“Scaring Normal People”: For Ted Cruz, Crazy Is A Family Business
Be careful what you wish for. The Republican Party sought a crop of new leaders with the vitality and ideological fire both Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney lacked heading into 2016. Now they’ve got them, most notably Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s leading the charge to either “defund” Obamacare or shut down the government, to the horror of McCain and other so-called “establishment Republicans” (as if there were any such thing.) Even Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul has maybe kinda sorta suggested that shutting down the government to defund Obamacare is a bad idea — even though he signed Sen. Mike Lee’s letter threatening to do so.
Cruz has no such qualms. Headlining former Sen. Jim DeMint and the Heritage Foundation’s “Defund Obamacare” rally last night in Dallas, he fired up the crowd with his Obama attacks. (Of course, I can’t help but note the irony of Heritage sponsoring Cruz’s “Defund Obamacare” tour when Heritage was the source of one of the plan’s key provisions: the individual mandate to carry health insurance.) Even though some Obama defenders showed up and heckled Cruz, the junior Texas senator and his father were the stars of the night.
“We’ve all seen this movie before,” Cruz told the audience. “President Obama and Harry Reid are gonna scream and yell ‘those mean, nasty Republicans are threatening to shut down the government.’” He went on: “One side or the other has to blink. How do we win this fight? Don’t blink!” Only squishes blink.
“Now is the best time we have to defund Obamacare,” Cruz told the crowd of 1,000. “We’re seeing bipartisan agreement that the wheels are coming off.”
The wheels came off the Heritage event, though, when Cruz’s father, minister Rafael Cruz, took the stage to close it out. When it comes to red meat and red-baiting, Ted is a piker compared to his Cuban refugee father, who talks of Castro’s tyranny but never mentions the fact that he supported the Cuban communist leader’s revolution against Batista. Again we heard Cruz Sr. warn that Barack Obama is leading us toward socialism. This time, though, he didn’t merely exaggerate, he outright lied, insisting “Sarah Palin was right” about death panels in Obamacare.
Cruz was oddly specific, as though he’d had a very vivid hallucination: There is a 16-member death panel, he told the rapt crowd, that “will be implemented next year.” Those “16 bureaucrats will decide” not only whether you get life saving treatment, but even knee surgery, Cruz warned the audience, farcically. Instead of a “knee operation,” maybe you’ll just get “a wheelchair” and pain medication instead. Cruz also predicted shortages of aspirin and a hike in staph infections under Obamacare, just like in his native Cuba (although many of Cuba’s medical shortages are due to the U.S. embargo.) Essentially, according to Cruz, the death panel will tell many of us “Go home and die!” And to think Republicans complained about Rep. Alan Grayson’s rhetoric back in the day.
The Cruz and Son roadshow would scare normal voters, but it seems ideal for a GOP primary. Even in Texas, Cruz is the state’s GOP voters’ top pick for a presidential nominee, above Gov. Rick Perry, who is hoping to ride off into the sunset away from the statehouse and toward another primary run. Not so fast, Governor. Cruz had a solid lead even before Perry reversed himself and asked for at least some Medicaid funding for Obamacare, making himself obviously a “squish.”
At what point might Cruz Sr. become a drawback for his son? Can you say “never?” In the important Tea Party primary within the GOP primary, he is leaving Marco Rubio and Rick Perry in the dust, and is neck and neck with Rand Paul nationally. (That’s why Cruz allies are accusing Paul allies of pushing questions about Cruz’s eligibility to be president especially in Iowa, although the two men profess to be friends.) It looks increasingly like Ted Cruz (and his father) dream of him as the 2016 nominee. But so do Democrats.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 21, 2013
“Rotten To The Core”: The Race To Implement Or Kill Common Core Standards
I’ve argued off and on for a while that the steady and accelerating abandonment of standards-and-assessments-based education reform on the Right is one of the most under-reported stories of the year. And at the crucial point where states are on the brink of implementing the most ambitious “standards upgrade” initiative by far, the Common Core Standards endorsed by nearly all governors from both parties (see this Special Report from the May/June 2012 issue of the Washington Monthly for a thorough description), the withdrawal of conservative support is becoming an epidemic. The New York Times‘ Bill Keller has penned a useful op-ed on the subject:
[T]he Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators, convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools accountable. Come together it did — for a while.
The backlash began with a few of the usual right-wing suspects. Glenn Beck warned that under “this insidious menace to our children and to our families” students would be “indoctrinated with extreme leftist ideology….”
