;)
The Commentariat -- Oct. 7, 2013
Justin Sink of the Hill: "President Obama dared Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Monday to prove there aren't enough votes in the House to pass a 'clean' bill to reopen the government. 'The House should hold that vote today,' Obama said during a visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Monday. 'If Republicans and Speaker Boehner are saying there are not enough votes, they should prove it.'" Thanks to James S. for the link:
Speaker Boehner has a credibility problem. From refusing to let the House vote on a bill that was his idea in the first place, to decrying health care subsidies for members of Congress and staff that he worked for months to preserve, to stating that the House doesn't have the votes to pass a clean C.R. at current spending levels, there is now a consistent pattern of Speaker Boehner saying things that fly in the face of the facts or stand at odds with his past actions. -- Adam Jentleson, spokesman for Harry Reid
... The above is from the New York Times, which is liveblogging developments. ...
... NEW. Ken Cirilli of Politico: "The Obama administration would be open to a bill that boosts the debt ceiling for a few weeks, a top White House official said on Monday... National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling said that how much to raise the debt ceiling is up to Congress and that the administration would prefer a longer term solution." ...
... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said the nation would default on its debt later this month if President Obama does not agree to GOP's demands to cut spending and change parts of the Affordable Care Act. Appearing on ABC's This Week on Sunday, Boehner agreed that the risks of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be 'catastrophic,' leading credit markets to freeze, the dollar to lose its value, and interest rates to skyrocket." For those of you who can stomach it, here's the full interview. Stephanopoulos, for once, did a fairly good job (within the limits of his capabilities -- he let Boehner get away with claiming several times that often in the past, "debt limits have been used to force big policy changes," an assertion that is untrue). It's quite a spectacle:
... The transcript of the interview is here. ...
... Greg Sargent: "A lot of folks have been willing to accept Boehner's demand for 'negotiations' at face value. But let's be clear on what he is really asking for here. Boehner is actually ruling out any negotiations in which Republicans don’t enjoy the leverage that the threat of a massive economic meltdown confers upon them. And he's also saying Republicans will make no concessions of their own in them." CW: This concept is very, very hard for the Village People, not to mention ordinary people, to understand. Boehner is counting on that; indeed, he may not understand it himself. After years of using this tactic, he may think extortion & negotiation are synonymous. ...
... Justin Sink of the Hill: "The White House on Sunday challenged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to prove his assertion in an ABC News interview that "there are not the votes in the House" to pass a "clean" continuing resolution. 'If he's right, why not prove it?" White House press secretary Jay Carney asked on Twitter."
... CW: Twitter? C'mon. President Obama must address the nation from the Oval Office about this Constitutional crisis. Treating Congressional sabotage like a political game played out on TV talk shows & Twitter trivializes the seriousness of the situation & demeans the President's efforts to preserve Constitutional norms. ...
... Bob Scheiffer practices journalism, & Ted Cruz's fellow Texas Senator, John Cornyn (R), can't respond with anything but his assigned talking points. Via Jack Beauchamp of Think Progress:
... Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: "[Saturday], 200 Members of the House Democratic Caucus, led by Congressmen Timothy H. Bishop and Patrick Murphy, sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner demanding a vote on behalf of the American people on the Senate-passed continuing resolution, which would reopen government and end the detrimental, five day long Republican Government Shutdown. The letter, which is signed by 195 voting Members and 5 non-voting delegates, makes clear that there is a bipartisan majority to pass this bill and reopen government now." ...
... Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "Combine those 195 Democrats with the 22 House Republicans who have signaled support for a clean resolution, and you get 217 members, which is a bare majority of the chamber's 432 members." ...
... AND/BUT. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the leading critic of the Ted Cruz Plan, told Chris Wallace of Fox "News" Sunday that "he would not join Democrats to bring up a clean continuing resolution on the House floor for a vote." Too bad. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...
