Puterbac News Network and Political Discussion Thread

[Professor Tiger]

Bravo! I see you got my "kryptonite" reference. I love that movie. I tried to find that "was it everything I ever dreamed of?" scene. Nice to see it in the trailer. Thanks.

[bluetick]

It's Ted Cruz's big day, so I offer this Cruz bio from Jeffrey Toobin. If you like Cruz you'll like this article; if you think the guy is a joke this piece will change your mind.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ ... solutist-2

[Jungle Rat]

Anyone else craving Tacos for lunch?

[Johnette's Daddy]

It's Ted Cruz's big day, so I offer this Cruz bio from Jeffrey Toobin. If you like Cruz you'll like this article; if you think the guy is a joke this piece will change your mind.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ ... solutist-2

I never thought he was a joke . . . I think he's a criminally insane megalomaniac, a la The Joker or Lex Luthor. A smarter version of Hitler.

[Toemeesleather]

I would think Hitler would be more likely to have a secret/undisclosed email account, and then lie about it. He'd probably also claim victory where he was defeated and had an ambassador killed.

[hedge]

You know, the more I hear about this Hitler fellow, the less I care for him...

[bluetick]

I would think Hitler would be more likely to have a secret/undisclosed email account, and then lie about it. He'd probably also claim victory where he was defeated and had an ambassador killed.

Ya do know he also used The Joker and Lex Luthor in his examples of megalomania, right? Why is it always Hitler that gets you rwnjs so riled up?

(Btw The Joker, Hitler, and Lex Luthor to a man would have texted in all caps and would have demanded world-wide attention to all their emails. Clue: they were megalomaniacs)

[Johnette's Daddy]

I would think Hitler would be more likely to have a secret/undisclosed email account, and then lie about it. He'd probably also claim victory where he was defeated and had an ambassador killed.

Ya do know he also used The Joker and Lex Luthor in his examples of megalomania, right? Why is it always Hitler that gets you rwnjs so riled up?

(Btw The Joker, Hitler, and Lex Luthor to a man would have texted in all caps and would have demanded world-wide attention to all their emails. Clue: they were megalomaniacs)

Ted Cruz sends texts in ALL CAPS.

The Truth Behind Ted Cruz’s Lies

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -lies.html

The junior senator from Texas is running for president. Here’s why his lies matter.
Oh happy day—freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz is set to announce that he’s running for president. And he’s not going to announce at the Alamo or any other defiant Texas-type monument. He’s making a pilgrimage straight to the birthplace of the Moral Majority, the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. The setting makes sense for a man who believes that God has called him to politics. After all, the only way to top shutting down the government is to try to run the government into the ground himself.

This month, Cruz released a short video that’s the best evidence yet for what a Cruz presidential campaign might be like. It’s called “A Time for Truth,” and the title has to be intentional irony.

Cruz’s Politifact track record for publicly-asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they’ve looked at. The only other leading contender with a higher rating is Ben Carson, who has a 100 percent “pants on fire” history, the result mainly of his brief time in the national spotlight and only having given Politifact one assertion to check—that people choose to be gay. (The investigative process on verifying that claim could have been entertaining, had Carson taken up Dan Savage’s invitation to take a very personal version of the Pepsi Challenge. Politifact chose a less experiential approach.)

It’s not just Cruz’s habit of embellishment that makes the video’s title more wish-fulfillment than description. One would expect a video entitled “A Time for Truth” to contain, you know, truth. Or calls to speak the truth, at the very least. Cruz’s infomercial, on the other hand, is simply a collection of Cruz clips wherein he apparently confuses speaking the truth with speaking very dramatically and forcefully. It is the Ugly American approach to foreign language in moral form.

Watch as Cruz loudly proclaims he will stand up for various things! He also asks for others to stand up for things! It’s a tic in the vernacular of the evangelical subculture Cruz hails from to think of extravagantly passionate sincerity as evidence of honesty and probity. So perhaps Cruz’s substitution of one for the other is not an intentional bait-and-switch.

Let’s indulge a thought experiment: What if, in all those cases where Cruz’s passionate sincerity has been found to be trustworthy, he meant what he said at the time?

We take it for granted that politicians lie to gain votes, to make themselves more appealing, or to make someone else look bad. But what if Cruz wasn’t craven, but instead as sincere as he sounds. What would that mean?

There are objective falsehoods that show Cruz could just be looking at a different set of data. Other, more telling whoppers show that Cruz isn’t just looking at different data, he’s living in a different universe.

The former category contains his insistence that there’s no such thing as global warming. The latter kind of lie is why Cruz can look a child in the eye and tell her the world is on fire.

Multiple news organizations have found fault with this standard refrain from his stump speech: “There are 110,000 agents at the IRS. We need to put a padlock on that building and take every one of those 110,000 agents and put them on our southern border.” There are not 110,000 agents at the IRS. There aren’t even that many employees. There are about 82,000, of whom about 14,000 are agents.

But that’s just a fact-check of the first sentence; what about the underlying notion that there’s some kind of equivalence between what accountants do and the kind of peacekeeping one might need at the border?

The most generous interpretation might be that Cruz thinks we’re not keeping track of our immigrants; more paperwork is in order. (True enough!) The spookier option is that he thinks IRS agents are as militarized as your local police force, and they would be the group to finally wrest “100 percent operational control” (an Orwellian-sounding metric Cruz often invokes but never explains) in the region.

