Last Call For The Cruz Con Game

The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy has Sen. Ted Cruz down cold:  his idiotic showboating and fake filibuster did nothing to stop Obamacare, but it sure helped him raise a lot of money from Obama-hating Tea Party suckers and lining the pockets of the one percenters using the movement to destroy what little wealth they don't already own.

The biggest actors so far in Defund, Inc. have been Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, the leadership PAC that Jim DeMint launched as a senator and handed off to his former staff members to run as a conservative super PAC. While Cruz led the defund fight in the Senate this summer, the SCF led a huge parallel fight on the outside,setting up a website, running radio and television ads, robocalls and a direct mail campaign, all designed to raise money from still-hot conservative activists and urge them to sign a petition to tell Congress not to fund the health-care bill when they greenlight funding for the rest of the government.

Starring in the ads, the robocalls, and the direct-mail campaign were Cruz and Lee, two former Supreme Court clerks turned underdog Senate candidates turned conservative Senate firebrands. As Cruz and Lee staged a filibuster-like marathon speech session Tuesday into Wednesday, the SCF streamed them on its website. But while Lee’s brand of fire is like a light you’d offer a friend looking for a smoke, Cruz’s heat has been pure napalm, much of it focused at his own Republican colleagues in the Senate. It’s made Cruz easily the most hated man in the Senate, but a figure quite beloved by Tea Party purists who want nothing more than to support a senator who is willing to mix it up in a scrum, even—or maybe especially—with his fellow Republicans.

And he doesn't care, because he knows the game:  if America despises Congress, and Congress despises Ted Cruz, he's the ultimate Senate maverick.

Fast forward one year and Cruz has become a superstar for the conservative movement that the Senate Conservatives Fund is looking to harness.  Thanks to Cruz’s star power, they’re doing it.  As Cruz and Lee’s multimedia campaign blanketed the country, the month of August, typically a snooze for D.C.-based fundraisers, yielded the SCF’s largest nonelection year fundraising month to date, at $1.5 million. 

Most importantly, the SCF now has in its possession a massive email list of potential like-minded donors, thanks to the 1.5 million people who signed the defund petition on the Don’tFundObamaCare website.  While "a list" may just be a roster in some circles, in the parlance of power and politics, a list is nothing less than a warchest-in-waiting for the SCF to use on behalf of its allies and against its enemies in the 2014 mid-term elections and the 2016 presidential race.  It also makes the SCF the most relevant, and possibly the most powerful, conservative group in the country, including the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. 

If anyone is still confused after the Obamacare funding fight (faux filibuster and all), Ted Cruz is now a 2016 contender and the SCF’s biggest ally. Its enemies are many of the men and women he shares a cloakroom with—any Republican senator who did not join in. 

It's the ultimate pogrom to cleanse the GOP of anyone who isn't willing to destroy the 99% in the name of the Masters of the Universe.  These clowns are primarying their own Senators, anyone who might cooperate with Obama for any reason, in order to obliterate them from politics.  The GOP Senate isn't as insane as the GOP House, and they're looking to fix that.

The con is on, and the con men are winning.

Not Even I Buy This, Alison

I'm not sure what Alison Lundergan Grimes is thinking in her lates line of attack against Mitch the Turtle, but not even I buy her argument that Obama administration EPA regulations are somehow McConnell's fault.

Alison Lundergan Grimes has tried to blame U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell for the Obama administration’s tough new environmental regulations on greenhouse gas emissions at new coal-fired power plants. 

“We are tired of Senator McConnell’s Washington, out-of-touch regulations,” Grimes told a group of Democrats in Owensboro last weekend, according to a video on Time-Warner’s CN2 cable channel website. 

“On his watch, since 1985, we have lost more coal jobs than the industry can account for,” Grimes said.

This is a nonsense attack coming from McConnell's right when his primary challenger Matt Bevin blames the guy for coal regs, but for Grimes to make the argument is not only disingenuous, it's stupid.  Running away from President Obama isn't going to make Democrats in the state vote for her.

