success at extracting vitriol and bile by the barrel from those who should be his ideological comrades, we can only assume that Cruz craves the hatred and condemnation, and regards Boehner’s Lucifer comment as an endorsement.
Ordinarily, decorum prevents politicians from making overt comments like this—even about the members of the opposing party. But Cruz has a way of producing the uncensored, blunt and ugly from his fellow party-members. This week, Complex collected some of the choice rips dealt to him by other Republicans. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsay Graham said in February. “Nobody likes him,” Bob Dole said in January. “Classless, tasteless and counterproductive,” said Rep. Tom Cole late last year. “I just don’t like the guy,” said former President George W. Bush in October.
“I hate Ted Cruz,” said Rep. Peter King, who isn’t exactly likable himself, recently. “I’ll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination.”
Of course, Cruz isn’t the first prick to inhabit politics. Lyndon Johnson, for example, famously enjoyed humiliating secretaries, senators and aides by summoning them into the bathroom for conversations while he was seated on the presidential throne. Richard Nixon could be nasty, too, but he resented the hatred his actions elicited. All would agree that Donald Trump is a wicked man, but he has his sensitive side, too, as proved by his emotional reaction to charges that he’s short-fingered.
If not the first prick, what is Cruz? He’s the first American politician who strives to be despised. If waterboarded, Johnson, Nixon and Trump would confess that they prefer love to hatred. Not Cruz, whose premeditated rudeness, self-righteousness, backstabbing and name-calling have inspired a dozen recent pieces exploring the question of why Washington hates Ted Cruz (Atlantic, New Republic, Mother Jones, New York, Vanity Fair, Vice, The Week, et al.). He wants to be hated. He draws strength from the attention it delivers and he has sought the hatred of others since high school (“He was not well liked,” said former high school classmate Laura Calaway). His pursuit of other’s hatred continued through college (“Ted’s style was sneering, smirking, condescending, jabbing his finger in your face,” said former college classmate Geoffrey Cohen) and has extended into his political career, where last year he gained notoriety (and more hatred) calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor.
Search history for Cruz’s antecedent and you’ll come up empty. Scan the pages of literature. Scroll your Rolodex. Canvass the jails and prisons. Nothing. Perhaps only in the annals of psychiatry can you find anybody in possession of a masochistic narcissist profile like Cruz’s. But those people are crazy. Cruz is not crazy. He might actually be a member of an advanced but not yet recognized species that has determined that spending effort on getting people to like you is a mug’s game. From the view from inside Cruz’s skull, once you get people to like you, your job has only begun. Additional acts of kindness, consideration and fairness must be extended or your likability will fade into the background. But hatred is a much more efficient use of emotional energy. Often, a single dose of malice can seal the impression among most people that you’re a terminal prick. By acquiring as his enemies the Washington political establishment, Cruz figures he can inherit their enemies, and the 2016 campaign has proved him right. Nobody until Cruz had the stomach to build his political foundation on a bedrock of loathing.
This is essentially the view of the Atlantic’s Molly Ball, who in January wrote that Cruz deliberately offends and insults his Republican colleagues so as to appear to his tea party allies as the only authentic conservative in the arena. Politicians have long campaigned for the White House by running against Washington, D.C. George Wallace was the first, doing it in the 1960 and ’70s. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama followed the Wallace example, although each crafted his own technique. But these candidates were only play-acting their hatred of Washington, eager to join the governing class in the event they won the presidential derby. What makes Cruz’s jihad against Washington appear sincere is his willingness to fight a two-theater war—one against the Democrats and the other against his own party—to the death if necessary. His hatred is pure and honest.
Did Cruz decide to play the hateful political villain, or was it thrust upon him? I defy you to look at him and not associate his squinty-eyed, prehensile-nosed, whiny-mouthed demonic visage with the great villains of film noir history. If looks are destiny, perhaps the answer to why Cruz works so hard to be hated can be contained in a snapshot: It’s the path of least resistance. But even film noir villains have deep soul-searching stretches in which they question their own badness. If Cruz has submitted to even a soul-searching once-over, I’d be surprised. Instead, he wears the hatred of his peers like a badge of honor, the way Lucifer and his fallen angels wore their Lord’s scorn.
If success is the measure, who can argue against the Cruz method? By antagonizing everybody in sight—by suppressing the standard-issue feelings of desiring love—he has taken his candidacy to unexpected heights. And he appears to be on the cusp of proving that hateful guys finish second.
By Jack Shafer
Last night, former Speaker of the House John Boehner captured the nation’s attention by calling presidential aspirant Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” in an appearance at Stanford University.
Having established his Satanic theme, Boehner continued. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
Any other politician would have winced at the characterization, especially coming from a fellow Republican. But given his long-term success at extracting vitriol and bile by the barrel from those who should be his ideological comrades, we can only assume that Cruz craves the hatred and condemnation, and regards Boehner’s Lucifer comment as an endorsement.
Ordinarily, decorum prevents politicians from making overt comments like this—even about the members of the opposing party. But Cruz has a way of producing the uncensored, blunt and ugly from his fellow party-members. This week, Complex collected some of the choice rips dealt to him by other Republicans. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsay Graham said in February. “Nobody likes him,” Bob Dole said in January. “Classless, tasteless and counterproductive,” said Rep. Tom Cole late last year. “I just don’t like the guy,” said former President George W. Bush in October.
“I hate Ted Cruz,” said Rep. Peter King, who isn’t exactly likable himself, recently. “I’ll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination.”
Of course, Cruz isn’t the first prick to inhabit politics. Lyndon Johnson, for example, famously enjoyed humiliating secretaries, senators and aides by summoning them into the bathroom for conversations while he was seated on the presidential throne. Richard Nixon could be nasty, too, but he resented the hatred his actions elicited. All would agree that Donald Trump is a wicked man, but he has his sensitive side, too, as proved by his emotional reaction to charges that he’s short-fingered.
If not the first prick, what is Cruz? He’s the first American politician who strives to be despised. If waterboarded, Johnson, Nixon and Trump would confess that they prefer love to hatred. Not Cruz, whose premeditated rudeness, self-righteousness, backstabbing and name-calling have inspired a dozen recent pieces exploring the question of why Washington hates Ted Cruz (Atlantic, New Republic, Mother Jones, New York, Vanity Fair, Vice, The Week, et al.). He wants to be hated. He draws strength from the attention it delivers and he has sought the hatred of others since high school (“He was not well liked,” said former high school classmate Laura Calaway). His pursuit of other’s hatred continued through college (“Ted’s style was sneering, smirking, condescending, jabbing his finger in your face,” said former college classmate Geoffrey Cohen) and has extended into his political career, where last year he gained notoriety (and more hatred) calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor.
Search history for Cruz’s antecedent and you’ll come up empty. Scan the pages of literature. Scroll your Rolodex. Canvass the jails and prisons. Nothing. Perhaps only in the annals of psychiatry can you find anybody in possession of a masochistic narcissist profile like Cruz’s. But those people are crazy. Cruz is not crazy. He might actually be a member of an advanced but not yet recognized species that has determined that spending effort on getting people to like you is a mug’s game. From the view from inside Cruz’s skull, once you get people to like you, your job has only begun. Additional acts of kindness, consideration and fairness must be extended or your likability will fade into the background. But hatred is a much more efficient use of emotional energy. Often, a single dose of malice can seal the impression among most people that you’re a terminal prick. By acquiring as his enemies the Washington political establishment, Cruz figures he can inherit their enemies, and the 2016 campaign has proved him right. Nobody until Cruz had the stomach to build his political foundation on a bedrock of loathing.
This is essentially the view of the Atlantic’s Molly Ball, who in January wrote that Cruz deliberately offends and insults his Republican colleagues so as to appear to his tea party allies as the only authentic conservative in the arena. Politicians have long campaigned for the White House by running against Washington, D.C. George Wallace was the first, doing it in the 1960 and ’70s. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama followed the Wallace example, although each crafted his own technique. But these candidates were only play-acting their hatred of Washington, eager to join the governing class in the event they won the presidential derby. What makes Cruz’s jihad against Washington appear sincere is his willingness to fight a two-theater war—one against the Democrats and the other against his own party—to the death if necessary. His hatred is pure and honest.
