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Author: Fuzzy Slippers

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Fuzzy Slippers

I am a constitutional conservative, a writer, and an editor.

Follow me on Twitter @fuzislippers

Last week,  Quinnipiac reported poll results for Iowa that showed Ted Cruz surging to 23%, only 2 points behind Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported:
A new Quinnipiac University poll of likely Republican caucus goers showed Mr. Cruz with 23%, behind only New York real estate developer Donald Trump, with 25%. That is more than double Mr. Cruz’s showing of 10% in the university’s October poll. Mr. Trump gained five points from October.
Today, Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, tweeted the following: https://twitter.com/RichLowry/status/673236631231533056 More Twitter responses:

As we are learning more about the radical Islamic terrorists responsible for 14 deaths in San Bernadino, California, the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are wasting no time in pushing for more gun control. The media started clamoring for gun control before the buildings were even cleared, and Obama was quick to leap onto his soapbox and stammer on about the need for gun control. Watch: Note the new language here: "gun safety laws."  We'll be hearing this again, I'm sure.

Judicial Watch has obtained new emails (available here) that reveal a bit more about Hillary Clinton's time at State than we knew before (or than she probably wants revealed). Judicial Watch reports:
Judicial Watch today released a new batch of emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton connected to the Benghazi attack. Included is an email chain showing that Clinton slept late the Saturday after the Benghazi attack and missed a meeting that her staff had been trying to set up about sensitive intelligence issues, including the Presidential Daily Brief, on a day she was to make a slew of phone calls to foreign leaders.
There was also an interesting detail in an email concerning Bowe Bergdahl's father's concern over "Crusader paradigm."
The documents contain an email passed to Clinton in the days following the Benghazi attack in which the father of alleged Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl anguishes over the “‘Crusade’ paradigm” which he says “will never be forgotten in this part of the world.”
You may remember Mr. Bergdahl from Obama's over-the-top, tin-eared, and inappropriate Rose Garden ceremony announcing the exchange of Bowe Bergdahl, who has since been charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, for five top Taliban leaders.

Whether he's engaging in effective dialog with Canadian actresses or American radicals, defending religious liberty, calling out climate change hysterics, taking on the progressive media, challenging GOP leadership, or playfully pushing back against Obama's gun control agenda, Ted Cruz has a way of tackling, head on and without fear, issues that either trip up other Republicans or that they avoid like the plague. This week, Cruz countered the Democrat accusation that the GOP is engaged in a "war on women" by asserting that the GOP is not "the condom police." CNN reports:
Iowans at a town hall waded into awkward territory on Monday evening as Ted Cruz tackled a question on contraceptives.

Jeb's campaign has, by almost all accounts, been a disappointment to donors, to GOP primary voters, to Jeb's campaign team, and to pretty much everyone who cared in the first place. Despite this, he continues to talk as if he is the front runner he never really was and hope that at some point others will believe it, too.  Part of this strategy appears to be relying on the questionable claim that this election cycle mirrors that of 2012. According to the Herald-Tribune, Jeb claims that the current front runners will fall . . . just as Herman Cain did in the 2012 cycle.  They report:
Jeb Bush cited the rise and fall of 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain as he sought to reassure supporters at a Longboat Key fundraiser Monday that their faith in him is well placed. By noting that Cain led in the polls at this point in 2012 only to flame out, Bush implied that current GOP front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson could follow the same path.

For many years, progressives and assorted leftists have been threatening (and pursuing) law suits against schools, cities and towns, and cemeteries and memorials in an attempt to remove all evidence of religious faith from the public sphere. The result has been a series of knee-jerk reactions by scared administrators who've preemptively banned prayer at senior centers or who've barricaded a mall Santa in a "glacier display."  The list is long (and silly, note the ban on the colors red and green). The right has been slow to respond, but there are groups who are fighting fire with fire.  According to the Cap Times, a local publication in Madison, Wisconsin, a school has canceled the reading of a transgender book to elementary school students.  This decision was taken after the Liberty Counsel weighed in and threatened to take action.

