.
In you guts, you know he’s nuts! By the time Ted Cruz was in law school, poor old Goldwater would complain to John Dean:
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
Speaking of demented authoritarians, it’s gonna be interested to see the pushback here:
Dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups are calling for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers.
A letter released on Tuesday asserts that such money is tainted by these donors’ efforts to deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change…
The letter is a project of the Natural History Museum, a mobile museum that draws attention to “social and political forces that shape nature yet are left out of traditional natural history museums,” said its co-founder and director, Beka Economopoulos.
A petition drive, also released on Tuesday and sponsored by environmental organizations including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, urges the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History to “Kick Koch off the board!”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and signer of the letter, said the donors seek a halo they do not deserve. “Cloaked in the garb of civic-mindedness, they launder their image while simultaneously and covertly influencing the content offered by those institutions,” he said…
***********
Apart from watching the birds flip by, what’s on the agenda for the day?
raven
Baud
@raven:
This is fascinating.
raven
@Baud: But but. . .
Baud
@raven:
ETA: Spying is a lot like swinging.
Major Major Major Major
I for one am off to Tokyo for the week.
This is shaping up to be a lovely honeymoon :D
raven
@Baud: Ya drive for show and putt for dough!
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Wow. No kidding. What an awesome trip.
Baud
@raven:
Your nym has a link to nowhere again.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: I’d be worried if our intelligence agencies were more Mission Impossible and less Burn After Reading.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
New Zealand just won an astonishing cricket match, with native South African Grant Elliott clubbing a six on the second to last ball to beat South Africa. New Zealand advances to its first ever World Cup final, and in so doing denying the South Africans their first ever trip.
Tomorrow night it’s Australia/India in the other semi and schrodinger’s cat is sure to be following.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Same as it ever was.
BobS
@raven: 348 members of the House of Representatives voted yesterday urging Obama to provide military assistance to Ukraine. With regard to those who didn’t, there’s considerable overlap with those who skipped Netanyahu’s speech (as well as those who voted against authorizing military force in Iraq).
OzarkHillbilly
Shorter Zimmerman: “God wanted me to kill Trayvon Martin.” I sh!t you not.
Randy P
It may come as news to our Republican
traitorssenators, but spying for Israel is still considered spying and people go to jail for doing it.Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Where else he gonna go except to hiding behind God?
Mustang Bobby
@Randy P: Yeah, just ask Jonathan Pollard.
On the Cruz front, he says he wants to “repeal every word of Common Core.” Okay, but it’s tough to repeal something that isn’t a law. I’m sure he knows that but his audience doesn’t, so what’s wrong with making up bullshit if you know it will get thunderous applause?
On the home front, enjoying my second full day of spring break by taking my trophy-winning Pontiac wagon into the shop to check on fuel tank issues and get the wiper motor replaced. The rainy season doth approach.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: A Dog for all reasons.
Baud
I saw clips of Cruz’s announcement on the news last night. Might be just me, but I didn’t think the visuals were very good for Cruz.
JPL
@raven: Will the Republicans demand that the Administration stop spying on Israel?
@OzarkHillbilly: He must be feeling ignored. Did he link to a fund me page?
Joel
@Baud: Honestly, can’t blame the Israelis for spying on us. After seeing how embarrassingly badly the US has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar re: Germany, France, etc. we don’t have much of a moral leg to stand on.
Conspiring with the House is another story, though.
Baud
Plane crash in southern France. Spain to Germany route. About 142 passengers.
Aimai
@Major Major Major Major: congratulations! It sounds fantastic!
JPL
Ted Cruz was on CBS news and said most of the 16 million people receiving health care through ACA is because of medicaid expansion. He also said 6 million people were thrown off of their health coverage and made to buy insurance that covers less. Oh and ACA is a job killer.
When asked to give one sentence on why he’d be a best candidate, Cruz said he’d always tell the truth.
hmm
ThresherK
Citizens’ freedom and small government (except when it isn’t) alert: Texas* wants to fine businesses $10k for putting up “no guns allowed” signs. A bill is in their Meth Lab of Democracy right now.