Did Cruz decide to play the hateful political villain, or was it thrust upon him? I defy you to look at him and not associate his squinty-eyed, prehensile-nosed, whiny-mouthed demonic visage with the great villains of film noir history. If looks are destiny, perhaps the answer to why Cruz works so hard to be hated can be contained in a snapshot: It’s the path of least resistance. But even film noir villains have deep soul-searching stretches in which they question their own badness. If Cruz has submitted to even a soul-searching once-over, I’d be surprised. Instead, he wears the hatred of his peers like a badge of honor, the way Lucifer and his fallen angels wore their Lord’s scorn.
If success is the measure, who can argue against the Cruz method? By antagonizing everybody in sight—by suppressing the standard-issue feelings of desiring love—he has taken his candidacy to unexpected heights. And he appears to be on the cusp of proving that hateful guys finish second.
Cruz's basketball gaffe
Bobby Knight: Cruz's basketball gaffe shows his incompetence
By Nick Gass
Legendary Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight laced into Ted Cruz's mistaken pronouncement of a basketball hoop as a "ring" at a rally in his state earlier this week.
Knight, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump ahead of Indiana's Tuesday primary, appeared alongside the Republican front-runner in an interview with "Fox & Friends" taped before their Evansville rally on Thursday and aired Friday morning.
Asked by Fox News' Brian Kilmeade if he had ever heard someone, like Cruz, call a basketball hoop a "ring," Knight chuckled.
"Well, I don't think I have," Knight said, slapping a hand on Trump's left shoulder. "A guy that would come into this state and think that we played with rings instead of baskets is not a guy that’s very well prepared to do a whole hell of a lot."
By Nick Gass
Legendary Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight laced into Ted Cruz's mistaken pronouncement of a basketball hoop as a "ring" at a rally in his state earlier this week.
Knight, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump ahead of Indiana's Tuesday primary, appeared alongside the Republican front-runner in an interview with "Fox & Friends" taped before their Evansville rally on Thursday and aired Friday morning.
Asked by Fox News' Brian Kilmeade if he had ever heard someone, like Cruz, call a basketball hoop a "ring," Knight chuckled.
"Well, I don't think I have," Knight said, slapping a hand on Trump's left shoulder. "A guy that would come into this state and think that we played with rings instead of baskets is not a guy that’s very well prepared to do a whole hell of a lot."
Get on with it...
Jane Sanders to FBI: Get on with Clinton email probe
By Nick Gass
The FBI should get the lead out on its investigation over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, Jane Sanders said Thursday.
During an interview with Neil Cavuto aired Thursday on Fox Business, the wife of Bernie Sanders and one of his closest political advisers also said that the campaign would continue to draw distinctions with Clinton on policy issues and not personal affairs.
Sanders noted that her husband's campaign has said as much from the very beginning of the campaign, particularly after he remarked during the first Democratic debate that the American people are "sick of hearing about your damn emails."
But Jane Sanders also noted that the Democratic candidate said there was a process, remarking that the FBI investigation going forward.
"We want to let it go through without politicizing it, and then we’ll find out what the situation is. And that’s how we still feel," Sanders said. "I mean, it would be nice if the FBI moved it along," she added, with a laugh.
By Nick Gass
The FBI should get the lead out on its investigation over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, Jane Sanders said Thursday.
During an interview with Neil Cavuto aired Thursday on Fox Business, the wife of Bernie Sanders and one of his closest political advisers also said that the campaign would continue to draw distinctions with Clinton on policy issues and not personal affairs.
Sanders noted that her husband's campaign has said as much from the very beginning of the campaign, particularly after he remarked during the first Democratic debate that the American people are "sick of hearing about your damn emails."
But Jane Sanders also noted that the Democratic candidate said there was a process, remarking that the FBI investigation going forward.
"We want to let it go through without politicizing it, and then we’ll find out what the situation is. And that’s how we still feel," Sanders said. "I mean, it would be nice if the FBI moved it along," she added, with a laugh.
Rips Boehner
Sen. Mike Lee rips Boehner for Cruz comments
By Burgess Everett
An irate Sen. Mike Lee on Thursday said he was “appalled” by former House Speaker John Boehner’s comments about Ted Cruz being the devil, demanding an apology for the “horrible” statement and attempting to leverage the incident into a victory in Indiana.
Calling into Mark Levin’s radio show, the Utah senator unleashed a six-minute diatribe in reaction to Boehner calling Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” and a “miserable son of a bitch.” Lee is one of just three senators to endorse Cruz in his battle against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
Lee, who is confrontational in his tactics but generally soft-spoken and deliberative in his remarks, called Boehner’s remarks “really vile stuff” and said he had held his tongue for years out of respect for Boehner's office as a powerful GOP leader. But after reading about Boehner’s comments in Stanford on Wednesday evening, Lee said he was “livid to have him talk about my friend Ted Cruz" like that.
“The fact that he has done this is appalling. And he should be ashamed of himself. And I demand he apologize, “ Lee said. “This is a wake up call to people who are supporting Donald Trump, thinking that he’s the guy that’s going to rail against the establishment. He’s not. He is the establishment. He’s the golfing buddy, the texting buddy of John Boehner. The same guy who praises Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.”
Lee and Cruz were architects of the GOP strategy in 2013 that sought to defund Obamacare in a spending bill. The gambit resulted in a government shutdown as Boehner sought to placate the conservative forces that plagued his reign as speaker.
But even when he was battling with Boehner back in 2013, Lee merely said he was “not a fan” of the Ohio Republican's plans to try an end run around conservatives, which ultimately failed as Boehner went with the failed Obamacare gambit. In an interview then, Lee calmly explained his opposition to Boehner’s plans to avoid a confrontation that eventually provoked a shutdown.
But on Thursday Lee raised his voice to a shout in a stem-winding counterattack to Boehner’s R-rated comments about Cruz. Levin remarked he had never heard Lee so animated, and while Lee admitted he was angry, he also said the controversial remarks offer a chance for Cruz to exploit Boehner’s attacks politically.
“He goes out and calls him the devil. This is wrong. This should be a wake-up call … I speak to my friends in Indiana. Anybody who is thinking about how to vote in Indiana on Tuesday, please, please vote for Ted Cruz,” Lee said. “You can show your support for Ted Cruz and your revulsion for this vile statement that John Boehner has made.”
“I’m grateful to John Boehner. Because John Boehner has exposed the truth … by saying. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, Donald Trump he’s great, I text with him I golf with him. Yeah, Hillary Clinton she’s great. Bernie Sanders, he’s great. But Ted Cruz is the devil.' Why?” he finished as Levin called his passion “commendable.”
By Burgess Everett
An irate Sen. Mike Lee on Thursday said he was “appalled” by former House Speaker John Boehner’s comments about Ted Cruz being the devil, demanding an apology for the “horrible” statement and attempting to leverage the incident into a victory in Indiana.
Calling into Mark Levin’s radio show, the Utah senator unleashed a six-minute diatribe in reaction to Boehner calling Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” and a “miserable son of a bitch.” Lee is one of just three senators to endorse Cruz in his battle against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
Lee, who is confrontational in his tactics but generally soft-spoken and deliberative in his remarks, called Boehner’s remarks “really vile stuff” and said he had held his tongue for years out of respect for Boehner's office as a powerful GOP leader. But after reading about Boehner’s comments in Stanford on Wednesday evening, Lee said he was “livid to have him talk about my friend Ted Cruz" like that.
“The fact that he has done this is appalling. And he should be ashamed of himself. And I demand he apologize, “ Lee said. “This is a wake up call to people who are supporting Donald Trump, thinking that he’s the guy that’s going to rail against the establishment. He’s not. He is the establishment. He’s the golfing buddy, the texting buddy of John Boehner. The same guy who praises Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.”
Lee and Cruz were architects of the GOP strategy in 2013 that sought to defund Obamacare in a spending bill. The gambit resulted in a government shutdown as Boehner sought to placate the conservative forces that plagued his reign as speaker.
