Cruz Control, King of the castle, Tax-and-Spend Republicans, C(eek) B(etter) O(ptions), the Ethanol conundrum, and a tribute to Gore Vidal.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
First up, Ted Cruz won the oft-delayed Texas Republican Senate primary last night over David Dewhurst, and will likely roll over token Democratic opposition in the fall to become Texas’ new Senator.
This is significant, from a national perspective, for a number of reasons.
Ted Cruz is 42, Ivy League-educated, and Hispanic. He was backed by Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint, and Rick Perry backed his opponent.
The reason that Cruz got the support he did is because, as previously noted, the electorate is becoming younger and more diverse, which is basically the opposite of what the GOP base is becoming.
Cruz, when he’s elected, will join Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, Ron Johnson, and probably Jeff Flake as an insurgent in the Senate GOP, beginning the transformation of the Senate GOP into the House GOP, which we’ve all seen has become an utter shitshow.
Here’s five things you should know about Ted Cruz:
- Ted Cruz believes George Soros leads a UN conspiracy to eliminate golf, via the infamous Agenda 21.
- Ted Cruz labeled Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”, and wants to raise the retirement age, cut benefits, and implement a privatization scheme to hand it over to Wall Street, functionally gutting the program.
- Ted Cruz co-authored a blatantly unconstitutional proposal that two or more states could nullify the PPACA, and indeed all Federal law, simply by working together to do so.
- Ted Cruz believes that Sharia law is an enormous problem in the United States.
- Ted Cruz campaigned on helping Texas defy international law by executing an illegal alien who was not informed of his right to request assistance from the consul of their own state. Incidentally, even North Korea has honored this in the past.
Yes, that’s right: Ted Cruz is to the RIGHT of Rick Perry, occupying the deli thin slice of politics between extreme conservatism and outright fascism.
Here is some insightful analysis from Charles P. Pierce.
And finally, yet another proclamation that the Tea Party is not dead, this time from The Atlantic.
Now that you’ve been presented with some information and analysis, let’s wrap it all up.
Ted Cruz is a dangerous ideological extremist who represents the most poisonous aspects of the modern conservative movement. Cruz, and people like Cruz, will burn Congress and this country to the ground if given the chance, and they must be stopped. Texas may be a lost cause, but there’s plenty of country left. The GOP, for the good of the country, has to be driven back into the South and Southwest like the armies of Mordor and kept there until they’re ready to govern responsibly.
Speaking of irresponsible governance, Rep. Steve King rolled out a new Birther theory, saying that President Obama’s parents sent a telegram from Kenya to Hawaii to announce the President’s birth.
Oh yeah, and he also endorsed dog fighting and other forms of animal cruelty. Go fuck yourself, Steve King.
The GOP loves to call Democrats “tax and spend liberals”. If that’s the case, why does the House GOP tax plan raise taxes on 10 times as many people as the Democratic plan does? There’s a reason this plan utterly failed in the Senate.
Of course, when the GOP figures massive tax cuts for the rich will create vast wealth for everyone, they do it using what’s called “dynamic scoring”, which the CBO refuses to use, because it’s crap math. Consequently, the GOP uses CBO numbers when they support their case, and slam the CBO when they don’t. Here’s a hint: if the CBO, a non-partisan fact-based organization, says your numbers are crap, you may want to take a second look at your numbers.
Next up, Wonkblog poses the question as to whether we should be using corn for fuel with a national drought underway. Personally, I think ethanol is crap. It takes more energy to produce than it creates, it requires specialized engines to process in large quantities, it’s not clean at all, and it increases the volatility of food prices around the world. Yet, because of the agricultural lobby and major agribusinesses, it’s mandated as part of our fuel supply. At the same time, algae-based biofuels and other truly clean, renewable fuels and resources can’t get a shake of government funding because they’re hippy dippy “green” projects.
Finally, Gore Vidal passed away last night at age 86. Here is Gore Vidal calling William F. Buckley a cryptofacist.
