Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Ted Cruz Tag

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 16, 2016 79 Comments
Following the GOP debate, Professor Jacobson noted that it looks like a two person race between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, and not only is this view becoming a consensus but apparently Trump thinks so, too. Trump has taken to Twitter to rant and rave against Cruz. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/688327093214662657

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 15, 2016 183 Comments
The exchange between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on "NY values" was one of the highlights of last night's debate. While Cruz clearly was referring to liberalism, he used a phrase that left him open to Trump's counterattack invoking 9/11: The media is thrilled with Trump's response. Of course, much of that media is in or from NY City. I expressed last night that I wasn't sure that the issue would play in Trump's favor outside NY. I was born in NYC, spent my early childhood there, grew up in and returned to the NYC suburbs after law school until moving to Rhode Island in 1993. And since 2008 have lived (originally part time now full time) in Ithaca. I understand what Cruz was referring to. And it has nothing to do with knocking the heroism of NY police and firemen, or how New Yorkers reacted under attack. It has everything to do with political, economic and social outlooks which are not accepted in the Republican Party in general much less among conservatives. The Cruz campaign apparently thinks this is a fight it needs to have, via Washington Examiner:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 14, 2016 137 Comments

Big Picture

Tonight's GOP debate was Ted Cruz's night. He went right after Donald Trump multiple times, but in a way that came across as forceful and informed, but not nasty. He also fended off a pretty vigorous attack from Marco Rubio. His strongest points came early and against Trump, when the audience would be the largest. Trump was runner-up. He had a good moment on Cruz's slam on "NY Values," but I'm not sure how defending NY values plays outside NY. His performance will confirm pre-existing views of him. Rubio had an okay night, not great, not horrible. Maneuvered the immigration issue into one of national security -- in other words Gang of 8 was then, this is now. Landed some punches on Cruz at the end. Christie may have raised his profile as the acceptable establishment candidate, as Jeb again failed to impress, and Kasich was Kasich. At least Christie showed some fight. Biggest loser -- Ben Carson. Didn't seem to be in the game at many levels.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 13, 2016 78 Comments
It must be old campaign oppo dump day in America. Earlier today, an old, deceptively edited campaign ad from Marco Rubio's Senate run floated to the surface of the internet. This evening, the New York Times thinks they have a hot scoop with a story about Ted Cruz's Goldman Sachs loans. The New York Times is about four years late to the "exclusive" party though. Cruz's Goldman Sachs loans are old news. According to their 2012 personal filings, the Cruz's took loans from both Goldman Sachs and Citibank. His wife, Heidi Cruz, works for Goldman Sachs, but is currently on leave. These loans were not, however, disclosed in the FEC filings for Cruz's campaign, Ted Cruz for Senate Committee. First, the NYT story:

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 13, 2016 20 Comments
Shortly after Obama's state of the union address last night, Ted Cruz appeared on the Kelly File and mercilessly lambasted the president for omitting recent developments in Iran as well as terror attacks like the one in San Bernardino. The FOX News Insider reports:
'State of Denial': Ted Cruz Bashes Obama's State of the Union Address President Obama's final State of the Union address was more like "a state of denial," Ted Cruz said on "The Kelly File" tonight. The Republican presidential contender told Megyn Kelly that he's not surprised that the president didn't mention ten U.S. sailors held by Iran during his speech.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 11, 2016 10 Comments
Just before the end of 2015, Ben Carson's campaign manager along with 20 staffers quit. Less than two weeks later, all New Hampshire paid staffers for a pro-Carson PAC, 2016 Committee, quit and left to volunteer for Ted Cruz. WMUR reports:
All five paid New Hampshire staffers at the pro-Ben Carson 2016 Committee super PAC quit their posts on Sunday to become volunteers for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, WMUR.com has learned. Jerry Sickles of Keene, the spokesman for the staff, said he and the other four staffers recently came to the conclusion that Cruz is the conservative most able to win the GOP presidential nomination and the presidency. He also noted that Carson has spent very little time campaigning in New Hampshire, which became frustrating to him and the other staffers as they tried to build support in the state.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 11, 2016 99 Comments
Back in November, Donald Trump asserted that if elected president he would have a "humane deportation force" to round up all illegal immigrants and deport them.  This statement is now being used in interviews with other presidential candidates who are opposed to amnesty and want to close the border and enforce existing immigration law. For example, in a Sunday interview, CNN's Jake Tapper harangued Ted Cruz on Trump's concept of a "deportation force." Watch:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 05, 2016 15 Comments
Ted Cruz's video ad, Invasion, is getting a lot of attention for the scenes of suits running across the border. But it's not the key moment in the video. That key moment comes when the screen splits to view Marco Rubio next to Cruz, with a cotton-mouth expression on his face as Cruz slams the economic impact of illegal immigration: Marco Rubio Ted Cruz Invasion Video