... CW: I didn't realize how bare the bare majority is. Remove Peter King & Co. & it isn't a majority at all. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think much of Boehner's belligerent interview was a coded cry for help from the Not-So-Crazies. He wants that discharge petition. ...
... AP: "Maryland's Rep. Steny Hoyer, [the House Minority Whip,] says he believes 140 to 160 of the 232 House Republicans 'think what's being done right now is irrational.' Hoyer tells MSNBC Monday these lawmakers are 'looking over their shoulders' at potential tea party challenges." ...
It is a concession, I acknowledge that. -- Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), speaking of the continuing resolution Democrats have agreed to pass
... Vicki Needham of the Hill: Shadow House Speaker "Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sunday said changes to President Obama's signature healthcare law should be tied to a debt ceiling increase." ...
... Tom Hamburger & Matea Gold of the Washington Post: "The growing unhappiness among longtime GOP check-writers and party elders underscores the deepening divisions over the ascendant tea party wing, which fueled this past week's shutdown and is demanding Democratic concessions in exchange for reopening the government and raising the nation's debt limit.... The frustration was evident this past week not just at [an American] Crossroads conference but also throughout the party's high-end donor class. While grass-roots activists cheer the unyielding positions of conservative House Republicans, some of the GOP’s top fundraisers are watching the situation with growing dismay.... It is too early to tell whether the discontent will seriously hamper fundraising for party committees and independent groups such as Crossroads. Some top GOP fundraisers said they think donors upset with the strategy will still write checks in the end." ...
... ** MAG & others recommend this excellent piece by Jonathan Chait, published Friday: "To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends." Read the whole thing; he has a lot more to say about the inherent flaw in our Constitutional form of government. ...
... Paul Campos, in Lawyers, Guns & Money, likes Chait's parenthetical observation, "Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance." ...
... CW: What Chait fails to mention is the third branch of government -- the courts. Would that we had a responsible, pragmatic Supreme Court instead of one that springs from & enables the radical fringe, the President, I believe, could declare a Constitutional crisis & open up the government for business again under a fiscally conservative resolution as well as raise the debt ceiling. ...
... OR, as James S. suggests, the FBI could just cuff the Congressional teabaggers. As the Greek government has done to its far-right party, the DOJ could charge the RTPs with being part of a criminal organization. And, please, could we see Ted Cruz doing the perp walk? (Not serious here, of course, but it's a lovely thought.) ...
... ** Paul Krugman: "Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they're also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence -- reigns supreme.... Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy -- we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news -- was bound to infect political strategy, too." CW: this is an expansion of a Krugman blogpost I linked the other day. Today's column is well-worth a read even if you read the post. ...
... Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post provides a perfect example of the kind of "balanced" reporting. Krugman derides. ...
... AND an unnamed House Republican backs up Krugman's assertion that House leaders have no idea what they're doing. Byron York of the Washington Examiner reports: "What became clear after an hour of discussion was that the House Republican leadership's position at the moment is the result of happenstance, blundering, and a continuing inability to understand the priorities of both GOP and Democratic colleagues." ...
... E. J. Dionne: "We now know that the tea party is primarily about postures aimed at undercutting sensible governance and premised on the delusion that Obama's election victories were meaningless. Its leaders abandon these postures as soon as their adversaries stand strong and the poll-testers report their approach is failing. This will give pause to anyone ever again tempted to follow them into a cul-de-sac." CW: I think Dionne's report of the death of the Tea Party is premature, & I don't see how the Tea Party's destructive agenda is the breaking news Dionne suggests it is, but his column is worth a read, if only for his evisceration of Li'l Randy. ...
... Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker: "If Obama refuses to back down, this could be a moment that will define his legacy -- a fight for democracy as much as for Democrats." ...
... ** Apocalypse Soon. Yalman Onaran of Bloomberg, in a straight news report: "A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen. Failure by the world's largest borrower to pay its debt -- unprecedented in modern history -- will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse." ...
