Ted Cruz

[analog kid]

The GOP establishment hates Cruz more than Obama, yet his little army of bible-thumping zealots think the party's really going to fall in line behind their Anointed One.

A year ago you couldn't find anyone in the Republican Congress who liked Cruz. He's their man now though. I've heard the phrase "lose with Cruz," meaning it's more important for the establishment to go with Cruz, even though they think he'll lose the election, because at least their party will remain intact.

Shows how much they dislike Trump.

[VtaGeezer]

Shows how much they dislike fear Trump.

Fixed.

[21st Century Man]

New York Sun endorses Ted Cruz.


Ted Cruz’s New York Values
Editorial of The New York Sun | April 15, 2016

  In the Republican presidential primary in New York, the Sun urges a vote for Senator Ted Cruz. It hasn’t been our normal practice to endorse in the primaries, but this year the vote, set for Tuesday, will take on outsized importance as we career toward a contested convention. The junior senator from Texas has emerged from a crowded field by dint of his fidelity to principles â€" limited, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a strong foreign policy â€" that couldn’t be at higher premium. They are the true New York Values.

    Senator Cruz's fidelity is to constitutional principles and a strict construction of the Bill of Rights, which New York was one of the states to demand as a condition of ratifying the Constitution; the Sun urges a vote for him in the Republican primary on Tuesday.
Our endorsement is not animated by hostility to either Donald Trump or Governor Kasich, both of whom are running well ahead of Mr. Cruz in the polls in New York. All three are better on key issues than either Secretary Clinton or Senator Sanders. We like Mr. Trump’s willingness to re-think the United Nations. We’re not against better trade deals. We are against a retreat from NATO, and Mr. Trump has been too xenophobic in his use of language in respect of religion and the immigration issue. Mr. Cruz, a former solicitor general of the border state of Texas, has been more sage.

More at

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/cruzs-new-york-values/89541/

[albrecht]

Soooo the latest conspiracy on the fringes is that Ted Cruz's dad was involved with the JFK assassination plot and has deep Bush oil connections. Wayne Madsen is the source, so take it as you wish.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20160407
https://themarshallreport.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/rafael-cruz-a-pro-batista-cia-connected-cuban-in-exile-really-ted/

[VtaGeezer]

Poor Rafael Jr can't get no respect in NYC...and this was the at GOP Establishment's gala...

<blockquote class="twitter-video" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The scene as Cruz speaks at NYC GOP Gala pic.twitter.com/Pwx8I0Ci25</p>&mdash; Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) April 15, 2016
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

[pate]

Juast for shits and giggles, I will do this.

Once


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg-SGdYdV7M

I say no more

[coaster]

Evidently this video shows Cruz sneaking money to a delegate? Or something.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-pwGx4vv2g

[21st Century Man]

Evidently this video shows Cruz sneaking money to a delegate? Or something.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-pwGx4vv2g

http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/22/cruz-campaign-refutes-video-claiming-he-passed-money-to-delegate-video/


I'm not saying whether it is true or not but you can look at the exchange from different points of view.

[MV/Liberace!]

Evidently this video shows Cruz sneaking money to a delegate? Or something.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-pwGx4vv2g

lol, what the fuck?

[VtaGeezer]

Cruz's explanation is plausible.  There's always a staffer near to take stuff given by the crowd. The guy has a bunch stuff in his other hand, one looks like a ball cap.

[MV/Liberace!]

Cruz's explanation is plausible.  There's always a staffer near to take stuff given by the crowd. The guy has a bunch stuff in his other hand, one looks like a ball cap.

Yeah, I believe his explanation. He might be Lyin' Ted, but he's no dummy. No way he'd go handing out cash in plain sight like Bob Barker.

[VtaGeezer]

Yeah, I believe his explanation. He might be Lyin' Ted, but he's no dummy. No way he'd go handing out cash in plain sight like Bob Barker.

Besides, he's a piker at the shakedown compared to Clinton....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gDeilMVmiQ

[analog kid]

I was more struck by the video that was embedded.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK3QqDs6yiU

Evangelicals are weird.

[Up All Night]

Last night, even big Cruz supporter Chris Krok, on his nightly radio talk show, on the Dallas flamethrower WBAP 820, admitted to his big nighttime audience, [and now peeved and angry Cruz supporters], that since Cruz simply has no chance of winning the nomination, he should get out, and, that Trump IS now, the presumptive GOP candidate.