But even when he was battling with Boehner back in 2013, Lee merely said he was “not a fan” of the Ohio Republican's plans to try an end run around conservatives, which ultimately failed as Boehner went with the failed Obamacare gambit. In an interview then, Lee calmly explained his opposition to Boehner’s plans to avoid a confrontation that eventually provoked a shutdown.
But on Thursday Lee raised his voice to a shout in a stem-winding counterattack to Boehner’s R-rated comments about Cruz. Levin remarked he had never heard Lee so animated, and while Lee admitted he was angry, he also said the controversial remarks offer a chance for Cruz to exploit Boehner’s attacks politically.
“He goes out and calls him the devil. This is wrong. This should be a wake-up call … I speak to my friends in Indiana. Anybody who is thinking about how to vote in Indiana on Tuesday, please, please vote for Ted Cruz,” Lee said. “You can show your support for Ted Cruz and your revulsion for this vile statement that John Boehner has made.”
“I’m grateful to John Boehner. Because John Boehner has exposed the truth … by saying. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, Donald Trump he’s great, I text with him I golf with him. Yeah, Hillary Clinton she’s great. Bernie Sanders, he’s great. But Ted Cruz is the devil.' Why?” he finished as Levin called his passion “commendable.”
Cruz to trounce Trump
Cruz to trounce Trump in Virginia delegate election
‘The Cruz campaign is mobilized in Virginia and they will likely dominate the convention floor,’ state party official says.
By Kyle Cheney
Ted Cruz got crushed in Virginia on primary day, but even Donald Trump’s forces believe he’s about to stuff the state’s national convention delegation full of supporters anyway.
Virginia GOP insiders with knowledge of the state’s delegate selection process expect Cruz backers to overrun this Saturday’s state convention and use their numbers to guarantee that the 13 statewide delegates to the national convention lean Cruz.
Their list is likely to include Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Cruz convention adviser and former Virginia attorney general. And it may come at the expense of other veteran Republicans seeking delegate slots – including former Gov. Jim Gilmore, who ran against Cruz in the GOP presidential primary, and Corey Stewart, director of the Trump campaign in Virginia.
“The Cruz campaign is mobilized in Virginia and they will likely dominate the convention floor on Friday and Saturday,” said a Virginia Republican central committee member familiar with the state convention process.
But Trump’s dominant position in the Republican primary after six straight blowout victories – from New York to this week’s sweep of Mid-Atlantic states – appears to have reordered the battle to secure delegates who would be loyal should the front-runner fail to clinch the nomination outright. So while Cruz’s mastery of the delegate selection process has given Trump’s team fits in the past, the response this time is a yawn.
“It takes a lot of the pressure off,” said Stewart, Trump’s Virginia director. “After [Tuesday] night, the campaign is convinced that we’re going to hit 1,237, so this will be a moot issue. There will be no second ballot.”
If Cruz makes inroads in the Virginia delegation, it’ll be the latest example of a pro-Trump state sending a Cruz-friendly delegation to Cleveland. Trump earned about 35 percent of the vote in the state’s March 1 primary, edging Marco Rubio’s 32 percent and more than doubling Cruz’s 17 percent. The result earned Trump 17 bound delegates on the first ballot at the convention to Cruz’s eight.
But Cruz has landed his allies in delegate slots bound to vote for Trump but likely to be free to vote their conscience on a second or third ballot – in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and Iowa and he’s poised to do the same in Virginia.
Already, he has secured five of six delegate slots in two Congressional districts that held local contests in recent weeks. (On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that one of those Cruz delegates – state Sen. Dick Black – has been in Syria heaping praise on the Assad government, which could create an uncomfortable dynamic for the Cruz campaign.)
Before Virginia convention-goers elect their national delegates, a Nominations Committee of party insiders will recommend a 13-member slate. The nomination panel includes appointees from state party chairman John Whitbeck, along with designees of the Virginia GOP’s 11 Congressional district leaders. They’ll select from among 80 applicants, including Cuccinelli, Stewart and Gilmore, who is also handling the Virginia GOP’s general election get-out-the-vote effort.
The slate then comes before the full state convention – a collection of GOP activists selected at local party meetings throughout the spring – for a final vote. If Cruz backers control the convention, they could reject the slate and force through another version packed with Cruz allies. The Nominations Committee may anticipate that outcome and propose a slate tilted toward Cruz supporters.
Gilmore told POLITICO he’s confident he’ll be selected as a delegate by virtue of his long commitment to the Virginia GOP. But he added that with Cruz’s motivation to force through a supportive slate, he’s “not taking anything for granted.”
Members of the nominations panel declined to discuss their work on the record, noting that they’re still developing their recommendations and will hold candidate interviews on Friday. But they emphasized that the process is intended to be a fair balance between the results of the March 1 primary, the makeup of the state convention and a recognition of the commitment of veteran Virginia GOP leaders.
“We’ll do our best to put together a slate that will pass,” said Jo Thoburn, one of the panel members. “We’ll see who’s in the room and what makes the most sense. Traditionally – and let me emphasize traditionally – our statewide elected are usually given seats on the slate. There’s nothing traditional this year.”
Graven Craig, the chairman of the committee, said the pan will “consider all merits of all the candidates who want to go represent us at the national convention.”
But one state GOP official familiar with the nomination panel noted that there’s only one self-declared Trump supporter on the panel – Renee Maxey of the state central committee – while several have backed Cruz or Rubio.
“There is no way that you’re not going to get a slate, in my opinion, that are predominantly Cruz people,” according to the official, who requested anonymity to relate conversations with party leaders.
But Stewart said he isn’t sweating.
“People are coming to accept the fact that Trump is going to be the nominee,” he said. “We don’t expect a Trump or a Cruz slate to be elected delegates to the national convention this coming weekend,” he continued. “We expect them to be unified.”
‘The Cruz campaign is mobilized in Virginia and they will likely dominate the convention floor,’ state party official says.
By Kyle Cheney
Ted Cruz got crushed in Virginia on primary day, but even Donald Trump’s forces believe he’s about to stuff the state’s national convention delegation full of supporters anyway.
Virginia GOP insiders with knowledge of the state’s delegate selection process expect Cruz backers to overrun this Saturday’s state convention and use their numbers to guarantee that the 13 statewide delegates to the national convention lean Cruz.
Their list is likely to include Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Cruz convention adviser and former Virginia attorney general. And it may come at the expense of other veteran Republicans seeking delegate slots – including former Gov. Jim Gilmore, who ran against Cruz in the GOP presidential primary, and Corey Stewart, director of the Trump campaign in Virginia.
“The Cruz campaign is mobilized in Virginia and they will likely dominate the convention floor on Friday and Saturday,” said a Virginia Republican central committee member familiar with the state convention process.
But Trump’s dominant position in the Republican primary after six straight blowout victories – from New York to this week’s sweep of Mid-Atlantic states – appears to have reordered the battle to secure delegates who would be loyal should the front-runner fail to clinch the nomination outright. So while Cruz’s mastery of the delegate selection process has given Trump’s team fits in the past, the response this time is a yawn.
“It takes a lot of the pressure off,” said Stewart, Trump’s Virginia director. “After [Tuesday] night, the campaign is convinced that we’re going to hit 1,237, so this will be a moot issue. There will be no second ballot.”
If Cruz makes inroads in the Virginia delegation, it’ll be the latest example of a pro-Trump state sending a Cruz-friendly delegation to Cleveland. Trump earned about 35 percent of the vote in the state’s March 1 primary, edging Marco Rubio’s 32 percent and more than doubling Cruz’s 17 percent. The result earned Trump 17 bound delegates on the first ballot at the convention to Cruz’s eight.
But Cruz has landed his allies in delegate slots bound to vote for Trump but likely to be free to vote their conscience on a second or third ballot – in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and Iowa and he’s poised to do the same in Virginia.
Already, he has secured five of six delegate slots in two Congressional districts that held local contests in recent weeks. (On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that one of those Cruz delegates – state Sen. Dick Black – has been in Syria heaping praise on the Assad government, which could create an uncomfortable dynamic for the Cruz campaign.)