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 04, 2016 48 Comments
Two Republican presidential candidates have spoken out against the Oregon standoff: Senators Cruz and Rubio. Aleister blogged about the precarious Oregon situation yesterday:
Protesters have taken over a small federal building in Oregon and some of them are armed. One of them is Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy who was in the news last year for clashing with federal authorities over land use. The reason for the protest seems to be two-fold. The situation which set off the protest was the prosecution of a pair of father and son ranchers named Hammond. The Hammonds are not part of the protest however and are expected to surrender themselves to authorities Monday for separate charges. The second aspect of the protest is a grievance over the federal government taking over land that used to be owned by ranchers.
In an interview on Iowa radio station KBUR Monday, Sen. Rubio acknowledged the federal government has too much control over land in the western half of the country, but urged protestors to seek a lawful remedy:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 01, 2016 8 Comments
Back in April, the Ted Cruz campaign had a fundraiser in which one could win an afternoon "shooting with Ted," so on the one hand, it's not surprising that when a "Netflix and chill" fundraiser went out people believed it. In other ways, however, because of the meaning of that phrase; it is surprising . . . simply because the Cruz campaign has been pretty savvy thus far about not making such cultural and social media faux pas. https://twitter.com/A_Garcia1990/status/681595388718133248/photo/1 And they didn't this time--the entire thing turned out to be a Photoshopped hoax.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 29, 2015 20 Comments
One of the things that I find amusing about the Democrats' war on the Koch brothers is the fact that it seems to be based more in projection than in fact.  George Soros is notoriously behind and/or involved in a slew of progressive initiatives, websites, and assorted pot stirrings. It's usually a good idea to know what the opposition is thinking, so it's worth taking a look at the article he penned for The Guardian entitled "The terrorists and demagogues want us to be scared. We mustn't give in."   In it, Soros claims that terrorists have discovered that western, "open" societies have a key weakness that can be exploited:  a fear of death. Note how he singles out France's response to the Paris attacks as being particularly "irrational" (as we'll see, he's quite happy with America's president's non-response to terrorism.):
Open societies are always endangered. This is especially true of America and Europe today, as a result of the terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere, and the way that America and Europe, particularly France, have reacted to them.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 23, 2015 38 Comments
Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes drew a cartoon showing Ted Cruz's children as monkeys dancing to his tune. The pretext was that the children appeared in a campaign ad. As if this is the first time children have appeared in a political context. There was a firestorm of controversy, and the cartoon was pulled: I have mixed feelings about the controversy. On the one hand, I'm against the culture of outrage that pervades campuses and increasingly the media. But I also understand why lines need to be drawn for candidates, particularly as to minor children.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 23, 2015 11 Comments
Whether it's an Overton Window effect, an example of Boyd's “OODA Loop," or something else, Ted Cruz is enjoying a surge in both state and national polls. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Cruz is now only four points behind the current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump. CNN reports:
Donald Trump's lead over Ted Cruz has shrunk to just 4 percentage points in the second national poll after last week's Republican debate. Trump wins 28% support in a Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday, with Cruz nipping at his heels with 24%. Following that pair is Marco Rubio with 12% support, Ben Carson with 10%, Chris Christie with 6% and Jeb Bush with 4%. The survey was in the field entirely after CNN's debate in Las Vegas on Dec. 15. Cruz has been steadily climbing and overtaking Trump in Iowa, and there is some evidence that the Texas senator is managing to perform similarly nationally.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 21, 2015 13 Comments