Whoever's running Team Grimes needs to get their head on straight.  Even environmentalists here are laughing at her claims.

Environmental activists, who oppose McConnell on many environmental issues, say that Grimes has it wrong.

“That’s a laughable accusation,” said Sarah Lynn Cunningham, an environmental engineer and activist in Louisville. Cunningham said she couldn’t think of one time when McConnell has sided with the environment over the coal industry.

Furthermore, Cunningham said the courts have tied McConnell’s hands when it comes to restraining the EPA on the issue of climate change and greenhouse gases. 

“I can’t believe that she doesn’t know the Supreme Court has twice issued major rulings saying the EPA should be regulating greenhouse gases per the (federal) Clean Air Act,” said Cunningham, a Democrat. “Mitch McConnell has one hell of a lot of power in Washington, but the Supreme Court, they’re the big boys.”

Grimes better figure out a smarter position on coal regs in Kentucky than "They're Mitch's fault."  It's insultingly stupid to the people who would want to vote for her.

Profiles In Courage, Marco Rubio Edition

Sen. Marco Rubio, his immigration push and 2016 chances imploding in real time due to the GOP's Tea Party meltdown, has decided he'll do anything to appease the "We hate those people" crowd that now owns the Republican party, including revoking his support of a federal judge he signed off on ten months ago.

The nomination of a gay black Miami judge to the federal bench will not move forward after Senator Marco Rubio announced he was withdrawing his support over concerns about the judge’s actions in two criminal cases.

Without Mr. Rubio’s approval, Judge William Thomas’s nomination to the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, in Miami, is effectively blocked. Judge Thomas, who serves on the Miami-Dade Circuit, was nominated by President Obama, with Mr. Rubio’s backing, more than 10 months ago.

Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, signed off on the nomination on July 24 after a background check raised no red flags. For a confirmation to proceed, nominees must secure the approval of both United States senators in their home state.

So Judge Thomas's nomination is all but dead.  Rubio can't flip-flop again, or he's completely out of the 2016 picture.  Even the Times calls him out for such rank hypocrisy and cowardice.

Supporters of Judge Thomas, who grew up on welfare in Pennsylvania in a family of 10 children, said Mr. Rubio’s opposition was rooted in politics, not court rulings. Mr. Rubio, a Republican, has seen his allure among conservatives tumble, a result of his aggressive push for immigration reform. In recent weeks, he has scarcely mentioned immigration, keeping his focus mostly on issues with broad conservative appeal like abortion and health care. 

Had he been confirmed by the United States Senate, Judge Thomas would have become the first black openly gay man on the federal bench. 

“As much as I would like to think that politics has nothing to do with this, it looks as if it does,” said Yolanda Strader, president of Miami’s largest association for black lawyers, who called Judge Thomas one of the hardest working on the bench. “It would be unfair to prevent a well-qualified judicial nominee from proceeding with the nomination process because he is an openly gay black male.”

Which wasn't a problem until the Tea Party found out.  Then it became a problem.  That's what Republicans do, talk a good game about "inclusiveness" and "big tent politics" and when it comes to delivering, they turn into hateful, spiteful bigots.  Anyone who trusts a Republican to not be a bigot, well.

Any questions about where the "savior" of the GOP's loyalties really lie?

StupidiNews!

• Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz continues to speak on the Senate floor about defunding Obamacare, but is expected to decisively lose a Senate vote to defund it later today.
• Brazil's Federal district has become the first regional government in South America to ban the sale of toy guns in an attempt to "change the culture of violence".
• Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has declared the deadly siege of Nairobi's Westgate Mall over, with 11 terrorists captured and three floors of the mall partially collapsed.
• After taking an 8-1 lead in America's Cup sailing races, Emirates Team New Zealand is on the verge of an epic collapse as Oracle Team USA has tied the series to force a decisive final race today.
• New York will create road signs letting drivers know that rest stops are designated texting zones in order to get people to comply with the state's laws against texting while driving.