(No link right yet, looking for a non-wingnut source, but not looking exhaustively.)
(*Aw geez, like that’s a surprise.)
raven
Lufthansa plane down in France.
MattF
I was just thinking the other day that Cruz is really the first no-kidding wingnut religious lunatic to be treated as a mainstream candidate. And I see the religion as really the basis of his candidacy– he could be a televangelist, he could follow in his dad’s footsteps. This means to me that the talk about grift and/or getting a FOX News job misses the point– Cruz is not Glenn Beck, he is something new.
ETA: And points to Goldwater for predicting it.
Elizabelle
@raven: Germanwings, wholly owned subsidiary of Lufthansa. Budget carrier, route was Barcelona to Dusseldorf; flight down about an hour into flight over the southern Alps about 65 miles from Nice.
CNN must be orgasming.
Watching BBC Worldnews, and they’re all in shock. This does not happen much with top European airlines. Especially not with mighty Lufthansa.
SOS sent just before plane went down; BBC guests wondering if plane or a pilot sent the SOS message.
beltane
@ThresherK: So much for the sacrosanct nature of private property.
beltane
@Elizabelle: An airline disaster in a glamorous location with a large number of white victims is a cable news dream come true.
raven
@beltane: wtf? There was little coverage of the Malaysia crashes, right?
debbie
@MattF:
That’s exactly what I was thinking while watching that speech! Or a Tony Robbins/Joel Osteen kind of vibe.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
What Barry Goldwater thought about the founder of the institution where Cruz made his announcement
beltane
@raven: CNN loves this kind of tragedy. They are ghouls and it is no crime to point out their ghoulishness.
Elizabelle
@MattF: And Sinclair Lewis, years before Mr. Goldwater.
From The Sinclair Lewis Society at Illinois State U:
beltane
@raven: The missing Malaysian jet was lost over the sea. No real information and plenty of empty space for endless conjecture. This will be played as pure maudlin, and what journalist would not like to be sent to the French Alps with an expense account
raven
@beltane: So you point out what you think is a racial component? bullshit
Elizabelle
@beltane: Blondes on board! And now they’re missing!
raven
@beltane: So turn the fucking tv off.
Elizabelle
@raven: Good morning, raven.
I think there’s def a racial component — maybe better understood as “first world” travelers than sheerly melanin. Would an Air Nigeria crash, or the loss of a Turkish or Iranian airliner over mountains — as has happened in recent years — be the sole topic on BBC World News? I say no.
beltane
@raven: I don’t have cable, rarely watch TV at all, don’t see why anyone would watch that crap.
beltane
@Elizabelle: There were also a lot of subtle aspersions cast at the competency of Malaysia Airlines. Will this be the case when dealing with a Lufthansa subsidiary?
ThresherK
@Elizabelle: I had to bite my tongue to keep from making a wry remark about my surprise when I heard “Lufthansa” (instead of “RyanAir”).
Elizabelle
@beltane: Yeah. Legend of wicked smart first pilot, who loved simulator flying, and Keystone Kops Malaysian officials. Couldn’t even divulge in which body of water to focus recovery search.
Keith G
@MattF: Cruz is a petit demagogue who can have great success with a very specific audience. My question is about Cruz’s learning curve. How quickly can he expand the size of a receptive audience?
The odds may be against him, though he is aided by the irrationality of Republican primary voters.
Elizabelle
I’m curious why all the government officials batted down hope for survivors asap. Obv the terrain, but wondering if another jet, maybe military, was aloft and saw what happened. Even on radar.
ThresherK
@Elizabelle: I prefer bringing up Goldwater, simply because 1) it’s true, 2) the wingnuts pick and choose what to worship about him, and 3) more people know who he is, especially our Beltway Inbreds.
(And yes, I intentionally used worship.)