... This Apocalypse Brought to You Live! by Fox "News." Jonathan Bernstein in Salon: "What all these [disparate Republican] talking points had in common ... is that they were eagerly snarfed up by the folks at Fox News and other parts of the Republican-aligned press. The truth is that Republicans can pretty much say whatever they want, no matter what the bizarre logic and no matter what connection it has to what they were saying five minutes ago, and Fox News will totally accept it and blast it for hours or days. The result? Republicans have become incredibly lazy. After all, why bother constructing a coherent argument if you don't need one.... It's easy for Republican politicians to fall deep within an information feedback loop, not even realizing that what everyone within that loop is excited about is unpopular, or perhaps just irrelevant, to the other 80 percent or so of the nation. Or to put it another way: Benghazi!" Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...
... Brian Beutler of Salon highlights the incoherence of the GOP "strategy": "The GOP’s current position ... boils down to to the laughable idea that nothing's more important than reopening federal monuments, funding clinical trials, and spending money on veterans services for two weeks, until we breach the debt limit and they have to be shut down again." CW: Beutler seems gobsmacked that Republicans don't know what they're doing, but Bernstein (above) provides a pretty good explanation of why they're so "clueless," as Beutler writes. Also thanks to Jeanne B.
Adam Liptak of the New York Times weighs in on the Supreme Court's consequential new term, which begins today. ...
... Justice Antonin Scalia weighs in on everything. Don't have time to read it, but I'm sure the interview, by Jennifer Senior for New York magazine, is full of stuff to make you want to rend your garments or something. ...
... NEW. The HuffPost factchecks Scalia. ...
... Robert Barnes of the Washington Post begins & ends his magazine piece on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a discussion of her fondness for opera (and how a good production of a sad operatic story makes her cry). CW: Well, she's a girl; what do you expect? No mention of her "mean beef stroganoff" of course because, as Barnes points out, Ginsburg can't cook. We hear from Scalia here, too. Nice touch.
Dr. Feelgood Runs FDA Painkiller Safety Tests. Peter Whorisky of the Washington Post: "A scientific panel that shaped the federal government's policy for testing the safety and effectiveness of painkillers was funded by major pharmaceutical companies that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to affect the thinking of the Food and Drug Administration. E-mails show that the companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend any given meeting of the panel, which had been set up by two academics to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials.... FDA officials who regulate painkillers sat on the steering committee of the panel, which met in private, and co-wrote papers with employees of pharmaceutical companies." CW: Reminds me of self-certified opthamologist Dr. Randy.
Senatorial Race
CW: You thought Scott Brown was a disaster? Ha! Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: Cory "Booker's bumpy campaign [for New Jersey's open U.S. Senate seat] and shrinking lead in the polls are all the more unsettling to Democratic Party officials because [GOP nominee Steve] Lonegan is a political anomaly in the blue-hued state: a Tea Party conservative who describes himself as a 'radical,' opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, cheers the current shutdown of the federal government and has relied on polarizing right-wing figures like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry as campaign surrogates." Voters who are skeptical of Booker have every reason to be, IMHO, but no reason to vote for Lonegan. The election is next week.
News Ledes
AP: "Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Suedhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries on how hormones, enzymes and other key substances are transported within cells."
AFP: "Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday insisted the capture of an alleged Al-Qaeda operative in Libya in a US raid was legal, after Tripoli demanded answers about the 'kidnap'. Abu Anas al-Libi, who was indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head, was captured on Saturday."
Danbury, Conn., News Times: " Voters turned out Saturday to accept a $49.25 million state appropriation to demolish Sandy Hook Elementary School and design and construct a new school on the Dickinson Drive site. The state money will also fund buying two parcels of adjacent land for a new entrance to the school. The vote was 4,504 yes to 558 no." Via New York.