Beck’s soul mate Michelle Malkin warned that the Common Core was “about top-down control engineered through government-administered tests and left-wing textbook monopolies.” Before long, FreedomWorks — the love child of Koch brothers cash and Tea Party passion — and the American Principles Project, a religious-right lobby, had joined the cause. Opponents have mobilized Tea Partyers to barnstorm in state capitals and boiled this complex issue down to an obvious slogan, “ObamaCore!”….
In April the Republican National Committee surrendered to the fringe and urged states to renounce Common Core. The presidential aspirant Marco Rubio, trying to appease conservatives angry at his moderate stance on immigration, last month abandoned his support for the standards. And state by red state, the effort to disavow or defund is under way. Indiana has put the Common Core on hold. Michigan’s legislature cut off money for implementing the standards and is now contemplating pulling out altogether. Last month, Georgia withdrew from a 22-state consortium, one of two groups designing tests pegged to the new standards, ostensibly because of the costs. (The new tests are expected to cost about $29 per student; grading them is more labor-intensive because in addition to multiple-choice questions they include written essays and show-your-work math problems that will be graded by actual humans. “You’re talking about 30 bucks a kid, in an education system that now spends upwards of $9,000 or $10,000 per student per year,” said Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute.)
The Common Core is imperiled in Oklahoma, Utah, Alabama and Pennsylvania. All of the retreat, you will notice, has been in Republican-controlled states.
It’s hard to tell how much of the opposition is coming from conservatives who now oppose public education (or as an increasing number now call it, “government schools”) itself, or who think “national” standards will inhibit state-based or local efforts to undermine traditional public schools in favor of subsidies for private schools or home-schooling, but it’s clearly growing, and the heavy investment of the business community in Common Core is at best slowing down the revolt.
I strongly suspect opposition to Common Core will be a major theme for up-and-coming conservative state-level candidates in 2014, particularly for GOP primary challengers seeking to attract “base” activist support and/or to overcome suspicions of RINOism. In the race between Common Core implementation and efforts to stop it (and yes, there is opposition from the Left as well, and some concerns and misgivings across the spectrum, but nothing like what we are seeing on the Right), it’s currently a dead heat with the horse named “No!” gaining fast.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly POlitical Animal, August 19, 2013
“Obama Hates White People”: Loose Lipped Maine Gov Paul LePage’s Penchant For Ignorance And Gross Stupidity
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) announced last month that he would run for re-election in 2014.
LePage squeaked into office in 2010 with some help from the Tea Party — he won just 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race — and has since earned a reputation as a blunt, loose-lipped politician with a penchant for controversy. Think a less diplomatic version of Chris Christie.
Things got so bad that in June, Assistant Senate Republican Leader Roger Katz wrote an op-ed saying he was “embarrassed” by LePage’s “unfortunate tone.”
With LePage gearing up to pursue a second term, here’s a look back at some of his more memorable controversies.
“Obama hates white people”
Move over, Kanye West.
At a fundraiser in August, LePage reportedly told a group of Republican lawmakers and supporters that President Obama “hates white people,” according to an account one attendee gave to the Bangor Daily News.
The chairman of the state GOP, Rick Bennett, told the Daily News he personally had not heard the remark, but said LePage did discuss how “President Obama had an opportunity to unify the country on race, but didn’t do anything.”
“The governor is not a racist,” he added.
“Blow it up”
LePage is no fan of newspapers (more on that below). Just how much does he hate the print news business? Enough to joke about bombing it to smithereens, apparently.
LePage had the chance to test out a fighter jet simulator this summer. While sitting in the cockpit, he was asked, “What would you like to do?”
His response: “I want to find the [Portland] Press Herald building and blow it up.”
A spokesman for the governor later said he was “clearly joking.”
“Vaseline”
LePage came under fire in June for making a vulgar sexual reference about a Democratic state senator, Troy Jackson, while discussing the state’s deadlocked budget negotiations.
“Senator Jackson claims to be for the people, but he’s the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” LePage said in an interview with Maine’s WMTW News.
LePage then walked away, only to return a little later with a semi-apology.
“Damnit,” he said. “That comment is not politically correct, but we’ve got to understand who this man is. This man is a bad person. He doesn’t only have no brains, he has a black heart.”
“Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell”
On the campaign trail in 2010, LePage told voters they should elect him because he would defend them from the federal government’s tyranny. He added, “As your governor, you’re gonna be seeing a lot of me on the front page saying, ‘Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell.'”