Before Virginia convention-goers elect their national delegates, a Nominations Committee of party insiders will recommend a 13-member slate. The nomination panel includes appointees from state party chairman John Whitbeck, along with designees of the Virginia GOP’s 11 Congressional district leaders. They’ll select from among 80 applicants, including Cuccinelli, Stewart and Gilmore, who is also handling the Virginia GOP’s general election get-out-the-vote effort.
The slate then comes before the full state convention – a collection of GOP activists selected at local party meetings throughout the spring – for a final vote. If Cruz backers control the convention, they could reject the slate and force through another version packed with Cruz allies. The Nominations Committee may anticipate that outcome and propose a slate tilted toward Cruz supporters.
Gilmore told POLITICO he’s confident he’ll be selected as a delegate by virtue of his long commitment to the Virginia GOP. But he added that with Cruz’s motivation to force through a supportive slate, he’s “not taking anything for granted.”
Members of the nominations panel declined to discuss their work on the record, noting that they’re still developing their recommendations and will hold candidate interviews on Friday. But they emphasized that the process is intended to be a fair balance between the results of the March 1 primary, the makeup of the state convention and a recognition of the commitment of veteran Virginia GOP leaders.
“We’ll do our best to put together a slate that will pass,” said Jo Thoburn, one of the panel members. “We’ll see who’s in the room and what makes the most sense. Traditionally – and let me emphasize traditionally – our statewide elected are usually given seats on the slate. There’s nothing traditional this year.”
Graven Craig, the chairman of the committee, said the pan will “consider all merits of all the candidates who want to go represent us at the national convention.”
But one state GOP official familiar with the nomination panel noted that there’s only one self-declared Trump supporter on the panel – Renee Maxey of the state central committee – while several have backed Cruz or Rubio.
“There is no way that you’re not going to get a slate, in my opinion, that are predominantly Cruz people,” according to the official, who requested anonymity to relate conversations with party leaders.
But Stewart said he isn’t sweating.
“People are coming to accept the fact that Trump is going to be the nominee,” he said. “We don’t expect a Trump or a Cruz slate to be elected delegates to the national convention this coming weekend,” he continued. “We expect them to be unified.”
Crush Trump
Insiders: Clinton would crush Trump in November
In the swing states that matter most, GOP insiders worry about a down-ballot disaster.
By Katie Glueck
In the swing states that matter most in the presidential race, Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer against Hillary Clinton in the general election.
That’s according to top operatives, strategists and activists in 10 battleground states who participated in this week’s POLITICO Caucus. Nearly 90 percent of them said Clinton would defeat Trump in their home states in a November match-up.
Republicans are only slightly more bullish on Trump’s prospects than Democrats: More than three-quarters of GOP insiders expect Clinton to best the Republican front-runner in a general-election contest in their respective states. Among Democrats, the belief is nearly universal: 99 percent of surveyed said will Clinton will beat Trump.
In three of the biggest swing states—Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida—Republicans were particularly downbeat about the prospect of a Trump-Clinton contest.
“There is positively no way for Trump to win in Pennsylvania,” said a Republican from that state.
“Trump cannot and will not carry Ohio,” a Republican from that state insisted. “He will do well in Appalachia and in the Mahoning Valley but he will get killed in the rest of the state. The danger for the GOP is losing Rob Portman which is a very real possibility under this match-up.”
Added a Florida Republican, who like all participants was granted anonymity in order to speak freely, “Trump is grinding the GOP to a stub. He couldn't find enough xenophobic, angry white Floridians to beat Hillary in Florida if he tried.”
“I not only think [Hillary] will win Florida in November if Trump is the nominee, I think she'll win 30+ states,” said another Florida Republican.
These comments follow two weeks of victories for Trump, who notched a major win in New York before going on to sweep the mid-Atlantic states on Tuesday.
Looking ahead to the general election, Republican insiders fretted that if Trump is at the top of the ticket, he will not only lose in a landslide, but will also endanger Republicans on the rest of the ballot.
“NH is potentially a swing state but Hillary would win in a rout with profound down ballot consequences,” wrote one New Hampshire Republican.
Said a Virginia Republican, “Virginia has shifted to be more suburban than rural. While a Trump candidacy will gin up turnout in the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest, Trump will get killed in the suburbs of the urban crescent. Time to focus on Congressional races and 2017.”
Several Democrats said Trump would so motivate Democratic turnout that they envisioned clear-cut pick-up opportunities across the ballot.
“In a Trump/Clinton matchup, Hillary will win Florida by no less than 5 points and will help the Democrats pick up a Senate seat, a couple of House districts, and a significant number of state legislative seats,” said one Florida Democrat.
Added a North Carolina Democrat, “Hillary Clinton will put North Carolina back in the blue column. She will also have long coattails in North Carolina, helping Roy Cooper take back the Governor's Mansion and in quite possibly the biggest upset this cycle, help Deborah Ross defeat Senator Richard Burr.”
Plenty of Democrats predicted a landslide victory over Trump in November.
“This will be a near historic blow out, 20% at least,” a New Hampshire Democrat said.
“Trump will win some redneck cow counties, but Hillary will crush him in the urban areas of Las Vegas and Reno,” a Nevada Democrat predicted.
“Unless we throw up on ourselves, this is a no brainer,” a Wisconsin Democrat added.
But, some noted, Clinton faces her own challenges, from high unfavorable ratings to the question of whether Democrats currently supporting Bernie Sanders, her Democratic primary opponent, will turn out for her should she win the nomination, as she looks poised to do.
“I think it has become clear that his message resonates with voters on both sides,” said one Florida Republican who expects Trump to beat Clinton in that state if they both capture their parties’ nominations. “He is less of a politician, Hillary is clearly a politician, all you have to do is watch her nod her head and pick the right expression to use.”
People on both sides of the aisle also said that Trump has demonstrated some ability to appeal to white working-class voters who might not otherwise vote Republican.
“Could be close if Trump starts to act normal,” a Pennsylvania Democrat said.
But the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans alike expect the math to work out in Clinton’s favor.
“Trump's crossover appeal provides some challenges,” a Colorado Democrat said. “But for every working class white male Hillary loses she'll pick up three suburban Republican women; and neither group may reveal that to pollsters.”
Ted Cruz on Wednesday tapped Carly Fiorina to be his running mate, in a move that struck some POLITICO Caucus insiders as desperate and ineffective.
The majority of insiders surveyed in both parties said bringing on Fiorina makes no difference for Cruz in their respective states — 60 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Democrats said the same.
“Being teased with a "major announcement" that turned out to be a candidate who is not going to win the nomination [choosing] Carly Fiorina as his running mate was like being promised a T-bone steak and being served a giant nothing burger,” an Iowa Republican said. “It smacks of desperation. It is never going to happen. I would have been embarrassed if I had been on the Cruz team and I was told I had to go out and sell that announcement.”
Added another Iowa Republican, “I'm a Carly supporter - but I don't see how this really moves the needle for Cruz. What is his argument? 'I know I can't win on the first ballot, but vote for me anyway because if it gets to a second ballot then Carly will be my running mate?' That doesn't work on a GOTV call... That's not a jab at Carly, it’s just a recognition that the narrative for Cruz is too daunting.”
Still, 27 percent of Republicans surveyed said the move might help Cruz as he struggles to regain momentum ahead of Indiana, which is shaping up to be a must-win contest for the Texas senator.
“She ran a strong NH campaign and as a woman brings a lot of appeal to the ticket,” a New Hampshire Republican said.
In the swing states that matter most, GOP insiders worry about a down-ballot disaster.
By Katie Glueck
In the swing states that matter most in the presidential race, Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer against Hillary Clinton in the general election.
That’s according to top operatives, strategists and activists in 10 battleground states who participated in this week’s POLITICO Caucus. Nearly 90 percent of them said Clinton would defeat Trump in their home states in a November match-up.
Republicans are only slightly more bullish on Trump’s prospects than Democrats: More than three-quarters of GOP insiders expect Clinton to best the Republican front-runner in a general-election contest in their respective states. Among Democrats, the belief is nearly universal: 99 percent of surveyed said will Clinton will beat Trump.
In three of the biggest swing states—Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida—Republicans were particularly downbeat about the prospect of a Trump-Clinton contest.
