Last Call For Moon Cruz

Sen. Ted Cruz is a joke, frankly.  But he's also a dangerous fanatic who will demagogue anything the Democrats do as the end of America.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) drew audible gasps Thursday when he told gathering of Christian conservatives that Democrats intended to amend the Constitution to limit free speech.

“When you think it can’t get any worse, it does,” Cruz warned at the Watchmen on the Wall gathering of pastors sponsored by the Family Research Council.

“This year, I’m sorry to tell you, the United States Senate is going to be voting on a constitutional amendment to repeal the First Amendment,” Cruz said, to the audible shock of the crowd.

What horrible bill could this possibly be?

The Tea Party-backed senator said Senate Democrats intend to vote this year on Senate Joint Resolution 19, which would effectively undo the unpopular U.S. Supreme Court decisions on campaign financing in the Citizens United and McCutcheon cases.

You mean the SCOTUS decisions that effectively allow plutocracy in America?  Why, those aren't dangerous at all!  But try to get the rich out of buying our elections, and well, you're repealing the First Amendment.

“I am telling you, I am not making this up,” Cruz said. “Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has announced the Senate Democrats are scheduling a vote on a constitutional amendment to give Congress the authority to regulate political speech, because elected officials have decided they don’t like it when the citizenry has the temerity to criticize what they’ve done.”

“They don’t like it when pastors in their community stand up and speak the truth,” he added.

And so Ted Cruz enlists the pastors in his war, because clearly our Founding Fathers meant the people with the most money to have the most influence on our election system.

Laugh all you want to at Cruz.  He's dangerous as hell.

No, Both Sides Don't Do It

President Obama took on the Villagers Thursday night at a fundraiser and tore into the "both sides do it" nonsense that somehow it's not the GOP blocking every piece of legislation that's causing nothing to come out of Washington.

“You’ll hear if you watch the nightly news or you read the newspapers that, well, there’s gridlock, Congress is broken, approval ratings for Congress are terrible. And there’s a tendency to say, a plague on both your houses. But the truth of the matter is that the problem in Congress is very specific. We have a group of folks in the Republican Party who have taken over who are so ideologically rigid, who are so committed to an economic theory that says if folks at the top do very well then everybody else is somehow going to do well; who deny the science of climate change; who don’t think making investments in early childhood education makes sense; who have repeatedly blocked raising a minimum wage so if you work full-time in this country you’re not living in poverty; who scoff at the notion that we might have a problem with women not getting paid for doing the same work that men are doing.

“They, so far, at least, have refused to budge on bipartisan legislation to fix our immigration system, despite the fact that every economist who’s looked at it says it’s going to improve our economy, cut our deficits, help spawn entrepreneurship, and alleviate great pain from millions of families all across the country.

“So the problem…is not that the Democrats are overly ideological — because the truth of the matter is, is that the Democrats in Congress have consistently been willing to compromise and reach out to the other side."

Why would Republicans want to work with Democrats to make America better when their entire base runs on hatred, anger, and fear?

“So when you hear a false equivalence that somehow, well, Congress is just broken, it’s not true. What’s broken right now is a Republican Party that repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people.”

Of course President Obama understands this.  Instinctively, Americans do too. A perfect example of this is the Warren Terrah and the Authorization of Use of Military Force declaration Congress made in 2001 for the war we've now been fighting for 13 years.  Both the AUMF and the terrorist detention facility at Gitmo remain ugly symbols of our permanent war, and they remain there because of Republicans.

You might want to keep in mind that Republicans keep passing bills specifically designed to prevent President Obama from being able to do things like close Gitmo.  That's why it's still open.  Period.

With An Iron Fist In A Velvet Minority Outreach Program

Keep up the good work chasing the votes of African-Americans like myself, Republicans like Newt Gingrich!

OH. BOY. @GingrichIdeas RT @BuzzFeedAndrew: @CNN pic.twitter.com/qqLyNaQjVl /
— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) May 23, 2014

For the life of me, I just can't imagine why Republicans don't get 90% of the black vote.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Officials in Portland are asking nearly 700,000 residents to boil tap water due to fears of E coli bacteria in the water supply.
• Pope Francis arrives in Jordan today for the start of his Middle East trip that will include both Israel and the Palestinian territories.
• The US has suspended aid to Thailand after this week's military coup in Bangkok as the Thai army has removed and detained PM Yingluck Shinawatra.
• The S&P 500 Index closed at a record high, above the 1,900 mark for the first time as a jump in new home purchases in April rallied the markets.
• Hewlett-Packard will be cutting 16,000 more jobs in 2014, raising total cost-cutting measures this year to 50,000 layoffs.