There's been quite a bit of drama surrounding the Marco Rubio - Ted Cruz exchange on immigration during the CNN debate and the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight immigration bill. Bret Baier's interview with Cruz following the CNN debate skirmish allowed Cruz to explain his rationale for proposing an amendment (one of several) that, had it been approved—and Cruz knew it would not be, would have legalized millions of illegals. When Cruz explains his "poison pill" amendment, it becomes clear that he was being not only smart but also quite savvy (and ultimately, and all that matters to me, successful in quashing the Rubio-Schumer amnesty bill). The amendment that Rubio is touting is an amendment that included the stipulation that no illegal immigrant would ever get citizenship.  Under any circumstances.  Cruz obviously knew that Rubio and the other Gang of Eight members would never agree to such a proposition when a path to citizenship was a key driver in their bill.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 19, 2015 9 Comments
One of the many things I like about Ted Cruz is his sense of humor, and his campaign's latest ad, set to air tonight in Iowa during Saturday Night Live, exemplifies this beautifully. The Blaze reports:
The ad, which features the Texas senator read Christmas classics like “Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer” and “The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails,” will air in key Iowa markets Saturday night, campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told the Independent Journal. “In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, we are excited to bring a Cruz family Christmas into the homes of SNL viewers in Iowa,” she told the website. “Ted is a long time fan of SNL, so the chance to film his own SNL-style commercial was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up!”
Watch:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 14, 2015 25 Comments
I noted the other night that Donald Trump may have opened the "Overton Window" for Ted Cruz, by making Cruz acceptable to both Republican establishment types and general election voters who otherwise would have considered him Cruz conservative. I noted the fear of a liberal who wrote:
Donald Trump looks like the warm-up act. Whoever follows him from the Republican party looks reasonable (and sane) by comparison.
How will the mainstream media react if Cruz's current poll surge holds and he looks like a viable challenger to Trump? We know the answer, because there's a history here, one I documented back in August 2013. And ironically, it's a theme Trump appears to be taking up in a recent attack on Cruz. I called it the crazying of Ted Cruz, focusing on a Daily Beast article trying to portray Cruz as "creepy":
A lifetime of achievement that would normally be heralded by liberals if achieved by a liberal Hispanic, devolves into creepiness on the slimmest of pretexts. This is all part of the crazying of Ted Cruz by liberal publications like the Daily Beast. It doesn’t matter what the substance is, they just want to associate the word “creepy” with Ted Cruz in the minds of the public, many of whom don’t read past the headline.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 13, 2015 8 Comments
While in Paris last month, Obama was petulant and dismissive in criticizing Republicans who "pop off" about his nearly imperceptible ISIS strategy. He said, "if folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan. If they think that somehow their advisers are better than my chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. " Setting aside the fact that Obama is not listening to his own advisors on the subject of ISIS and even required that intel about ISIS be modified to meet the WH narrative, this is a rhetorical strategy that has worked for him in other cases such as ObamaCare.  It's so effective for him that many Americans actually believe that Republicans have offered no ideas for health care reform should ObamaCare be repealed or simply collapse.  Obama hopes that the same thing will happen regarding ISIS, but so far at least, that does not seem to be the case. Instead, not only is the press pushing Obama on ISIS in the wake first of Paris and then—though less so—after the San Bernardino terror attack, but Republicans do have plans for defeating ISIS.  One such plan was released this week by Ted Cruz.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 12, 2015 44 Comments
I noticed this Facebook comment on the page of a local Ithaca liberal Democrat, on a post criticizing Donald Trump:
Donald Trump looks like the warm-up act. Whoever follows him from the Republican party looks reasonable (and sane) by comparison.
The commenter didn't use the term, but she was describing how Trump has moved The Overton Window. The Overton Window has been described as follows:
The Overton window is a political theory that refers to the range (or window) of policies that the public will accept. The idea is that any policy falling outside the Overton window is out of step with public opinion and the current political climate, and formulated to try and shift the Overton window in a different direction, or to expand it to be wider.
Has Trump moved the Overton Window? That's a theory advanced the other day by David French at National Review (h/t Instapundit):
Accessibility by WAH