Curious who will be the next lefty which Teabaggers exhume, a la Mormons, to “convert” to conservatism, a la their recent dalliances with Truman, JFK and MLK. I’d love for them to take on Sinclair Lewis, because it’ll prove how stupid their exercise is.
chromeagnomen
instead of AuH2O it will be just HCl.
MattF
@Elizabelle: It’s very rare for aircraft to just fall out of the air. And, when it happens, it’s very bad news.
Elizabelle
In non-aviation news: several of Sinclair Lewis’s favorite recipes, from The Sinclair Lewis Society site.
The Sinful Chocolate Cookies look fab. Bourbon an ingredient, to keep the snake-talking preachers’ fans away.
Forgot that S. Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, and declined the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith.
Need to read him. Prescient guy. Would like to see his take on the early 20th century.
Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Southeast of Ted Cruz’s Calgary, Alberta birthplace.
MattF
@ThresherK: Not to mention George Orwell. He was a Trotskyite in the ’30’s, fer Pete’s sake. Anti-Stalin, but no less leftist for that.
Keith G
@Elizabelle: It very easily could be racial, just as other factors may have predominant impact such as geographic proximity and historic and cultural ties.
I think it is very important to monitor any conduct influenced by ethnic bias. At the same time, it is tiring and a bit clichéd to hear critiques of such conduct called out in advance of any action.
debbie
@Keith G:
Of course, it could be that lessons were learned from the Malaysian crashes.
Major Major Major Major
Ok, looks like I’ll be taking the l0razepam early for this flight. Thanks a lot guys :-/
Elizabelle
@Major Major Major Major: Sayonara, Major Major. Have a wonderful time and tell us about Japan. Whenever you do …
Happy jet trails. You’ll be safe up there.
Keith G
@Elizabelle:
Because there wasn’t any hope?
I guess anything is possible, but it looks like the plane returned to ground in the maritime Alps south of Mercantour National Park, a place of very beautiful terrain but not one conducive to surviving a rapidly aborted air flight.
Elizabelle
@ThresherK: From your Goldwater RationalWiki link (and thanks for it):
Goldwater knew what he was dealing with. These are John Birchers, now wrapped in Christianism.
Randy P
@Major Major Major Major: It’s funny, but I never really contemplate safety when flying. I’m more focused on annoyance at the person whose seat back is in my lap.
I worry more about crashes when driving, which I hate. Especially when driving tired. I’ve had a couple of scary near misses from being tired, and I’ve seen some terrible one-car accidents in good conditions which I assume were from tiredness, lacking any other explanation.
Maybe it’s because I’m a numbers guy and I’ve internalized the statistics about flying vs driving safety.
geg6
@Randy P:
Nah. I’m not really much of a numbers person (despite the fact that my career has been in financial aid). And I feel the same way. Don’t worry much in a plane. On a highway? Totally different story.
ms_canadada
@Baud: Cruz is very sweaty and comes across as a mean crow.
Germy Shoemangler
@Randy P: Which is why I’m always amused when I see people on science blogs complaining “where are all the flying cars we were promised?” When I first saw comments like this I truly thought they were joking.
But they’re serious.
Whenever I read an article about scientific advancements, or progress that was predicted 50 years ago (but didn’t materialize) there are invariably reader comments asking why we were cheated out of flying cars.
I see so much careless driving, so much aggressive driving, people half-asleep, kids texting (my car broke down last year. The dealer sends a kid in a van to pick me up when my car was fixed. The kid was texting while he drove me. Almost rear-ended another car at a stop light. I had to ask him to please stop texting.) and of course every day my local media features the mugshots of men and women charged with DWI (twice and sometimes three times the legal limit).
That’s all we need. Flying cars. What could go wrong?
Cervantes
@OzarkHillbilly:
Disgusting.
Cervantes
@MattF:
Be that as it may, guess who said the following about Ted Cruz:
Germy Shoemangler
@Cervantes:
HUDSON NY – Soft spoken and shy, Eric Garner Jr. shares what his life was like when his father was alive.