“There is positively no way for Trump to win in Pennsylvania,” said a Republican from that state.
“Trump cannot and will not carry Ohio,” a Republican from that state insisted. “He will do well in Appalachia and in the Mahoning Valley but he will get killed in the rest of the state. The danger for the GOP is losing Rob Portman which is a very real possibility under this match-up.”
Added a Florida Republican, who like all participants was granted anonymity in order to speak freely, “Trump is grinding the GOP to a stub. He couldn't find enough xenophobic, angry white Floridians to beat Hillary in Florida if he tried.”
“I not only think [Hillary] will win Florida in November if Trump is the nominee, I think she'll win 30+ states,” said another Florida Republican.
These comments follow two weeks of victories for Trump, who notched a major win in New York before going on to sweep the mid-Atlantic states on Tuesday.
Looking ahead to the general election, Republican insiders fretted that if Trump is at the top of the ticket, he will not only lose in a landslide, but will also endanger Republicans on the rest of the ballot.
“NH is potentially a swing state but Hillary would win in a rout with profound down ballot consequences,” wrote one New Hampshire Republican.
Said a Virginia Republican, “Virginia has shifted to be more suburban than rural. While a Trump candidacy will gin up turnout in the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest, Trump will get killed in the suburbs of the urban crescent. Time to focus on Congressional races and 2017.”
Several Democrats said Trump would so motivate Democratic turnout that they envisioned clear-cut pick-up opportunities across the ballot.
“In a Trump/Clinton matchup, Hillary will win Florida by no less than 5 points and will help the Democrats pick up a Senate seat, a couple of House districts, and a significant number of state legislative seats,” said one Florida Democrat.
Added a North Carolina Democrat, “Hillary Clinton will put North Carolina back in the blue column. She will also have long coattails in North Carolina, helping Roy Cooper take back the Governor's Mansion and in quite possibly the biggest upset this cycle, help Deborah Ross defeat Senator Richard Burr.”
Plenty of Democrats predicted a landslide victory over Trump in November.
“This will be a near historic blow out, 20% at least,” a New Hampshire Democrat said.
“Trump will win some redneck cow counties, but Hillary will crush him in the urban areas of Las Vegas and Reno,” a Nevada Democrat predicted.
“Unless we throw up on ourselves, this is a no brainer,” a Wisconsin Democrat added.
But, some noted, Clinton faces her own challenges, from high unfavorable ratings to the question of whether Democrats currently supporting Bernie Sanders, her Democratic primary opponent, will turn out for her should she win the nomination, as she looks poised to do.
“I think it has become clear that his message resonates with voters on both sides,” said one Florida Republican who expects Trump to beat Clinton in that state if they both capture their parties’ nominations. “He is less of a politician, Hillary is clearly a politician, all you have to do is watch her nod her head and pick the right expression to use.”
People on both sides of the aisle also said that Trump has demonstrated some ability to appeal to white working-class voters who might not otherwise vote Republican.
“Could be close if Trump starts to act normal,” a Pennsylvania Democrat said.
But the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans alike expect the math to work out in Clinton’s favor.
“Trump's crossover appeal provides some challenges,” a Colorado Democrat said. “But for every working class white male Hillary loses she'll pick up three suburban Republican women; and neither group may reveal that to pollsters.”
Ted Cruz on Wednesday tapped Carly Fiorina to be his running mate, in a move that struck some POLITICO Caucus insiders as desperate and ineffective.
The majority of insiders surveyed in both parties said bringing on Fiorina makes no difference for Cruz in their respective states — 60 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Democrats said the same.
“Being teased with a "major announcement" that turned out to be a candidate who is not going to win the nomination [choosing] Carly Fiorina as his running mate was like being promised a T-bone steak and being served a giant nothing burger,” an Iowa Republican said. “It smacks of desperation. It is never going to happen. I would have been embarrassed if I had been on the Cruz team and I was told I had to go out and sell that announcement.”
Added another Iowa Republican, “I'm a Carly supporter - but I don't see how this really moves the needle for Cruz. What is his argument? 'I know I can't win on the first ballot, but vote for me anyway because if it gets to a second ballot then Carly will be my running mate?' That doesn't work on a GOTV call... That's not a jab at Carly, it’s just a recognition that the narrative for Cruz is too daunting.”
Still, 27 percent of Republicans surveyed said the move might help Cruz as he struggles to regain momentum ahead of Indiana, which is shaping up to be a must-win contest for the Texas senator.
“She ran a strong NH campaign and as a woman brings a lot of appeal to the ticket,” a New Hampshire Republican said.
Hiding in the Night Sky
Hubble Sees Galaxy Hiding in the Night Sky
This striking NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the galaxy UGC 477, located just over 110 million light-years away in the constellation of Pisces (The Fish).
UGC 477 is a low surface brightness (LSB) galaxy. First proposed in 1976 by Mike Disney, the existence of LSB galaxies was confirmed only in 1986 with the discovery of Malin 1. LSB galaxies like UGC 477 are more diffusely distributed than galaxies such as Andromeda and the Milky Way. With surface brightnesses up to 250 times fainter than the night sky, these galaxies can be incredibly difficult to detect.
Most of the matter present in LSB galaxies is in the form of hydrogen gas, rather than stars. Unlike the bulges of normal spiral galaxies, the centers of LSB galaxies do not contain large numbers of stars. Astronomers suspect that this is because LSB galaxies are mainly found in regions devoid of other galaxies, and have therefore experienced fewer galactic interactions and mergers capable of triggering high rates of star formation.
LSB galaxies such as UGC 477 instead appear to be dominated by dark matter, making them excellent objects to study to further our understanding of this elusive substance. However, due to an underrepresentation in galactic surveys — caused by their characteristic low brightness — their importance has only been realized relatively recently.
This striking NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the galaxy UGC 477, located just over 110 million light-years away in the constellation of Pisces (The Fish).
UGC 477 is a low surface brightness (LSB) galaxy. First proposed in 1976 by Mike Disney, the existence of LSB galaxies was confirmed only in 1986 with the discovery of Malin 1. LSB galaxies like UGC 477 are more diffusely distributed than galaxies such as Andromeda and the Milky Way. With surface brightnesses up to 250 times fainter than the night sky, these galaxies can be incredibly difficult to detect.Most of the matter present in LSB galaxies is in the form of hydrogen gas, rather than stars. Unlike the bulges of normal spiral galaxies, the centers of LSB galaxies do not contain large numbers of stars. Astronomers suspect that this is because LSB galaxies are mainly found in regions devoid of other galaxies, and have therefore experienced fewer galactic interactions and mergers capable of triggering high rates of star formation.
LSB galaxies such as UGC 477 instead appear to be dominated by dark matter, making them excellent objects to study to further our understanding of this elusive substance. However, due to an underrepresentation in galactic surveys — caused by their characteristic low brightness — their importance has only been realized relatively recently.
April 28, 2016
Scamming US Veterans
Scamming US Veterans: Efforts to Privatize Veterans Administration’s Health System
Evidence suggests that a privatized system would make worse any problems veterans now face in getting care — and it is likely to cost more money.
By Dean Baker
There are few areas where there is more bipartisan support than the need to provide adequate health care for the country’s veterans. While many of us opposed the war in Iraq and other recent military adventures, we still recognize the need to provide medical services for the people who put their lives at risk.
This is why it is especially annoying to see right-wing groups invent scandals around the Veteran Administration’s (VA) hospitals in order to advance an agenda of privatizing the system. If there was a real reason to believe that our veterans would be better cared for under a privatized system, then it would be reasonable to support the transition.
But this is the opposite of the reality. All the evidence suggests that a privatized system would make worse any problems veterans now face in getting care — and it is likely to cost more money.
To back up a step, we actually have a great deal of evidence on the quality of care provided by the VA system. In an outstanding book, The Best Care Anywhere, Washington Monthly editor Phillip Longman documents how the VA’s system of integrative care outperforms the models used by private insurers. The key point was that the VA system effectively tracks patients through their various contacts with doctors and other health care professionals.