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Reader Comments (13)
I still hope Obama has the qualities I see in him and he will stick to his stance of not acquiescing to terrorism. However, John Boehner has something fairly powerful working in his favor. The President is seen as a father figure, metaphorically and for many people, more literally. We need not revisit Maureen Dowd's neurotic ramblings, but she's a high profile example. When there is pain and fear, the expectation is the President, acting as the country's father, makes it better. Public voices rarely speak responsibly and the media money juggernaut will foment the situation. Media ratings will come on the backs of stories of the sick, dying and untreated; the hungry; the jobless and a 1000's of other poor souls among us. There have been few consequences for the right's terrorism to date and I am fearful there won't be.
@Diane (et al)-
If there were ever a moment for our President to speak to the people, it is now. He needs to speak about his aggravation--and the pain of the American people--and put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the crazoid Republicans. He can speak as our Father figure, or our Brother--it does not matter. And.....he must speak EVERY DAY! Each day he must remind us what really is going on, and how all of us are being held hostage by the radical GOP. It would be wonderful if he could use 12-step metaphors, but he probably does not know them. It should be a veritable countdown.
The Bully Pulpit is his. He needs to use it. And not by traveling around the country, but by sitting in the oval office with the Tee Vee cameras whirling! I think only Faux News would protest. Oh well!
Long ago, one of my assignments was in the office that administered the VII Corps drug and alcohol program. I soon discovered that te drug abusers were bad, but the alcoholics were worse. You can't reason with them. Everything is someone elses's fault.
An out for Boehner would be too check into the Betty Ford clinic for rehab, but first he has to admit that he has a problem, which seems unlikely.
From the October 6 "Examiner" article linked above: "As the congressman told the story, as August progressed ... the House GOP leadership was mostly unaware of what was going on. "They got surprised a little bit by the Obamacare thing," the lawmaker said. "This was something that blew up in August. Nobody really saw it coming — probably should have a little bit, I'm not being critical of anybody in that regard, on either side of this — but it just happened." "
That congressperson chose to be anonymous, but if s/he is telling the truth, all you have to do, to determine who it is, is find out which (R) congressperson has been in a coma from July-September.
Otherwise you have to guess among about 200+ sociopathic liars and fabulists.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/shutdowns-roots-lie-in-deeply-embedded-divisions-in-americas-politics/2013/10/05/28c0afe2-2cfa-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story.html. Here is a good article by Dan Balz of the WaPo. The thing that jumped out at me is that in the last election Barry O won only 700 of 3000 counties in the US. The rural dwellers didn't vote for Obama uniformly throughout the country.
To me the shutdown polarization has as much to do with the differences between urban and dwellers as anything. Some of this difference, I understand since the skill-set necessary to thrive each place is different. I was reminded of one of the biggest reasons Alaska and Hawaii became states: the vast resources were owned by out of state, non-voting entities which exercised an outsize influence on everything in the state. Economic and political power concentrated in too few absentee hands. Sort of like today. Who owns your local media outlets, or "local" businesses", or "local" politicians? Boner and the Tea baggers totally rely on low information voters who have the attention span of the average tv commercial. And these same voters are unable to connect the dots, especially in a world increasingly set up to make following the dots more and more complicated.
The thing to keep in mind about the rural dwellers is the outsized influence of each individual business. The selected winners in the rural business sweepstakes are the often the biggest funders of the church, the school athletics teams, advertisers in the papers and political people. They toss people the bone of "independence" for the population's otherwise servile lives and incomes.
In urban places you have greater diversification of everything and the ability to find both anonymity and community if your hubris is asocial to the immediate setting. In my town, if you flip someone off while driving or whatever, you will see them again at the the single grocery store in town. Peer pressure politics is alive and well here. Self-reinforcing politics like Faux and right wing Republicans are equally valid to those of us who gather here.
"Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort", NYT Nov. 12 2012 is one article among many about ways to deal with competing ideologies. And just as CW says that Twitter is no way to respond to the current budgetary impasse, I'd say the Obamans are forgetting what in their playbook won the elections in the first place. I would say that having a positive appeal to urban and rural dwellers was initially a big deal with Barry O. The media bombardment on Democrats needs to be counterattacked, now.
As I was "swifting" my hard wood floors this morning I thought of that silly, but memorable ad featuring an elderly couple who discover a box containing these Swifter products on their front stoop. After using this nifty product the wife says to her husband, Morty,–-who by the way lets her be the one who stands on a chair and reaches up to dust those faraway and hard to reach places–––"look at all the dirt that this has captured––we've been living in a fool's paradise." And from that thought I immediately thought of the dirt that has accumulated in our hallowed halls of congress and how, they too, are living in a fool's paradise. A clean sweep of these buggers would be perfect, but I fear there are too many like Morty who let the few try and fight the dirt in those hard to reach places. We need loud voices here, we need Obama out there plugging away... I'm running out of optimism––that little bit that keeps me from becoming really frightened of what might happen. But I'll go back to my cleaning and think up some clever eggcorns––or whistle a happy tune––what else can I do?
@citizen625 Looks like Charlie Pierce read the same Dan Balz article in The Washington Post
"...seems like a good fella, and I generally enjoy his campaign work, but, lawsy me, this is 15 minutes I wasted and will never get back."
Since, Pierce usually doesn't post on Sundays, I'd say this piece provoked his displeasure. Might want to take a look.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Long_Division
Oh, PD, I'm not sure 'Swifting' is an eggcorn. But, I used that word about my handy dandy SwiFFer with my sister-in-law who promptly made fun of me. I responded, "Oh, I have a Swifter, it's faster." Dumb, I know.
But onto the serious stuff...yeah, I'm beginning to feel the same unease as I read, watch and listen to an unsettling undercurrent coming from the WH.
@ citizen625. I usually don't read Dan Balz, as he is a certified practitioner of "both sides do it" "journalism." He learned from the master -- David Broder, RIP -- & he is carrying on the tradition in exemplary fashion -- and teaching the kids -- see Lori Montgomery's piece in today's WashPo, linked above.
This particular Balz piece, which I scanned just now, is a good example. If you were a busy person & this was the only piece about the shutdown you had time to sit down, read & contemplate, you would come away thinking, "Gee, both sides must be at fault because the Congressional districts are more polarized now."
@ MAG: That "unsettling undercurrent" you were feeling eddied into an undertow this morning as Gene Sperling announced the WH would consider a clean short-term debt ceiling increase. Politico story linked above.
Marie
This just in: http://thehill.com/video/administration/326925-obama-to-dare-boehner-to-hold-vote-on-clean-funding-bill
Funny. Daily Kos was pushing this last night.
Oh yeah. And Balz is Broder, only with more hair. I'm sure that's part of the reason WaBezos hired him away from the SactoBee, where he was Chief False Equalizer during Reagan's attempt at privatizing state government.
In addition to the Balzy (or not so ballsy, as the case may be) position of assigning equal blame across the political spectrum (thus sweeping up--or maybe swiffing up--plenty of constitutionally correct Democrats along with teabagging apostates of constitutional government), I notice that Time has jumped aboard the middle of the road express.
This morning I read a headline on their website that refers to the president as "No-Negotiate Obama". Cute, no? No, it's not. It's willfully misleading, wildly inappropriate, and false in every way a stupid statement can be.
But first, since we're in the playoffs, a baseball analogy. You're up at the plate. You get your turn at bat. You whiff like a windmill in a hurricane. You bow your head in shame and head back to sit on the pine, hoping your next at bat won't be quite so humiliating. Except now you play for the Teabag Dirty Thirty. These guys take the idea of "kill the umpire" to new levels. Not only do they contest balls and strikes (a big no-no in baseball--illegal in fact; you can complain all you want, but once the umpire, or the voting public, rules, that's it.), they contest the outcome of games in which the other side, despite all their cheating and appallingly bad sportsmanship, has kicked their asses out of the park. Bu they simply don't believe in rules and so will never accept the judgement of the umpire, the game itself, or the fans. Fuck everyone.