Krok even went as far as to describe Cruz's pick of his VP, as an act of desperation.

[VtaGeezer]

John Beohner on Rafael Cruz last night at Stanford:

"Lucifer in the flesh.  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.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/john-beohner-ted-cruz-lucifer-222570#ixzz478PqDGuL

[Lt.Uhura]

These candidates must assume voters are ignorant, have short memories, or both.

[21st Century Man]

Satanists are furious that Boehner compared Ted Cruz to the Dark Lord

https://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/satanists-are-furious-that-boehner-compared-ted-cruz-to-the-dark-lord/comments/#disqus

[VtaGeezer]

Cruz took a lesson from Ronald Reagan an selecting his VP before the nominee selected.  Reagan did it in '76.  And lost the nomination to Ford.  Cruz's arrogance is Clintonesque.

[albrecht]

Satanists are furious that Boehner compared Ted Cruz to the Dark Lord

https://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/satanists-are-furious-that-boehner-compared-ted-cruz-to-the-dark-lord/comments/#disqus

This election cannot get any more bizarre. We already had some lady Ted Cruz look-a-like (who is now going to do porn) and now Satanists upset that Ted Cruz is said to be "Lucifer in the flesh." Not to mention Trumps antics, a candidate who insisted he wasn't lying and that he really did attack his mother with a hammer and try to stab someone else, an old Jewish Communist from Vermont who never has held a job, and Billary with all her scandals past and present and maybe getting an indictment (if the government wasn't so corrupt.) It is crazy. And I like it.

[VtaGeezer]

I heard that Lucifer is sueing Beohner for defamation.

[starrmtn001]

Oh HELL NO!  That sphincter cheated me out of my vote, here in Colorado.  Deport the SOB!

[136 or 142]

1.I'm a little surprised that nobody brought up this 'basketball ring' thing that Ted Cruz said that apparently will likely destroy his campaign in Indiana.
First of all, by itself I find the whole thing silly, but if you listen to the entire segment, Cruz actually says 'basketball rim' the first time, which is apparently a perfectly acceptable term for 'basketball hoop' and the second time when he says 'ring' it sounds like he actually meant to say 'rim' again and somehow confused himself over something.  Also, even if it weren't a slip of the tongue, but a genuine mistake on his part, How does this matter?  So, maybe he doesn't know basketball all that well.  Nobody is an expert in everything.  A basketball hoop looks like a ring. 

I can't stand Ted Cruz, but I think this really is a pretty stupid way for his campaign to end.

2.The bigger thing to me though is that while a lot is made out of this incident, nobody brings this idiocy of Ted Cruz up: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCSnKNoyWtw

Leaving aside that Ted Cruz uses the dishonestly cherry picked year of 1998 to bring up the falsehood of the 'global warming pause'  (Ted Cruz isn't just a liar, and a damn liar, but he also lies with statistics.)  The worse part is right at the end where Ted Cruz says something like "Well, fine.  We can cut 1998 off of this graph, and it will still show a flat line."  Except, as the Admiral points out, and as everybody who passed high school algebra should know, if you alter the numbers that make up the line in the graph, the entire line changes.  I realize that the 'line of best fit' is statistics and that may not be taught in some high schools, but basic graphing is algebra.  (Personally I'd much rather see statistics as the core of high school mathematics, and not algebra which is basically only needed for higher level academic math, but that's a different argument.)   

I personally think it's far more important for a President to be literate in mathematics and statistics than to be knowledgeable of basketball.  I suppose some might argue that getting the term wrong was 'insulting to the people of Indiana', but that sounds like an incredible example of overly-sensitive 'political correctness' to me.

I don't know which suggests that the United States may be becoming an Idiocracy more: that such a big deal is made of some stupid slip of the tongue, that no deal at all was made of Ted Cruz's mathematical idiocy, or that a United States Senator who is regarded (by the mainstream media at least) as a 'genius'  is almost certainly innumerate.  (There are several other examples where Ted Cruz shows a complete lack of understanding of basic mathematics, not just this one, including, I would argue, his entire world view, which I think can be fairly termed as apocalyptic.)

3.Republican turnout in the primaries has been declining.  In Michigan, something like 200,000 more people voted in the Republican Primary than in the Democratic Primary, but in the less Democratic state of Pennsylvania, something like 80,000 more people voted in the Democratic Primary.  I think this is clearly largely a result of the Anti Trump Republicans giving up.