This reduces the likelihood that they will get unneeded treatment, but more importantly, ensures that the patient’s doctors are aware of the other treatments their patient is receiving. A major problem for patients seeing multiple doctors is that none of them may have full knowledge of the set of conditions afflicting the patient or the drugs they might be taking. By keeping a central system and having a general practitioner assigned to oversee the patient’s care, the VA system minimizes this source of mistakes. In fact, this model is so successful that most providers have tried to move in the same direction in recent years.
Longman was writing about the VA system of the 1990s, which had undergone a remarkable turnaround under the leadership of Kenneth Kizer who President Clinton had appointed to head up the health care system as undersecretary of veterans affairs. The quality of care established by Kizer deteriorated somewhat under President Bush. This was partly a result of the large inflow of new veterans associated with the administration’s wars. It was also partly due to the fact that Bush’s political appointees showed the same sort of commitment to veterans’ health as his appointees to the Federal Emergency Management Agency did to preparing for disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
Nonetheless, as Alicia Mundy points out in a recent Washington Monthly piece, the VA system still did quite well by most measures. An analysis done for the VA in 2010 found that nearly all the studies comparing the quality of VA care with its counterparts in the private and public sector found that the VA provided care that was as good or better than what was available in its competitors.
Given this reality, the proponents of privatization had to invent a scandal to push their case, and they got one. They found evidence of substantial waiting lists at the VA hospital in Phoenix. According to accounts promoted in the media, 40 patients died while they were waiting to see a doctor. This of course sounds horrible.
In reality, a report by the VA’s inspector general found that six, not 40 patients had died while waiting for appointments. And it wasn’t clear that in any of these cases the death was related to lack of treatment. But the reality didn’t matter, the right had their story and they were determined to push it everywhere they could.
The Koch brothers funded a new veterans organization, Concerned Veterans of America, which made attacking the VA health care system the major goal of its work. While full-fledged privatization is clearly a step too far at this point (most veterans really value the health care they get through the VA system), their goal is to piecemeal privatization through a process of gradually outsourcing more and more services.
As this process gains momentum, full-scale privatization may look like less of a lift. The outsourcing is likely to undermine the quality of care, most importantly by making the VA system’s practice of integrative care more difficult. It is also likely to increase costs, since the privatized services will almost invariably cost more than the services provided through the VA.
In short, the practice of outsourcing more services from the VA and eventually privatizing it is likely to be a really bad deal from the standpoint of the country’s veterans. It is also likely to be a bad deal from the standpoint of taxpayers, who will be getting a larger bill for lower quality care. But, it is likely to be a very good deal for the contractors making profits on VA business, and for that reason privatization of the VA is a very real threat.
Evidence suggests that a privatized system would make worse any problems veterans now face in getting care — and it is likely to cost more money.
By Dean Baker
There are few areas where there is more bipartisan support than the need to provide adequate health care for the country’s veterans. While many of us opposed the war in Iraq and other recent military adventures, we still recognize the need to provide medical services for the people who put their lives at risk.
This is why it is especially annoying to see right-wing groups invent scandals around the Veteran Administration’s (VA) hospitals in order to advance an agenda of privatizing the system. If there was a real reason to believe that our veterans would be better cared for under a privatized system, then it would be reasonable to support the transition.
But this is the opposite of the reality. All the evidence suggests that a privatized system would make worse any problems veterans now face in getting care — and it is likely to cost more money.
To back up a step, we actually have a great deal of evidence on the quality of care provided by the VA system. In an outstanding book, The Best Care Anywhere, Washington Monthly editor Phillip Longman documents how the VA’s system of integrative care outperforms the models used by private insurers. The key point was that the VA system effectively tracks patients through their various contacts with doctors and other health care professionals.
This reduces the likelihood that they will get unneeded treatment, but more importantly, ensures that the patient’s doctors are aware of the other treatments their patient is receiving. A major problem for patients seeing multiple doctors is that none of them may have full knowledge of the set of conditions afflicting the patient or the drugs they might be taking. By keeping a central system and having a general practitioner assigned to oversee the patient’s care, the VA system minimizes this source of mistakes. In fact, this model is so successful that most providers have tried to move in the same direction in recent years.
Longman was writing about the VA system of the 1990s, which had undergone a remarkable turnaround under the leadership of Kenneth Kizer who President Clinton had appointed to head up the health care system as undersecretary of veterans affairs. The quality of care established by Kizer deteriorated somewhat under President Bush. This was partly a result of the large inflow of new veterans associated with the administration’s wars. It was also partly due to the fact that Bush’s political appointees showed the same sort of commitment to veterans’ health as his appointees to the Federal Emergency Management Agency did to preparing for disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
Nonetheless, as Alicia Mundy points out in a recent Washington Monthly piece, the VA system still did quite well by most measures. An analysis done for the VA in 2010 found that nearly all the studies comparing the quality of VA care with its counterparts in the private and public sector found that the VA provided care that was as good or better than what was available in its competitors.
Given this reality, the proponents of privatization had to invent a scandal to push their case, and they got one. They found evidence of substantial waiting lists at the VA hospital in Phoenix. According to accounts promoted in the media, 40 patients died while they were waiting to see a doctor. This of course sounds horrible.
In reality, a report by the VA’s inspector general found that six, not 40 patients had died while waiting for appointments. And it wasn’t clear that in any of these cases the death was related to lack of treatment. But the reality didn’t matter, the right had their story and they were determined to push it everywhere they could.
The Koch brothers funded a new veterans organization, Concerned Veterans of America, which made attacking the VA health care system the major goal of its work. While full-fledged privatization is clearly a step too far at this point (most veterans really value the health care they get through the VA system), their goal is to piecemeal privatization through a process of gradually outsourcing more and more services.
As this process gains momentum, full-scale privatization may look like less of a lift. The outsourcing is likely to undermine the quality of care, most importantly by making the VA system’s practice of integrative care more difficult. It is also likely to increase costs, since the privatized services will almost invariably cost more than the services provided through the VA.
In short, the practice of outsourcing more services from the VA and eventually privatizing it is likely to be a really bad deal from the standpoint of the country’s veterans. It is also likely to be a bad deal from the standpoint of taxpayers, who will be getting a larger bill for lower quality care. But, it is likely to be a very good deal for the contractors making profits on VA business, and for that reason privatization of the VA is a very real threat.
Three-legged stool
Break Up the GOP
By Bill Maher
It’s often been said that the Republican Party is a three-legged stool. One leg is the religion/culture warriors, another is the big business fiscal hawks/tax cutters, and the other is the defense hawks. Donald Trump has performed one valuable service in this campaign: exposing just how wobbly that stool is. Actually, it’s completely broken. When’s trash day? If the legs don’t fit, you must acquit.
Trump is the canary in the coalmine warning everybody it’s time to partition the Republican Party into three separate entities. Each can stay crazy, just not together. They have to have some kind of ideological cohesion, otherwise the only thing left to unite them is an asshole, and that’s not working.
Nativists who hate immigrants shouldn’t be in the same party with large corporations, who need low-wage labor. Deficit hawks shouldn’t be glued to neocons, who always want bloated defense budgets, or to tax cutters, who always fight for less revenues. Those who worship only guns and God don’t belong with those who worship only money. Old folks who want to protect Medicare and Social Security don’t belong with young hedge fund managers who want to privatize them. Anti-internationalists like Rand Paul don’t belong with John McCain, who wants to go to war everywhere.
It’s funny that the Republican Party keeps turning to Paul Ryan to do the jobs no other Republican wants to do – like speaker of the House, or President of the United States. He’s the ultimate Republican because he’s all of these contradictions in one man. A pathological liar you can trust; a worshipper of both Jesus and the atheist Ayn Rand; a deficit hawk who always votes for bloated budgets; and an ideologue with a plan to dismantle Medicare who campaigns against any cuts to Medicare.
Republicans see their problem as a lack of a candidate to unify them, when the real problem is that their voters have competing agendas that can’t be unified, and shouldn’t be for a democracy to function.
By Bill Maher
It’s often been said that the Republican Party is a three-legged stool. One leg is the religion/culture warriors, another is the big business fiscal hawks/tax cutters, and the other is the defense hawks. Donald Trump has performed one valuable service in this campaign: exposing just how wobbly that stool is. Actually, it’s completely broken. When’s trash day? If the legs don’t fit, you must acquit.