“The new Gestapo, the IRS”
There have been a number of criticisms of the Affordable Care Act: It’s unconstitutional; it’s unwieldy; it hinders job growth. LePage, responding to the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law, added a new one, likening the IRS, which will enforce much of that law, to Nazi Germany’s police force.
“We the people have been told there is no choice,” he said during a weekly radio address. “You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo, the IRS.”
After catching flak, LePage clarified one week later that the IRS isn’t actually the Gestapo.
“What I am trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and, frankly, I would never want to see that repeated,” he said. “Maybe the IRS is not quite as bad — yet.”
“Kiss my butt”
Shortly after assuming office in 2011, LePage said he would not attend Martin Luther King Day events hosted by the NAACP, explaining his decision by saying, “I am not going to be held hostage by a special interest group.”
When asked about the NAACP’s criticism of him for turning down those invites, LePage told a reporter, “Tell them to kiss my butt.”
“Some women may have little beards”
In 2011, the Maine Board of Environmental Protection recommended banning bisphenol A, or BPA, in all reusable food and beverage containers sold in the state. Studies have linked BPA to health problems in young children and fetuses, prompting the European Union and several U.S. states to regulate the chemical’s use.
LePage, unconvinced that the science behind those studies was sound, disagreed with the environmental agency’s recommendation.
“The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen,” he said. “So the worst case is some women may have little beards.”
“Newspapers”
LePage is terrified of Maine’s newspapers.
While visiting a grade school, LePage told the students, “My greatest fear in the state of Maine: Newspapers. I’m not a fan of newspapers.”
TV and radio news were all right, LePage added, because they don’t “spin” the news.
“Brainwash the masses”
Months into his first term, LePage ordered that a mural depicting labor triumphs and notable figures like Rosie the Riveter be removed from the state’s Department of Labor building, saying the mural was too one-sided.
A spokesperson for LePage said he had made the decision after receiving an anonymous fax likening it to “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”
“The Department of Labor is a state agency that works very closely with both employees and employers, and we need to have a decor that represents neutrality,” the spokesperson added.
The U.S. Labor Department, which helped pay for the mural with a $60,000 grant, filed a federal lawsuit demanding that it be returned. A judge threw out that lawsuit, but LePage placed the mural back on display in the Maine State Museum earlier this year.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, August 20, 2013; Editor’s note: This story was first published on July 3, 2013, and updated on August 20.
“G.O.P. Purity Control”: The Right Wing Is Back To Denouncing Every Utterance That Strays From Absolute Rigid Orthodoxy
After losing the 2012 election the G.O.P. engaged in a bit of soul-searching, and talked publicly about changing their image, if not their policies. That phase is definitively over. The Republicans are back to denouncing every utterance that strays from an absolutely rigid right-wing orthodoxy, and even ones that really don’t.
Take, for example, the agonies of Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader who is running for re-election in Kentucky. He is far to the right on every issue and was at the forefront of the stonewall opposition to President Barack Obama that has paralyzed Congress. And yet a right-wing group has announced its intention to run ads against him ahead of the 2014 primary, where he faces a Tea Party challenger.
Mr. McConnell, in their estimation, has failed to oppose health care reform with sufficient vehemence. Just last week, he had the temerity to point out that shutting down the government will not actually stop reform from going into effect. As if that was not appalling enough, Mr. McConnell admitted that “there are handful of things in the 2,700-page” health care bill “that are probably are OK.”
Mr. McConnell went on to say that the bill was the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years” and that “we need to get rid of it.” But what he actually said or where he actually stands seems to make no difference to Republicans out there on the Tea Party fringe.
At least Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, might sympathize with Mr. McConnell’s plight. It was widely reported last week that he called Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign talk of “self-deportation” by illegal immigrants “racist.” Actually he said that the discussion “hurts us.” In the gap between the comment and the clarification, there was a blizzard of outrage on the right wing corners of Twitter and the rest of the Web.
In another sign of the intense pressure on Republicans to prove their bona fides, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas on Sunday released evidence indicating that he is really and truly American. I mean he gave the Dallas Morning News his birth certificate proving that he is a “natural born American” — and therefore eligible to run for president. Mr. Cruz was born in Canada (not quite Kenya, but definitely not the U.S. of A.). But his mother was an American citizen, meaning he never had to go through a naturalization exercise.