[136 or 142]

Cruz took a lesson from Ronald Reagan an selecting his VP before the nominee selected.  Reagan did it in '76.  And lost the nomination to Ford.  Cruz's arrogance is Clintonesque.

I don't see why this is arrogant.  In many states, for instance, where the governor selects the Lieutenant Governor to be their running-mate, the running-mate is frequently chosen long before the primary.

Ted Cruz did not choose Carly Fiorina at this time because he's arrogant, he chose her because this the last move that he has left to try and stop Trump.  However, Cruz' argument that he chose her because he wanted primary voters to know in advance I think is entirely sound.  Personally I'd like for Presidential nominees to release their list of cabinet selections before the general election.

[136 or 142]

From what I've read, outside of the twitterverse and many mainstream political journalists, according to the polls few real people in Indiana actually care that Ted Cruz referred to a basketball hoop or rim as a ring.

No surprise that once again the ordinary citizen is smarter than the media class or the hyper partisan.

I will say from my watching of CNN, that many political journalists seem to be quite intelligent. John King is excellent with data and statistical analysis (which apparently is now referred to as 'analytics'), Jake Tapper is clearly very smart and even Wolf Blitzer isn't George Noory level stupid.  Of the journalist pundits, Gloria Borger is bright, and the rest seem to be as well (I can't remember their names.)  I thought that Tim Russerts' 'gotcha' interviews and journalism were bad enough at the time because they were based solely on whether a politician was consistent, as if their being consistent meant that they must be right.  But, this 'gotcha' journalism over meaningless terminology is just idiotic.  That seemingly intelligent journalists play this game is sad and I honestly can't understand why they do it.  There is no evidence that their readers or viewers care about these things.

[VtaGeezer]

Indiana's ultraconservative Gov. Michael Pence is endorsing Cruz.  What a surprise.  He was trying to hide in his foxhole as he's up for re-election in Nov. too, but I'm guessing the Stop Trumpers waved a big wad of campaign cash at him to draw into the Cruz darkness.  I don't see it as much of a boost since Pence fans were already going for The Anointed One.  Trump's endorsement by Bobby Knight may help in Indiana but his screwy babbling about Truman and the A-bomb will come back to haunt DT. 

The last few days before the election is always a battle for "undecided", i.e., the least informed, dumbest and dullest...IOW likely to be a good few days for Cruz.

[GravitySucks]

I don't see why this is arrogant.  In many states, for instance, where the governor selects the Lieutenant Governor to be their running-mate, the running-mate is frequently chosen long before the primary.

Ted Cruz did not choose Carly Fiorina at this time because he's arrogant, he chose her because this the last move that he has left to try and stop Trump.  However, Cruz' argument that he chose her because he wanted primary voters to know in advance I think is entirely sound.  Personally I'd like for Presidential nominees to release their list of cabinet selections before the general election.

Cruz chose Fiorina for one reason. To try and get as many votes in California as possible. He knows that if Trump gets 110-120 out of 172 delegates in California, it will put him over the top. Fiorina has already won a California primary to run last time against Barbara Boxer. Cruz is hoping to get as many of those same voters to vote for him. Any other stated motive is just spin.

[VtaGeezer]

I don't see why this is arrogant.

I think he's insufferably arrogant because with barely 30% of the total delegates from the primaries thus far he blathers incessantly as if he and "Donald" are neck and neck.

[VtaGeezer]

Cruz chose Fiorina for one reason. To try and get as many votes in California as possible. He knows that if Trump gets 110-120 out of 172 delegates in California, it will put him over the top. Fiorina has already won a California primary to run last time against Barbara Boxer. Cruz is hoping to get as many of those same voters to vote for him. Any other stated motive is just spin.

As an ex-Californian, I don't see Carly as a plus there.  She won a tepid primary against a loser ex-Congressman moderate and a bunch of unknowns that most Repubs saw as a futile effort since Boxer was seen as the sure winner in November.  I'm waiting to see if Cruz will campaign in CA as "Ted" or as "Rafael".

[VtaGeezer]

Update on the Pense "endorsement"...it was reeaaally weak.  Said he'd vote for Cruz but was actually complimentary toward Trump.

[RealCool Daddio]

Satanic Temple responds to Boehner calling Cruz "Lucifer" - "Christians can’t just push Cruz off on Satanists. We don’t fucking want him."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/04/29/satanic_temple_explains_why_ted_cruz_isn_t_lucifer.html