COMMENTS:
* Trump and Cruz. Man, that's like having to choose between Leopold and Loeb.
* I totally believe Flint needs help and fast. For once though, it would be nice if the one who broke it (the governor) had to pay for it. He will tout that $400m as good governance and crafty savings, not as a symbol of his failures. The feds need to bleed every dime from that SOB and then send the rest pronto.
* What lies at the heart of both the theocrat and the fascist is his deep yearning for authoritarianism. Naturally he believes himself to be the only one deserving of the authority. Trump is almost certainly less dangerous than Cruz the True Believer (tm). Both are terrifying, both are contemptible. Both will devolve a national election against HRC into bile soaked hatefest that will make the treatment of Obama over the past 8 years seem tame. Cherish our democracy indeed.
* The Dominionists who masquerade as Teabaggers -- who in turn control the Republican Party -- don't care about the economic ruin they are inflicting on the states they control. That's why they keep re-electing the Brownbacks, Walkers, Jindals, ad nauseum, despite the fiscal-disasters-by-policy occurring in plain sight. The subjects of concern to rational citizens, the long-term practical issues of economic growth, shared prosperity, public health and safety, international stability, the environment, etc., are not relevant in today's fundamentalist-dominated Republican Party. What matters to the Dominionists are "When will Jesus return?" and "How can we make it happen more quickly?" By their logic, putting Ted Cruz in the White House -- with his Godly government and his Godly finger on the nuclear trigger -- will hurry that process along. After all, Cruz has been raised from childhood with the idea that he shall rule as a king over the ungodly, as according to Dominionist dogma.
* "Don't Let Trump's Antics Distract You From Cruz's Unwavering Extremist Agenda" Don't worry, Charlie. I think about the two of them constantly, and it's ruining my life.
* Cruz is by far the worst of the terrible, terrible lot. Trump would certainly be preferable to him. Cruz would all but eliminate the government when it comes to protecting the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for the vast majority of US citizens. The government would get much, much bigger when it comes to bombing brown people in distant (and maybe not-so-distant) lands, imprisoning people, and in determining what individual citizens can and can't do with their genitalia. And this list almost certainly just scratches the surface of cruelties, both prodigious and petty, which Cruz would be able to inflict on this country, and this planet.
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Don't Let Trump's Antics Distract You From Cruz's Unwavering Extremist Agenda
One is theater. The other is terrifyingly real.
By Charles P. Pierce, March 6, 2016
This is something that He, Trump said on Saturday night. I mention it because I think it marks a severe downturn in He, Trump's campaign. He prospered as a vulgar talking yam. Then, he became the most boring person on earth—the endless bore in the clubhouse bar who talks you through his entire round.
"I hit a ball 280 yards. Stand up! Do I hit good? Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong? I simply held up the hands. They're fairly large, actually."First of all, I don't believe He, Trump can hit it 280 without a howitzer in his bag, unless of course he's playing with the late Kim Jong-Il at Prevarication Hills in Pyongyang. (That distance, by the way, would place him no worse than seventh place in the PGA's driving distance standings this year.) But listening to him brag about it on the podium last night reminded me of nothing more that Dan Jenkins's classic rejoinder to some classic example of the type: "Hoss, if I have to go all 18 with you, I'm going to need caddy fees."
In truth, he might just have been a little unnerved. Suddenly, it is obvious that the only real competition he has is Tailgunner Ted Cruz, and that puts He, Trump, a charlatan who only recently became a kind of monster, in a head-to-head brawl with someone who has been raised since birth to be one. Trump is an opportunist who saw a chance and half-ran, half-stumbled toward it. Cruz is someone who's had his eyes on the prize since before Princeton and Harvard Law loosed him upon the world. Trump is a man of grandiose, hopelessly vague promises. Cruz is dead-serious about hauling the country into retrograde theocracy and Gilded Age economics. Trump places his faith in Two Corinthians, which I believe is a pizza and sandwich joint on Staten Island. Cruz considers himself to be both a vehicle for political extremism and the instrument of the living God. You decide which frightens you more.
Here is something about the hotel in which I am staying in this poisoned city. When you make your reservation online, the property makes a point to tell you that the water for the facility comes from the Genesee County water system, so feel free to take a shower without worrying that your nose will fall off, or that, somewhere between the shampoo and the conditioner, your IQ will drop 50 points. Those concerns are for the people who live here, in the Other parts of the city. What has happened here is a perfect bell-jar specimen of the principles of conservative Republican governance that Ted Cruz seeks to bring to the entire nation.
Here in Michigan, the attention paid to the misfeasance and malfeasance of the administration of Governor Rick Snyder is causing even the elite political media to notice that Snyder is hardly an outlier among his fellow Republican governors. They've noticed that the lab rat is dying in Kansas, where Ted Cruz won overwhelmingly among Republican voters on Saturday. They've noticed the catastrophe left behind in Louisiana by former presidential candidate "Bobby" Jindal. They've noticed how far along are the efforts of former presidential candidate Scott Walker to turn Wisconsin into a banana republic. And, if you roll all of these disasters up in a big ball—Sam Brownback's batshit economics in Kansas, Jindal's legacy of corporate sycophancy in Louisiana, Snyder's disinclination to respond to an emergency that does not affect his donor class, and Walker's greed for political power—you get the platform of presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who would like you to know that he welcomes all of their support.
All you need for confirmation of this is to look at what happened in Washington at the end of this week. A proposal for federal aid to the embattled citizens of Flint came before the Senate. This was a bipartisan effort, with Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan being joined in the effort by, of all people, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. Alas, they did not reckon with Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from the state of Utah. Lee refused unanimous consent on the measure, effectively jamming it up.
"Michigan has an enormous budget surplus this year and a large rainy-day fund," Lee said. "Relief and repair efforts are already in the works. The people and policymakers of Michigan right now have all the government resources they need to fix the problem. … The only thing Congress is contributing to the Flint recovery is political grandstanding."In addition to demonstrating that Lee is very close to being a completely unfeeling bastard, this statement is a clear and unequivocal declaration of faith in the kind of devolution of federal responsibilities to the states in which both Cruz and Lee believe—an example of pure and undistilled Tentherism. This is the Articles of Confederation in action. Both men believe that the proper role of the federal government is to defer to the authority of people like Snyder, Jindal, Brownback, and Walker, and the pet legislatures that enabled them. (And that's not even to mention that, since the Flint story broke, Snyder has had the local government jumping through hoops.) Ted Cruz imbibed this faith early in life and he has never wavered in his fealty to it. It is important at this point to mention that Mike Lee is perhaps the only friend Ted Cruz has made since being elected to the Senate. However, Lee backed Cruz's futile government shutdown and saw his polling back home fall into a ravine. This probably accounts for why Lee hasn't yet formally endorsed his running buddy.
On Sunday night, the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates will debate in this broken and wounded place. They will do so in the shadow of a Republican campaign that has come down to a choice between a bizarre political freak show with overtones of Mussolini and a cool, calculated attempt to turn American government back into the kind of fearsome Darwinian experiment in laissez-faire neglect that has failed time and again through history. That is what has come out of Saturday's results, and there is nothing funny about it.
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