Ted Cruz: ‘Religious Liberty’s Never Been More Under Assault’ in America

Mediaite.com:

Ted Cruz spoke at Liberty University today and talked at some length about how big the threat against religious freedom is in the United States. He railed against the IRS and spoke up in support of Hobby Lobby, declaring that “religious liberty’s never been more under assault.”
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Cruz brought up an Air Force chaplain who got in trouble for saying there are no atheists in foxholes. Cruz laughingly asked if it’s not supposed to be the job of a chaplain “to be insensitive to atheists.”

He railed against the government forcing groups like Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor to “violate their religious beliefs,” which he found especially ironic because of how Pilgrims came to the U.S. to begin with to flee religious persecution. He told the audience that there needs to be a call to action where people of faith should “stand and speak, no matter what the consequence.”

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Politiks As Usual: In These News 3/2/14

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Politiks As Usual: In The News 2/16/14

John Kerry Belittles Climate Questioners: ‘Flat Earth Society’ 

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Politiks As Usual: In The News 12/29/13

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Cruz To Dump Canadian Citizenship

Democrat Pollster Shocked to Find No Racism in Tea Partiers, So They Invent Some

Mediaite.com:

The Democratic pollster Democracy Corps, commissioning research from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, recently dug into that foreign species commonly referred to as “the conservative voter.” In a dispatch that reads like the curious field notes Charles Darwin scribbled while observing the natural wonders of the Galapagos, the Democratic pollsters have found that the family Republican is made up of a variety of genera, including moderates, tea partiers and socially conservative evangelicals.


Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pollsters discovered that these factions are distinct and not especially friendly towards one another; but the report is not without surprising findings. 

The top of that list is the discovery that the majority of Republican voters are fed up with litigating social issues via the electoral process. A wave of pragmatism is overtaking the GOP’s subgroups, setting up a collision with the last remaining holdouts within the GOP who view politics as the last weapon in a dwindling arsenal aimed at halting what they view as a debasing of the culture. 

“We know that Evangelicals are the largest bloc in the base, with the Tea Party very strong as
Well,” the memo reads. They feign shock at the notion that Republicans view President Barack Obama as a “liar” and a “manipulator,” two designations that the majority of American voters would agree with but to which the Democratic base’s Pavlovian response is to point and shriek “racism.”

Indeed, the pollsters even confess that they “expected” to find more racism among Republican voters. “We expected that in this comfortable setting or in their private written notes, some would make a racial reference or racist slur when talking about the African American President,” they confess. “None did.”

But this response by the voters they surveyed is viewed by Democracy Corps pollsters more as a clever evolutionary response to a history of predation. The Republican voter, the pollsters declare, harbors racial consciousness that is only masked by an effective camouflage:

They know that is deeply non-PC and are conscious about how they are perceived. But focusing on that misses how central is race to the worldview of Republican voters. They have an acute sense that they are white in a country that is becoming increasingly “minority,” and their party is getting whooped by a Democratic Party that uses big government programs that benefit mostly minorities, create dependency and a new electoral majority. Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many Evangelical and Tea Party voters.

The capable naturalists at Democracy Corps are trained to recognize even the latent, recessive racism lingering deep within the Republican genome. Like the human coccyx, the vestigial prejudice in the GOP voter is betrayed when the subject is scrutinized by those with trained eyes.

Looking past the obligatory nods to partisan shibboleths contained within this memo, however, are a series of interesting nuggets that contribute to the political debate. “Evangelicals who feel most threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back,” the memo reads. “They are very in tune politically, but the Tea Party base is very libertarian and not very interested in fighting gay marriage.”

This spells trouble on the horizon. The tense truce between socially conservative evangelicals and tea partiers, two groups which largely agree on philosophy but greatly differ over tactics, will certainly find themselves again at odds when the Republican Party’s presidential primary process heats up after the midterm elections. The clash may, however, come sooner. 

As National Journal‘s Charlie Cook observes, Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) best shot at maintaining his majority in the upper chamber of Congress by scuttling a small budget deal and forcing House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to take an unpalatable measure back to his members in order to force another shutdown. This cynical tactic is among the last tools in the toolshed for Democrats, and it just might work. 