Trump is the canary in the coalmine warning everybody it’s time to partition the Republican Party into three separate entities. Each can stay crazy, just not together. They have to have some kind of ideological cohesion, otherwise the only thing left to unite them is an asshole, and that’s not working.
Nativists who hate immigrants shouldn’t be in the same party with large corporations, who need low-wage labor. Deficit hawks shouldn’t be glued to neocons, who always want bloated defense budgets, or to tax cutters, who always fight for less revenues. Those who worship only guns and God don’t belong with those who worship only money. Old folks who want to protect Medicare and Social Security don’t belong with young hedge fund managers who want to privatize them. Anti-internationalists like Rand Paul don’t belong with John McCain, who wants to go to war everywhere.
It’s funny that the Republican Party keeps turning to Paul Ryan to do the jobs no other Republican wants to do – like speaker of the House, or President of the United States. He’s the ultimate Republican because he’s all of these contradictions in one man. A pathological liar you can trust; a worshipper of both Jesus and the atheist Ayn Rand; a deficit hawk who always votes for bloated budgets; and an ideologue with a plan to dismantle Medicare who campaigns against any cuts to Medicare.
Republicans see their problem as a lack of a candidate to unify them, when the real problem is that their voters have competing agendas that can’t be unified, and shouldn’t be for a democracy to function.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Pop Goes the Digital Media Bubble
Tech companies won't save journalism. So who will?
By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
You don't always hear the bubble burst. Often, it's more a gradual escaping of air, signaled by nothing more than the occasional queasy feeling you bat away: One house for sale on the block, oh well. Two, three—maybe just a robust market? Five, six, seven—and suddenly everyone's underwater and the sheriff is at your door.
That's kind of how it's feeling in the digital media business. For a few years now, investors have been pouring money into online news with the kind of fervor that once fueled the minimansion boom. But in the past year, the boarded-up windows have started showing up: The Guardian, which bet heavily on expanding its digital presence in the United States, announced it needed to cut costs by 20 percent. The tech news site Gigaom shut down suddenly, with its founder warning that "it is a very dangerous time" to be in digital media. Mobile-first Circa put itself on "indefinite hiatus." Al Jazeera America, once hailed as the hottest thing in bringing together cable news and digital publishing, shut down and laid off hundreds of journalists.
Pop.
And it's been getting worse. As the New York Times' John Herrman put it, "in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic." Mashable, which had made a big investment in news and current affairs, laid off dozens of journalists and pivoted to a new, video-heavy strategy. Investor darling BuzzFeed fought reports that it had slashed earnings projections by nearly 50 percent. Salon laid off a string of veteran staffers. Yahoo put its core business, including its news and search features, up for sale.
Pop. Pop.
Here's the thing: It was not hard to see this coming. For years now, smooth-talking guys (yes, mostly guys) with PowerPoint decks have offered up one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism—all the reporting done by users, for free, with newsrooms simply curating it all. "Brand You"—each journo out there on her own, drawing legions of followers to her personal output. (Even Andrew Sullivan couldn't make that work.) Viral headlines—every news shop Upworthy-ing its way into the Facebook swarm. Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again. A whole class of future-of-news pundits made a living pontificating about how "legacy media" were getting their lunch eaten by digital-native startups.
And the investor money kept coming. BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Fusion, Mic (not to mention their 1stGen cousins Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, and Gawker)—for a while they all were too fast to fail, hiring Twitter-famous names out of established newsrooms, rolling out sexy technology systems, and exploding watermelons on live video. As Josh Topolsky, a veteran of digital media (most recently at Bloomberg) wrote the other day, "I can tell you from personal experience over the last several months, having met with countless investors and leaders of media companies and editors and writers and technologists in the media world that there is a desperate belief that The Problem can be solved with the New Thing. And goddammit someone must have it in their pitch deck."
But while a ton of great work has come (and continues to come) out of all the New Things, none of them have answered the burning question of how to pay for journalism—especially the public-interest, watchdog, feet-to-the-fire kind that democracy needs to function. For one thing, all the big new digital shops today employ, between them, a few thousand journalists—compared with the ten-thousand-plus laid off in the great retrenchment of 2007 to 2010. For another, like virtually every other hot property across the internet, digital media startups are better at growing than at showing a profit. And since a profit is what the people supplying those giant piles of cash are ultimately looking for…
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Remember when Chris Hughes put The New Republic up for sale earlier this year? His letter to TNR staff subtly blamed the very same people it was addressed to: "I will be the first to admit that when I took on this challenge nearly four years ago, I underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today's quickly evolving climate."
Bullshit. "Transitioning" was not The New Republic's main challenge. Refusing to work on, with, and for the internet was once a pervasive problem in news organizations, but while vestiges of that still linger, it is no longer what keeps publications from succeeding financially.
What keeps them from making money now is that online advertising pays pennies. (Actually, a penny per reader is pretty good these days—CPM, or "cost per thousand" ads, is often far less than half that.) And there are a ton of people competing for those fractions of a penny—including Google and Facebook, which collectively pulled in a whopping 85 percent of new ad spending in the first quarter of this year. The only way to make ends meet in that environment is to turn up the fire hose of fast and cheap content or rent your pages out to native advertising (sorry, branded content).
Look at it this way: A reporter doing even modestly original work might produce five stories a week (and that's not allowing for anything more than a few phone calls and a couple of rounds of editing per piece). If each of those stories gets, on average, 50,000 readers, and each of those page views generates 0.01 cents (again, a very generous rate), you'll end up grossing $2,500 a week, or $130,000 a year, with which you'll have to pay the reporter and her editor, their benefits, web tech, sales and ops staff, taxes, insurance, electricity, rent, laptops, phones…
And this calculus assumes a brutal pace of hour-by-hour filing and publishing, with journalists constantly looking over their shoulder at the traffic numbers. (When a New York Daily News editor was fired last week for dropping attributions from columnist Shaun King's stories, he noted that he was expected to process 20 stories from five reporters each day.) And the kind of digging that an investigative story requires—months of research and reporting, plus fact-checking, editing, and maybe multimedia production—forget it. The math just doesn't work.
From the very beginning, 40 years ago this year, our newsroom has been built on the belief that journalism needs to be untethered from corporate interests or deep-pocketed funders—that the only way a free press can be paid for is by its readers. This can take a few different forms: subscriptions, donations, micropayments, all of which we're experimenting with. It can be something the audience is forced to do (via the paywalls you'll find at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal) or something they choose to do, as in public radio.
At Mother Jones, we've gone the latter route: Our mission is to make our journalism accessible to as many people as possible. Instead of requiring you to pay, we bet on trust: We trust you'll recognize the value of the reporting and pitch in what you can. And you trust us to put that money to work—by going out there and kicking ass.
Because of your trust, we can choose which stories we go after, rather than chasing the spin du jour. We can look where others in the media do not. We can, as our colleague David Corn puts it, get off the spinning hamster wheel and dig deep.
And we can do it without fearing that some corporate overlord will pull the plug. Remember what happened when casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson bought Nevada's largest daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal: as the sale was being negotiated, reporters were mysteriously tasked with digging up dirt on a judge who'd antagonized Adelson. Then the newsroom was told to back off covering the biggest story in town—their boss. This was a paper where a columnist had already been hounded into bankruptcy by Adelson over a few words. (We faced a similar attack recently from another billionaire upset about our critical coverage of his past.) Your support is what keeps Mother Jones' journalists from having to fear that kind of intimidation and control.
If you're a regular reader of Mother Jones, you'll have noticed that we've been in the equivalent of a pledge drive this month: We need to bring in $175,000 by Saturday to stay on track. This is something we do three times a year, and it's the most important way we raise money to pay for everything we do.
But we're not crazy about these monthlong fundraisers, and maybe you aren't either. So we're looking at ways to make it easier ("frictionless," as they say in the tech world) for you to support the journalism you believe in. One of our big initiatives is an online sustainer program, where readers agree to give us a bit of money every month. That could make a big difference for our stability: Just 1,200 more readers who value our reporting enough to pitch in $20 a month would get our "sustaining" revenue up to $50,000 a month, or $600,000 every year. If that's an option for you, it would be a big help.