How bizarre that Mr. Cruz felt he had to do this. Of course, the way the Republicans are going, by 2016 merely having lived in the socialist haven north of this country will probably be enough to knock him out of contention.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times, August 19, 2013
“They’re Both Opportunists”: Julian Assange Loves Rand Paul’s Playtime Politics And His “Very Principled Positions”
Julian Assange, who back when he roamed the earth freely used to do things like show up on the steps of St. Paul’s to protest the wrongs of capitalism, has now apparently placed his faith in the man who is arguably the capitalists’ single biggest lickspittle in Washington, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). In and of itself, this is only mildly interesting. But Assange’s admirers on the left are so seduced by his oppositionalist posture and his desire to stick it to the man (as long as the man is the government of the United States) that they seem willing to follow him off any cliff, maybe even the cliff of voting for Paul in 2016. It’s a jejune politics, and ultimately a politics of leisure. No one whose day-to-day life is materially affected by the question of who is in office has time for such silly games, and therefore, no one who purports to be in solidarity with those people should either.
In an interview over the weekend with Campus Reform, a conservative college students’ group and website, Assange offered up a range of choice thoughts, none more interesting than this one: “In relation to Rand Paul. I’m a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the U.S. Congress on a number of issues. They have been the strongest supporters of the fight against the U.S. attack on WikiLeaks and on me in the U.S. Congress. Similarly, they have been the strongest opponents of drone warfare and extrajudicial killing.” And then this: “The libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice really in the U.S. Congress. It will be the driver that shifts the United States around.”
Assange also praised Matt Drudge in the interview, saying Drudge “should be applauded for breaking a lot of that censorship” of the mainstream news media. Drudge, it should be recalled, didn’t break any “censorship” at all. Conspiracy theorists of left and right have always had trouble distinguishing between censorship and editorial judgment, and it was Newsweek’s judgment (long before current ownership, I note) in January 1998 that its Monica Lewinsky story wasn’t ready for print. Drudge simply “reported” on that fact—or rather was spoon-fed it by disgruntled internal sources. The Lewinsky story was getting around, and so it’s a near certainty that Newsweek, or someone, would have published it soon. But Assange elevates Drudge to hero status.
It’s true that the Pauls do take one principled position, their anti-war stance. That’s one more than some people, I guess. But they get way too much credit for it, and for their supposed “libertarian” posture. Rand Paul is not a libertarian at all. A true libertarian supports the rights of same-sex couples to marry and the right of women to make decisions about their bodies. Paul is against same-sex marriage to such an extent that he compared it with interspecies marriage earlier this summer. And he’s not merely anti-abortion rights; he’s thrown in with the “personhood” movement, which would essentially grant the rights of personhood to fertilized eggs and represents the extreme wing of the anti-abortion rights movement.
What does Assange make of these positions? And what does the Assange of the St. Paul’s anti-banking protest make of Paul’s strident free-marketeerism to the extent of insisting that businesses have the right to discriminate against black people if they want to? We’ll never know, I suspect. If ever compelled to address these points, he’ll probably say they’re side issues dredged up by people devoted to the status quo—a standard and boring “fight the power” line.
I should say I’ve never admired Assange. His is the kind of black-and-white, moral absolutist thinking about politics one should grow out of after graduate school. He put American and other lives at risk with some of his 2010 leaks of classified military material. Into the bargain he may have sexually assaulted two women—innocent until proven otherwise on that one, but nevertheless it hangs out there and is part of the reason he’s holed up in that Ecuadoran Embassy.
He’s a bad actor. But at least once upon a time he was a somewhat consistent bad actor. Now he’s just an opportunist, as much an opportunist as Paul himself. Here’s what “the libertarian aspect” of the GOP is going to bring to America in the thankfully unlikely event it is to succeed at the ballot box. First, taxes so low on the wealthy as to be nearly nonexistent (actually, in some ways the most interesting of Assange’s weekend remarks were those equating taxation with “violence,” which puts him in the company of nutcases like Alan Keyes). Second, the end of any kind of business regulation. Severe cuts to all programs for the poor. These are the only issues, after Paul’s anti-war stance, on which his libertarianism is consistent. It is interesting indeed to learn that Assange agrees.
That’s why these seemingly left-wing anti-establishment types should never be trusted. These are just playtime politics, luxuries for the leisure class. If you want a real left-winger, I say stick with Marx. At least he understood that politics is chiefly about economic relations. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is sending you down blind alleys, knows little about politics to begin with, and should be shunned by anyone who claims to be anywhere on the broad left side of the spectrum.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 19, 2013
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