In the same way, Democrats can shatter this fragile truce between purist evangelicals and pragmatic tea partiers by forcing the issue of national gay marriage legislation. It would tear the country apart, but with the country will go the GOP. 

Desperate times…

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Ted Cruz Tells Trayvon’s Mother Why Stand Your Ground Laws Can’t Possibly Be ‘Racist’

Mediaite.com:

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed by George Zimmermanin early 2012, appeared on Capitol Hill Tuesday for a hearing regarding the controversial “Stand Your Ground” laws. When it came time for Sen.Ted Cruz (R-TX) to speak at the hearing, he informed the still-grieving mother that Stand Your Ground laws actually benefit African-Americans as much as, if not more than, they do whites.

Cruz began by offering his condolences for Fulton’s loss, but quickly moved on to defend the trial by jury process that found Zimmerman not guilty of murder. He also noted, correctly, that the “subject of this hearing, the Stand Your Ground laws, was not a defense that Mr. Zimmerman raised. So this entire hearing–the topic of this hearing–is not the issue on which that trial turned.” 

Though Zimmerman’s defense team did not end up using Stand Your Ground, it did come out during the trial that Zimmerman was likely aware of the law’s protections when he shot Martin. “We know that some in our political process have a desire to exploit that tragic, violent incident for agendas that have nothing to do with that young man who lost his life,” Cruz continued. “We have seen efforts to undermine the verdict of the jury and, more broadly, to inflame racial tensions that I think are sad and irresponsible.”  

Then, Cruz got to one of his primary points, which concerned that effect of Stand Your Ground laws on African-American communities. He rejected the notion, put forward earlier in the hearing that “no one could reasonably believe that Stand Your Ground laws protect those in the African-American communities who are victims of violent crimes.” 

He found that idea particularly remarkable since “a great many African-Americans find themselves victims of violent crime and have asserted this defense to defend themselves, defend their families, defend their children.”  

Cruz also cited the fact that “in 2004 a state senator in Illinois by the name of Barack Obama co-sponsored an expansion of Illinois’ law providing civil immunity for those who use justifiable force to defend themselves” as evidence that similar laws could not possibly be racially biased. “The notion that stand your ground laws are some form of veiled racism may be a convenient political attack,” he said, “but it is not borne out by the facts remotely.”   

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Ann Coulter Rips The View Hosts Claiming Women Govern Better: 'Bitchy' and 'Hysteria' Are Female Traits

 

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House Approves Legislation To End Shutdown, Reopen Government

CNN.com:

The House of Representatives late Wednesday night passed a Senate-brokered bill to fully reopen the government and raise the federal government's debt ceiling.

Weeks of bitter stalemate gave way to a frenetic few hours of legislative action Wednesday to address the federal government's latest budgetary crisis -- an episode marked by rare bipartisanship, but also the very real prospect of more fights to come.

The relatively rapid movement, by congressional standards, came on the 16th day of the partial government shutdown and one day before the Treasury Department had warned the nation could run out of money to pay its bills unless it raises its borrowing limit.

If legislation brokered by Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate gets to his desk, President Barack Obama has vowed to get things back up and running as soon as possible.

"I will sign it immediately," the President said. "We'll begin reopening our government immediately."

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Frequent MSNBC Guest Roger Simon Wishes Death on Ted Cruz, Accuses Him of Waging a 'War Against Babies'

NewsBusters.org:

In his Monday column Politico's Roger Simon unleashed an anti-GOP rant where he accused the Republican Party of letting "racism out of the closet," accused it of waging "a war against babies" and wished death on two of its leaders Ted Cruz and John Boehner.

In his column headlined "Government shutdown unleashes racism" Simon wasted no time in attacking Republicans by putting his twist on old anti-lawyer joke: "Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved? Answer: America." Simon then went on to accuse Cruz of "making a war against babies," as seen in the following excerpt:

Harsh? Look around you at what is happening to America and you will see harsh. I am not talking about closed parks and monuments. I am talking about the funds cut to nearly 9 million mothers and young children for food, breastfeeding support and infant formula.

That is harsh. Making a war against babies is harsh. And for what? Because Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, has grown so drunk on the sound of his own voice and so besotted with illusions of his own grandeur that he believes halting government today will propel him into the White House tomorrow?