Meanwhile, that $175,000 by the end of the month? It's not some arbitrary goal, but the cold, hard number required in our budget to keep our reporters on the beat. In the first 26 days of this month we've raised about 75 percent of that, so we need $45,000 in the next four days. But that's how these campaigns typically work: Everyone waits until the last minute to pitch in.
If that's you, remember that ultimately this is about something bigger than MoJo. If we're going to have a functioning democracy, we'll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close. The new moguls are in the technology business, not the journalism business. And while some of them say wonderful things about journalism, money talks—and right now, the money is saying "pop."
Tech companies won't save journalism. So who will?
By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
You don't always hear the bubble burst. Often, it's more a gradual escaping of air, signaled by nothing more than the occasional queasy feeling you bat away: One house for sale on the block, oh well. Two, three—maybe just a robust market? Five, six, seven—and suddenly everyone's underwater and the sheriff is at your door.
That's kind of how it's feeling in the digital media business. For a few years now, investors have been pouring money into online news with the kind of fervor that once fueled the minimansion boom. But in the past year, the boarded-up windows have started showing up: The Guardian, which bet heavily on expanding its digital presence in the United States, announced it needed to cut costs by 20 percent. The tech news site Gigaom shut down suddenly, with its founder warning that "it is a very dangerous time" to be in digital media. Mobile-first Circa put itself on "indefinite hiatus." Al Jazeera America, once hailed as the hottest thing in bringing together cable news and digital publishing, shut down and laid off hundreds of journalists.
Pop.
And it's been getting worse. As the New York Times' John Herrman put it, "in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic." Mashable, which had made a big investment in news and current affairs, laid off dozens of journalists and pivoted to a new, video-heavy strategy. Investor darling BuzzFeed fought reports that it had slashed earnings projections by nearly 50 percent. Salon laid off a string of veteran staffers. Yahoo put its core business, including its news and search features, up for sale.
Pop. Pop.
Here's the thing: It was not hard to see this coming. For years now, smooth-talking guys (yes, mostly guys) with PowerPoint decks have offered up one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism—all the reporting done by users, for free, with newsrooms simply curating it all. "Brand You"—each journo out there on her own, drawing legions of followers to her personal output. (Even Andrew Sullivan couldn't make that work.) Viral headlines—every news shop Upworthy-ing its way into the Facebook swarm. Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again. A whole class of future-of-news pundits made a living pontificating about how "legacy media" were getting their lunch eaten by digital-native startups.
And the investor money kept coming. BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Fusion, Mic (not to mention their 1stGen cousins Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, and Gawker)—for a while they all were too fast to fail, hiring Twitter-famous names out of established newsrooms, rolling out sexy technology systems, and exploding watermelons on live video. As Josh Topolsky, a veteran of digital media (most recently at Bloomberg) wrote the other day, "I can tell you from personal experience over the last several months, having met with countless investors and leaders of media companies and editors and writers and technologists in the media world that there is a desperate belief that The Problem can be solved with the New Thing. And goddammit someone must have it in their pitch deck."
But while a ton of great work has come (and continues to come) out of all the New Things, none of them have answered the burning question of how to pay for journalism—especially the public-interest, watchdog, feet-to-the-fire kind that democracy needs to function. For one thing, all the big new digital shops today employ, between them, a few thousand journalists—compared with the ten-thousand-plus laid off in the great retrenchment of 2007 to 2010. For another, like virtually every other hot property across the internet, digital media startups are better at growing than at showing a profit. And since a profit is what the people supplying those giant piles of cash are ultimately looking for…
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Remember when Chris Hughes put The New Republic up for sale earlier this year? His letter to TNR staff subtly blamed the very same people it was addressed to: "I will be the first to admit that when I took on this challenge nearly four years ago, I underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today's quickly evolving climate."
Bullshit. "Transitioning" was not The New Republic's main challenge. Refusing to work on, with, and for the internet was once a pervasive problem in news organizations, but while vestiges of that still linger, it is no longer what keeps publications from succeeding financially.
What keeps them from making money now is that online advertising pays pennies. (Actually, a penny per reader is pretty good these days—CPM, or "cost per thousand" ads, is often far less than half that.) And there are a ton of people competing for those fractions of a penny—including Google and Facebook, which collectively pulled in a whopping 85 percent of new ad spending in the first quarter of this year. The only way to make ends meet in that environment is to turn up the fire hose of fast and cheap content or rent your pages out to native advertising (sorry, branded content).
Look at it this way: A reporter doing even modestly original work might produce five stories a week (and that's not allowing for anything more than a few phone calls and a couple of rounds of editing per piece). If each of those stories gets, on average, 50,000 readers, and each of those page views generates 0.01 cents (again, a very generous rate), you'll end up grossing $2,500 a week, or $130,000 a year, with which you'll have to pay the reporter and her editor, their benefits, web tech, sales and ops staff, taxes, insurance, electricity, rent, laptops, phones…
And this calculus assumes a brutal pace of hour-by-hour filing and publishing, with journalists constantly looking over their shoulder at the traffic numbers. (When a New York Daily News editor was fired last week for dropping attributions from columnist Shaun King's stories, he noted that he was expected to process 20 stories from five reporters each day.) And the kind of digging that an investigative story requires—months of research and reporting, plus fact-checking, editing, and maybe multimedia production—forget it. The math just doesn't work.
From the very beginning, 40 years ago this year, our newsroom has been built on the belief that journalism needs to be untethered from corporate interests or deep-pocketed funders—that the only way a free press can be paid for is by its readers. This can take a few different forms: subscriptions, donations, micropayments, all of which we're experimenting with. It can be something the audience is forced to do (via the paywalls you'll find at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal) or something they choose to do, as in public radio.
At Mother Jones, we've gone the latter route: Our mission is to make our journalism accessible to as many people as possible. Instead of requiring you to pay, we bet on trust: We trust you'll recognize the value of the reporting and pitch in what you can. And you trust us to put that money to work—by going out there and kicking ass.
Because of your trust, we can choose which stories we go after, rather than chasing the spin du jour. We can look where others in the media do not. We can, as our colleague David Corn puts it, get off the spinning hamster wheel and dig deep.
And we can do it without fearing that some corporate overlord will pull the plug. Remember what happened when casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson bought Nevada's largest daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal: as the sale was being negotiated, reporters were mysteriously tasked with digging up dirt on a judge who'd antagonized Adelson. Then the newsroom was told to back off covering the biggest story in town—their boss. This was a paper where a columnist had already been hounded into bankruptcy by Adelson over a few words. (We faced a similar attack recently from another billionaire upset about our critical coverage of his past.) Your support is what keeps Mother Jones' journalists from having to fear that kind of intimidation and control.
If you're a regular reader of Mother Jones, you'll have noticed that we've been in the equivalent of a pledge drive this month: We need to bring in $175,000 by Saturday to stay on track. This is something we do three times a year, and it's the most important way we raise money to pay for everything we do.
But we're not crazy about these monthlong fundraisers, and maybe you aren't either. So we're looking at ways to make it easier ("frictionless," as they say in the tech world) for you to support the journalism you believe in. One of our big initiatives is an online sustainer program, where readers agree to give us a bit of money every month. That could make a big difference for our stability: Just 1,200 more readers who value our reporting enough to pitch in $20 a month would get our "sustaining" revenue up to $50,000 a month, or $600,000 every year. If that's an option for you, it would be a big help.
Meanwhile, that $175,000 by the end of the month? It's not some arbitrary goal, but the cold, hard number required in our budget to keep our reporters on the beat. In the first 26 days of this month we've raised about 75 percent of that, so we need $45,000 in the next four days. But that's how these campaigns typically work: Everyone waits until the last minute to pitch in.
If that's you, remember that ultimately this is about something bigger than MoJo. If we're going to have a functioning democracy, we'll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close. The new moguls are in the technology business, not the journalism business. And while some of them say wonderful things about journalism, money talks—and right now, the money is saying "pop."
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