Cruz’s fantasy life, understandably, gets warmer and fuzzier closer to home. Take his version of the aw-shucks, I-don’t-deserve-her, backhandedly condescending marital anecdote that male candidates are required to have. It casts his decision to run for Senate as a moment of unexpected validation:

He recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”

“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million—“which is all we had saved,” he added—into his campaign.

Heidi Cruz herself recalls the conversation differently. There was no movie-friendly smash cut “absolutely,” or even assent. Rather, she told Politico, she “wanted him to raise money from elsewhere first, to show that the support was out there.” And even then, “She proposed that they not put their own cash into the campaign unless it made the difference between winning and losing.” That’s sort of the opposite of an instantaneous absolutely: a hesitant and conditional maybe.

Maybe Ted’s version is just the kind of face-saving white lie we tell ourselves to preserve harmony in a relationship. After all, it’s easier and healthier than nursing a grudge. Or, in Cruz’s mind, a hesitant and conditional maybe, if it relates to something he wants bad enough, is enthusiastic agreement.

This is delusion would explain almost everything Ted Cruz does.

That would explain Cruz’s misguided belief that a wide swath of Americans want to repeal Obamacare. It would explain his quixotic crusade against the country’s growing support for marriage equality. It would make sense, even, of his run for the presidency.

Cruz, after all, is a “top-tier” candidate mostly in terms of name recognition. While he’s an extremely popular speaker at base-flaming events such as CPAC (where he finished third in the easily gamed Straw Poll), wider swaths of GOP voters are not as kind. Even among the notoriously conservative Republican Iowa caucus-goers he’s in single digits. In the even narrower category of self-identified Iowa Tea Partiers, he has only 10 percent of the vote, trailing Ben Carson (11 percent), Rand Paul (15 percent) and flavor of the month Scott Walker (33 percent).

To be fair, most politicians who run for president have some strain of the megalomania that seems to infect Cruz. Almost every politician who runs for president needs to have that curious mental twist, an ego like a funhouse mirror. Otherwise, no one except those already likely to win would run. Ask some liberal Democrats how they feel about that scenario.

But the most successful politicians seem to leaven self-importance with data. Obama’s 2008 victory over the inevitable Hillary Clinton is often painted in terms of pure marketing, but it was number-crunching that made the difference in the nitty-gritty days of the final states. Bill Clinton often looks like an example of sentiment prevailing over smarts, but his career’s lows reflect the times when he didn’t turn off the charm.

Tell the truth, Ted Cruz says. Just don’t try to get him to be honest with himself.

[Jungle Rat]

Zzzzzzzzzzz.......

[Jungle Rat]

Nobody here has the attention span to read all that. C'mon!

[10ac]

EFZ

(all caps)

[Professor Tiger]

Run Rand Run!

[Bush will get nominated, but a guy can dream.]

[Professor Tiger]

PS: That should have been...

RUN RAND RUN!

(all caps)

[Toemeesleather]

These two serious, careful scientists — geophysicist Maurice Ewing, director of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, and geologist-meteorologist William Donn believe they have finally found the explanation for the giant glaciers, which four times during the past million years have advanced and retreated over the earth. If they are right, the world is now heading into another Ice Age....

..Ewing and Donn realized that their theory had startling implications for the future. They have the scientist’s distaste for the sensational and carefully worked out the wording of the theory’s formal conclusion: “The recent epoch can be considered as another interglacial stage.” A number of scientists have tried to disprove their theory; so far they have been unsuccessful.

As Ewing and Donn read the glacial thermostat, the present interglacial stage is well advanced; the earth is now heading into another Ice Age. Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate we may have been watching an Ice Age approach for some time without realizing what we were seeing....

...According to our theory, with the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, the rise in sea level will stop,” Ewing and Donn explained. Instead of adding water to the sea, the glaciers will begin taking it out.

For a long time after the ocean flood subsides, the only effect the Ice Age will have on us down here will be more rain. The new Arctic moisture that falls as snow on the glaciers will increase both rain and snow here, swelling rivers and watering deserts. Then, gradually, our weather will cool. Icy winds will blow from the advancing glaciers; the great snows will fall farther and farther south. In several thousand years a two-mile ice sheet may cover the United States and Europe. If man finds no way to switch the glacial thermostat, there may well be a real estate boom in the Sahara.


http://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the- ... ice-age/1/

[Professor Tiger]

Obama traded a known deserter for five top Taliban commanders.

That is the kind of lopsided nuke deal we can expect him to make with Iran.

[bluetick]

Obama traded a known deserter for five top Taliban commanders.

Meh. Probably the only 5 Taliban to ever fly in a commercial jet. They won't be coming to the Mall of America.

[10ac]

Obama traded a known deserter for five top Taliban commanders.

That is the kind of lopsided nuke deal we can expect him to make with Iran.

One wonders why he would do such a thing. Even for one who "served with honor and distinction".

[bluetick]

I guess oprama took advice from America's most famous living ex-POW.

"Now this idea for an exchange of prisoners for our American fighting man. I would be inclined to support such a thing depending on a lot of the details."
- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), interview with Anderson Cooper/CNN 2/14/2014

[sardis]

That's a ringing endorsement, there, I tell ya.

And your use of "oprama" in relation to our commander in chief is very offensive...

[bluetick]

And your use of "oprama" in relation to our commander in chief is very offensive...

Sorry sardis, your post got cut off...right before you identify the offended party. heh

historical footnote: as a Hillary '08 supporter, I took up the use of oprama (oprah + Obama = oprama) which was in vogue at the time, and never put it aside