After railing against the GOP's "Kamikaze Caucus", Simon then used one Confederate Flag waving protestor to paint an entire movement as racist:

This weekend, racism came out of the closet. (Which assumes it has ever been in the closet.)Protesters marched through the streets of Washington on Sunday with a Confederate flag and then a protester lounged against the White House fence with one. Displaying the Confederate flag in front of a home occupied by a black family was meant to send a particular, and particularly repellent, message.

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Peter King’s Lonely Fight vs. ‘Ted Cruz Wing’

Politico.com:

If Peter King’s brand of Republicanism seems to be on the wane these days, the Long Island congressman isn’t letting it go quietly.

King, 69, has long been one of the Hill’s most quotable and irascible troublemakers, a frequent presence on cable television with an apparently boundless capacity for outrage. He has fumed over topics as serious as Hurricane Sandy relief and aid for Sept. 11 responders, and as comparatively trivial as the White House party crashers and the death of Michael Jackson (whom he called a “lowlife” and a “pervert.”) King broke with Newt Gingrich over the government shutdowns of the mid-1990s and earned the gratitude of the Clinton clan when he rebuked his own party for impeaching a president for sexual indiscretions.

So while it’s not a surprise that King would be one of the Republican Party’s most prominent internal critics these days, even the congressman’s friends say there’s a new intensity and urgency to the lawmaker’s indignation.

King has thundered away in recent months against what he calls the “Ted Cruz wing” of the Republican Party, criticizing the GOP’s libertarian drift on issues such as domestic surveillance and assailing what he views as the utter pointlessness of the House’s effort to defund Obamacare at the cost of a government shutdown. He has floated the idea of a 2016 presidential campaign largely out of opposition to the tea party crowd.

His frustration, friends say, reflects a deepening conviction that Republicans have lost touch with the working-class, middle-of-the-road voters who sent King to Congress in the first place, and who used to make Republican candidates for the Senate and the presidency competitive in downstate New York.

For a veteran pol like King, the plain reality is, there has never been a lonelier time on the Hill to be a blue-collar Republican from Nassau County. When he tried to trigger a revolt against the shutdown this week, only one moderate-leaning Republican – Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent – joined the effort.

Speaking to POLITICO in his Capitol Hill office, King rejected the notion that he, rather than the great majority of his colleagues who have supported the shutdown, is out of step with the national Republican electorate.

“I don’t consider these guys conservatives. I think the party is going in an isolationist trend. It’s appealing to the lowest common denominator in many ways. And this whole threat of defunding the government, to me, is not conservative at all,” said King, who added later: “Maybe we do live in different worlds. These guys from the Ted Cruz wing live in their own echo chamber.”

The vast cultural gulf that separates King from many of his Republican colleagues is evident from a quick glance around the walls of his office. In a heavily Southern-inflected GOP conference, King is an Irish policeman’s son; he is surely the only member with photos of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca on his wall, and a piece of the destroyed Secret Service office at 7 World Trade Center on his desk.

Yet King insists he is not the outlier in the Republican-held House. On the contrary, he argues, his district has a mix of voters that more closely approximates a winning national electorate than those of most of his GOP colleagues.

“It basically would be right-of-center Republicans and Reagan Democrats, people who belong to building trade unions, cops, firefighters, middle-class families who are fighting to get ahead, but also realize that life isn’t that simple,” King said. “There’s a big building trade constituency in Ohio and Pennsylvania, for instance. I think a blue-collar conservative could carry Pennsylvania for president, could carry Ohio, for instance, but we alienate those groups.”

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Politiks As Usual: In The News 10/7/13

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MSNBC Finds Its Bogeyman In Ted Cruz

Mediaite.com:

As you may have heard, MSNBC has struggled since the 2012 election. 

Rachel Maddow‘s audience down almost 50 percent in the past year. 

Chris Hayes dragging down the entire primetime lineup after inheriting the 8:00 PM weekday slot. 

Ed Schultz redefining the word nomad (four different time slots in two years). 

The Cycle‘s revolving door of hosts due to the loss of half of the original cast of four. 

But the primary reason MSNBC had been leaning backward instead of forward was due to the loss of… Mitt Romney. To them, he was the perfect picture of evil for producers and anchors at the network to present to its progressive audience: old, white, rich, Republican, and racist (the last term apparently applies to anyone who isn’t a Democrat). With Romney, the 21st Century version of Gordon Gekko, they had their sitting duck, the caricature they needed to fuel a 24/7 network based on (mostly) one-sided opinion. 