Florida representative Alan Grayson has a reputation for being a little "out there." When he's not making bizarre claims about GOP health care plans, calling female lobbyists "K Street whores," or running blatantly false and manipulated ads, Grayson apparently likes to muse about against whom he can take legal action. Watch: The latest target of Grayson's special brand of crazy is Ted Cruz.  According to Mediaite, Grayson is promising to file suit against Cruz should he (Cruz) be elected president.
Florida Congressman Alan Grayson told radio host Alan Colmes Wednesday that if Ted Cruz is elected president, he “will file that beautiful lawsuit saying that he’s unqualified for the job” according to the Constitution. Cruz was born in Canada to a native-born American mother, making the presidential candidate a dual Canadian-American citizen. It was not until a 2013 Dallas Morning News article that Cruz acknowledged his Canadian citizenry publicly. In 2014, the senator renounced his Canadian citizenship altogether.
Apparently Grayson believes that anyone who is born to an American parent while in a foreign country is not an American by birth.  Or something.

Between reports that representatives from major networks (CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, and CBS) gathered together to discuss how to take down Trump and John Kasich's bizarre ad, Trump seems to have more people poised to work against him than with him. The Hill reports that the GOP is in a "panic" over Trump and are finally taking his campaign seriously enough to call him "the clear front-runner" and to wonder how to derail it. So far, GOP strategists and pundits on both sides have been predicting that Trump's success will be short-lived, that it's just like the last presidential election in which each candidate had his or her 15 minutes of fame . . . only to crash, burn, and drop out in a matter of weeks. That, however, is not the case with Trump thus far; the Hill continues:
“The media has twisted and turned through a number of different positions where they tried to explain that it was just a fad — the summer of Trump,” said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa. “Well, it’s lasted all fall. There is a realization that you are not going to wake up tomorrow and he’s going to vanish.”

Art Laffer, famed member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, has co-authored, with Stephen Moore, an article for Investor's Business Daily in which they assert that Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have the "best" tax proposals. They begin with a bit of a warning to those serious about tax reform:
All the GOP tax plans look good to us — though some are admittedly better than others. The danger now is that too many conservatives have formed a circular firing squad and are shooting down nearly all proposals on purity grounds or attacking trivial differences. This is the surest way to derail tax reform altogether. If Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley had held to such a "my way or the highway" approach, the epic 1986 tax reform that collapsed tax rates to 15% and 28% never would have happened.
That said, Laffer and Moore continue by narrowing their focus to Rand and Cruz:
Which brings us to Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. The two of us helped craft their low-rate flat tax plans. The plans are similar: Paul's rates are 14.5% on business net sales and wages and salaries. Cruz has a 16% business net sales tax and a 10% wage and salary tax.

An Arizona state senator has jumped off the Democrat bandwagon and joined the Republican party. https://twitter.com/RaquelABC15/status/668858904877514752 Citing the values of self-determination and self-empowerment, Carlyle Begay announced his decision earlier this week. The Arizona Republic reports:
Carlyle Begay, a Democrat who was often viewed as the state Senate's 18th Republican, officially joined the GOP Monday. The announcement, attended by a bevy of Republican elected officials, surprised no one and makes no substantive change to the power dynamics in the Arizona Legislature.

As Ted Cruz's campaign gains momentum and as Obama continues to be more aggressive in his critique of Republicans than of ISIS, Cruz challenged Obama this week over comments made overseas regarding the Paris attacks, ISIS, and the Syrian refugee crisis. Politico reports:
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday said that if President Barack Obama wants to be critical of his rhetoric, he should "come back and insult me to my face." Obama has been critical of Cruz's proposal for handling the Syrian refugee crisis, which includes allowing in Syrian Christians, but not Syrian Muslims. The president earlier this week called that approach "shameful," adding, "we don't have religious tests to our compassion." "Mr. President, if you want to insult me, you can do it overseas, you can do it in Turkey, you can do it in foreign countries, but I would encourage you, Mr. President, come back and insult me to my face," Cruz told reporters Wednesday morning, looking directly into the cameras. "Let's have a debate on Syrian refugees right now. We can do it anywhere you want. I'd prefer it in the United States and not overseas where you're making the insults. It's easy to toss a cheap insult when no one can respond, but let's have a debate."

In the wake of rising costs for health insurance in the ObamaCare market, consumers are simply opting out, and this is taking its toll on ObamaCare's viability not only for consumers but for health insurers.  So much so that United Health, one of the nation's largest health insurers, acknowledged this week that it is considering leaving the ObamaCare market. Watch: The Obama administration responded by "quietly" promising to bail out health insurers in yet another attempt to save his clearly ineffective and flailing signature law.  The debate centers, once again, on the so-called "risk corridors" built into ObamaCare.