Second, yet another zombie parallel. Any fans of Walking Dead recognize what has happened to the Republican party, the members of which live in deathly fear of being caught and consumed by zombies. In fact, one of the more urgent subtexts of the storyline, and a reason it is watched by many more viewers than those who get off on the gore, is the fascination with an image of a society without rules, shorn of civilizing influences. A pure libertarian society, if you will, in which there is absolutely no reason for anyone to indulge in altruism, although many still hold on to that as a remnant of their former life, their humanity.
But Republicans have long ago jettisoned altruism. Tha shit is for the rubes. It's everyone for themselves, especially those with far-right sugar daddies paying the bills. But now suddenly, in their midst come these teabagging zombies. Here's how the Walking Dead wiki defines zombies:
"A deceased human body that has somehow become reanimated and autonomous, yet no longer has sufficient brain or vital functions to be considered alive or capable of thought."And here's how one of the humans left alive describe these murderous creatures:
"These things ain't sick! They're not people! They're dead! Ain't got to feel nothing for them, 'cause all they do, they kill! These things right here!"
Sounds pretty much like teabaggers, don't it?
But here's the difference. In the world of the Walking Dead, the humans left alive have a far greater reason to adopt the new paradigm wrought from fear of death. They are outnumbered 5,000 to 1.
The GOP is cowering in fear of 30 brainless, slow moving zombies. I know there are plenty more abroad, but only 30 are calling the shots right now. Brainless undead creatures who act only to consume and destroy. No plan. No mind. No interest in rules or the nation, or the Constitution.
This is why E.J. Dionne is wrong. These things will keep coming. You point a 6 foot long piece of rebar at their heads and they won't blink when you drive it through their empty skulls.
As for the Balz's of the media world, they should know that people who drive in the middle of the road get hit from both sides. And when they get hit from the right, a zombie or four might clamber out and eat them.
Yum. Both Sides sushi.
Arrghh...should have been "Balzes".
This weekend, on Prarie Home Companion, Keillor did a piece in which two combatants agree to a duel. But no pistols or swords. Something much more deadly: English grammar.
Split me no infinitives and dangle me no participles, mes amis. Pass me that semi-colon and stand back while I drop it on my foot.
An interesting journalistic glitch: this morning I read a Chris Hedges' piece in Truthdig in which he quoted Ted Cruz from his loooong fake filibuster. I just went back to the article to copy quote and paste it here because I found it way over the top and wondered why this wasn't getting more press. Here's the quote:
"“What we have here is our core values as Americans and Christians slipping away into this facade where we should take care of our poor, sick, and disabled,” said Cruz in hour 19 of his filibuster. “It is disheartening to know that the nation our forefathers built is no longer of importance to our president and his Democratic counterparts. Not only that, we are falling away from core Christian values. I don’t know about you, but I believe in the Jesus who died to save himself, not enable lazy followers to be dependent on him. He didn’t walk around all willy nilly just passing out free healthcare to those who were sick, or food to those who were hungry, or clothes to those in need. No, he said get up, brush yourself off, go into town and get a job, and as he hung on the cross he said,”I died so that I may live in eternity with my Father. If you want to join us you can die for yourself and your own sins. What do I look like, your savior or something?” That’s the Jesus I want to see brought back into our core values as a nation. That’s why we need to repeal Obamacare.”
But I couldn't find the quote––-read the damn article twice and then noticed at the end of the second page a notice that this quote had been eliminated since it apparently was a parody that a commenter brought to their attention. Sure enough, the second comment said "This is a satire from Free Wood Post." Am surprised that Hedges fell for it. Funny though, how close it is to Cruz's truth. Can you dig it?