Of course, the only way to continue the Romney portrayal was for the Republican nominee to get elected. That didn’t happen–not even close—resulting in MSNBC losing its biggest asset. And for the first eight months of this year, Phil Griffin‘s ship was a rudderless one thanks to big breaking news after big breaking news story (with a big trial thrown in). It all started in the spring with the Boston bombings and Oklahoma tornadoes, extended into the summer with the Zimmerman trial and Syria, and culminated in September with the Navy Yard shooting. 

Political opinion took a back seat. The network urgently required a political war and/or a sinister conservative to breathe life back into the prompter. 

Continue to blame Bush? Please. Even he wasn’t cooperating by the showing the same class his father has in keeping his mouth shut and only having nice things to say about the Obama Administration when saying anything at all. 

Boehner? C’mon…the tan jokes can only go so far. 

Enter Ted Cruz, Republican Senator from Texas. 

We all know the story from there: Cruz leads a fight from the Hannity/Levin/Palin wing of the GOP to defund Obamacare. “Establishment” Republicans from political and media circles (from John McCain to Peter King to Karl Rove) fight back, creating a juicy civil war that has allowed the aforementioned Maddow to get her smirk back. 

Cruz then takes it even further, performing a 21-hour filibuster-that-wasn’t-technically-a-filibuster that curiously made almost everyone’s head explode both on Capitol Hill and newsrooms across the country. Given the outrage, you would think the guy was the Majority Leader and hadn’t passed a budget in four years or something… 

Anyway, the now-2016 GOP frontrunner has since been compared to Hitler by Chris Matthews. Ed Schultz says Republicans like Cruz who oppose funding Obamacare do so because of racism. Of course, that means the 68 percent of Americans who hoped the Supreme Court would strike down all or part of President’s health care law (New York Times/CBS poll) back in May are also racist. And what about those pesky unions Schultz has become the unofficial spokesman for? Even they want no part of the new law. White hoods for all! 

Not too long ago, MSNBC may have finally lost George W. Bush after squeezing every last bit of material from a President who left office nearly five years ago. 

In November, they lost Mitt Romney. 

John Boehner has always been, to quote Dr. Evil in Austin Powers 2, The Spy Who Shagged Me, “like the Diet Coke of evil: Just one calorie, not evil enough.”

Minus a Presidential election, the network needed a savior. 

Not Keith Olbermann…he’s back on ESPN. 

Not Jon Stewart…he’s under contract until 2015. 

Not Barack Obama…he already feels soooo 2012. 

But thanks to the man leading the effort to defund Obamacare, Christmas has come early to 30 Rock. 

Putting the network on Cruz control. 

For a little while, anyway…

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Senator Ted Cruz On Defunding Obamacare

 

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Democrat Official Allan Brauer Wishes ‘Debilitating, Painful, Incurable Diseases,’ on Kids of Ted Cruz Advisor

Mediaite.com:

Allan Brauer, the elected communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County, California, is not a fan of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). When speechwriter and advisor to Cruz, Amanda Carpenter, took to Twitter to rally Republicans in the Senate to support a bill which would defund the Affordable Care Act, Brauer expressed his frustration with this sentiment in no uncertain terms. 

“May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases,” Brauer wrote. 

This sentiment ignited a firestorm on Twitter and many attacked Brauer for the inappropriateness of his comment. 

Rather than retract or apologize, Brauer proceeded to justify his actions in a subsequent tweet. 

Other organizations have highlighted Brauer’s propensity for making incendiary statements and using offensive language on Twitter to attack his political adversaries in the past. 

On Friday, the House passed a resolution to fund the government which would defund “Obamacare” by 230-189 votes. The bill will now head to the Senate where it is not expected to pass in its present form. 

UPDATE: After a number of tweets attacking the individuals who lashed out at Brauer for his offensive language, the Sacramento County Democratic official issued an apology to Carpenter. 

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Politiks As Usual: In The News 7/15/13

 

DOJ Examining Evidence For Possible Investigation Into Zimmerman Civil Rights Violations

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Politiks As Usual: In The News 4/22/13

 

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