Friday Shakedown

Dan Bidondi, an Infowars "reporter," went to Massachusetts and didn't plan on running into opposition like this.  An unnamed resident engaged him on Infowars' crazy conspiracy theories.

(NSFW)

I wish more people would confront wackos like this in this way.  It's just like the Westboro Baptist Church.  They do not respond to reason, reason, or facts, and they contribute nothing to the debate.  Having an argument with them is not a good use of your time.  You will walk away from the encounter feeling more frustrated than you were at the start and they will walk away thinking they've won.  The only thing they respond to is ridicule.  

North Carolina is trying to make it harder for students to vote.  Shocking, I know.  The bill, which was sponsored by six Republican Senators, would force the parents of out-of-state students to pay higher taxes if they claim their child as a dependent and the student is registered to vote in their college district.  If you are a student, you should be able to vote for the district that directly represents you where you live.  When I was a student at Ohio State, I petitioned the congresswoman for Ohio District 15, which was where the school sat.  For the time I was attending and living there, I considered her my voice in Congress.  I should have been able to vote in that district if there had been an election while I was there.  Speaking of Ohio... They're trying to do a similar thing there.  This is just another example Republicans trying to suppress the vote and change the rules of the game.  Instead of having a message that appeals to a majority of the country, or people in their districts, they try to keep opponents from voting.  That isn't how democracy is supposed to work.

In other news, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, famous for being one of the most hated members of the Senate on both the Left and Right, floated the notion of a presidential run.  This move was promptly met with laughter all around.

The NRA has a new president and he's possibly more to the right than the last one.  At a speech in New York, he referred to the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression."  There is so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to start.  The historian in my head is speechless at the moment.  

Maybe more along the lines of the Civil War tomorrow...

McCarthy Reincarnate

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has been in the news lately because of his opposition to Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense.  Now he is in the news for different reasons.

The New Yorker discovered a past for Cruz that reminds us of a dark period in American politics, where guilt-by-association ruined many careers.

The author of the piece was actually in attendance of the speech Cruz gave to Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers group.  And she wrote down his comments.

From The New Yorker:

Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)

He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

While I'm sure that he believes in what he is saying, he most certainly was playing the room.  The Koch brothers group, Americans for Prosperity, operates in a fantasy land.  They and groups like them attack a President Obama that does not exist, which in my opinion makes it that much harder to combat.

Notice how, like Joe McCarthy sixty years ago, he didn't name names.  Joe McCarthy set up hearings to find out which members of the government and the entertainment industry were members of the Communist Party.  He used many dirty tricks including faked documents and doctored photographs.  Senator Cruz does no know if any members of the Harvard faculty are members of the Communist Party but it doesn't matter if he does.  He says he does and tries to link it to the President and that stirs the Right into a frenzy.  He should really find something better to occupy his time with than trying to link the President to imagined communists.