In light of the terror attack in Paris and (presumably) Obama's weak performance against ISIS and bizarrely petulant performance in Turkey, terrorism now rivals the economy as the single most important issue to American voters. ABCNews reports:
Terrorism suddenly rivals the economy as the single most important issue to Americans in the 2016 presidential election -- and a year out, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds more people paying close attention to the contest than at this point in any race back to 1988. After years of dominating the political landscape, the economy now has company. Given the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, 28 percent of Americans now call terrorism the top issue in their choice for president, compared with 33 percent who cite the economy. Nothing else comes close. Attention, moreover, is focused as never before. Three-quarters of Americans say they are closely following the 2016 race, including three in 10 who are following it very closely. That’s the highest level of attention at this point in a presidential race in polls back nearly 30 years.
According to this report:  "Partisan divisions are 33-23-36 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents."

As the Republican presidential primary heats up, illegal immigration is again taking center stage.  While this is nothing new (as we know President Reagan attempted to address it in the '80s, John McCain made it a priority in '08, and on), the discussion has taken an interesting turn this election cycle. At issue, of course, are Obama's executive amnesty, the recent influx of illegal immigrants (including huge numbers of children), the vast number of illegals currently living and working in the U.S., border security (such as it is), and a host of related issues including the burden of illegal immigration on tax payers in terms of jobs, health care, schooling, police and judicial involvement, and various entitlement costs. Marco Rubio's involvement with the Gang of Eight, particularly his decision to work closely with Chuck Schumer, has not gone unnoticed by either the conservative base nor by the other presidential hopefuls.

As ObamaCare co-ops close and people lose ObamaCare subsidies while getting hit with sky-rocketing premiums, the New York Times has noticed that the deductibles associated with ObamaCare make the plans useless to many people. The NYT reports:

Obama administration officials, urging people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, have trumpeted the low premiums available on the law’s new marketplaces.

But for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.

“The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.”

As France and the world begins to get a clearer picture of yesterday's coordinated set of terrorist attacks in Paris, ISIS has claimed responsibility, and French president Francois Hollande has iterated his statement that ISIS is indeed responsible and has made clear that he wants to lead a swift and "merciless" response. USA Today reports on President Hollande's statement:
Speaking after the security meeting, Hollande said Friday's attacks were "committed by a terrorist army, the Islamic State group, a jihadist army, against France, against the values that we defend everywhere in the world, against what we are: A free country that means something to the whole planet.”
CNN reports on the ISIS statement issued today:

ISIS claimed responsibility for gunfire and blasts that targeted six sites Friday night in Paris, killing 128 people in one of Europe's deadliest massacres in recent years.

In an online statement distributed by supporters Saturday, the terror group said eight militants wearing explosive belts and armed with machine guns attacked precisely selected areas in the French capital.

In addition to the people killed, 180 others were injured, according to the Paris Police Prefecture. More than half of them are in critical condition.

Among those wounded are an as yet unconfirmed number of Americans.  Also from CNN:

One of the primary obstacles to repealing the failure that is ObamaCare has been the extremely successful framing of the debate by progressives on both sides of the aisle.  The question they posit and that derails any and all attempts to rid the American people of the ObamaCare albatross that is disproportionately strangling the poor and the middle class in myriad ways is:  What will you replace it with? This is a false choice.  No one called for a replacement of the 18th Amendment that made Prohibition not just the law of the land but a part of the U. S. Constitution.  ObamaCare is bad law.  You don't "replace" bad law, you get rid of it. Framing the argument as "repeal and replace" implies "if not ObamaCare then what other behemoth federal monstrosity should take its place?" and as such is a clever maneuver by ObamaCare defenders because it effectively posits that there are only two options:  ObamaCare or something just like it, i.e. another federally-mandated and -controlled health insurance system that does everything that is popular about ObamaCare and nothing that is controversial or unpopular about it.

We're all familiar with the annual attempts to clamp down on Christmas.  Be it schools banning Christmas songs, Obama's VA banning Christmas carols and cards for veterans, schools removing Christmas from calendars, or outrage and fainting vapors over the mere of sight of a Christmas tree, we expect this barrage of intolerant insanity each year. This year, it seems, will be no different.  A mall in Long Island, worried about offending people with the sight of Santa, decided to set up a glacier display and barricade Santa within it. The New York Post reports:
A Long Island mall swapped Santa’s sleigh for something resembling a spaceship and nixed the Christmas tree because it didn’t want to “offend” anyone, irate shoppers told The Post.