“It was good, better, supportive. He was at every game,” said Garner.
A basketball player and a student at a community college in New Jersey, Garner is a regular 20-year-old guy who unwillingly found himself at the center of a heated national debate on racism.
“He’s a victim of his life being changed and altered forever. It will never be the same and that’s in part due to the criminal justice system,” said Gregory Mosley, a former lieutenant in the New York State Police and the director of the Law Enforcement Diversity Initiative.
His father’s death, seen by millions in a viral video, sparked protests nationwide when a grand jury decided not to indict the white police officer that killed him with an apparent choke hold. Though a man of few words, Garner shared his perspective with aspiring police officers, telling them he no longer wants to get a driver’s license.
“I don’t want to get stopped by the cops. I’d rather take public transportation,” said Garner.
Garner joined the Columbia County district attorney, the county judge, and a defense attorney in speaking to a group of 23 recruits of the Law Enforcement Diversity Initiative- a program created to prepare people for success in the police academy and boost the number of minority officers.
“It’s clear that police agencies that are more diverse are more effective and better serve the communities with which they stand,” said Mosley.
“It’s an aspiring program for the young people who come out. They should have this in every borough in the city,” said Garner.
Garner’s story resonated with a Puerto Rican recruit from the Bronx who has felt discriminated himself.
“I want to see a change in my police department, so I have to be that change,” said Lester Zaborski III.
Garner says if his father was alive to see him, he knows he would be proud.
“He’d be happy that I’m talking to other kids about the story that we have experienced,” said Garner.
Garner attended Monday’s session as a favor to the program director. On Tuesday, he will go back to being a student studying business, sports management, and playing basketball.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
Right, it was never Lewis.
See here for what I think is the likeliest source.
chopper
@Baud:
the visuals are never going to be good for the guy.
OzarkHillbilly
@Cervantes: As a rule, I am against capital punishment. I think I could make an exception in his case.
Cervantes
@MattF:
In what sense was Orwell ever a “Trotskyite”?
MattF
@Cervantes: Just one Harvard grad to another, I guess.
Cervantes
@MattF:
That would be funny, too — but it was Pat Robertson (about Ted Cruz).
MattF
@Cervantes: Well, from “Homage to Catalonia,” for example. I guess it’s fair to note that the Trots didn’t really enforce political discipline, but that was a feature, not a bug.
MattF
@Cervantes: My error. I see that Robertson graduated Yale Law.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Wow! Congratulations, and try to keep rested while traveling. Best wishes to your family for the future!
Keep us posted on your adventures while overseas, so we can be properly jealous of your world wide travel!
rikyrah
@Major Major Major Major:
Enjoy Tokyo!
that is on my bucket list.
Cervantes
@ThresherK:
There are still a few places in Texas where the law specifically prevents gun-owners from carrying their hand-guns (airports and polling places, for example) — and then there is the rest of Texas: let’s call it Gunland, for short.
The bill in question applies in Gunland. What it does is (1) prohibit the banning of lawful concealed-carry hand-guns in many state and local public buildings in Gunland; and (2) punish local government entities and officials in Gunland who pursue such bans — by allowing gun-owners to sue for damages.
Just so you know: the Texas Senate approved the bill a week ago.
Fair enough.
@beltane:
The bill does not apply to private property — or federal property, for that matter.
Eric S.
@Mustang Bobby: pictures of the Pontiac?
Ruckus
@Germy Shoemangler:
Of course one of the big things that makes flying safer is the education, rules and rules enforcement of pilots. How many hours a day, how many days a month, even how long a shift is. Commercial flights above very small planes have co-pilots. There are minimum flight separations, takeoffs/landings are controlled. And even then there are close and too close situations. Flying cars? So not only will there be crashes but there will be falling debris. If you car can fly will you be restricted to very controlled airspace, like freeways or will you be able to fly over houses and urban areas? And even if not allowed (texting and using a phone already being against the law) will people do it anyway? Yeah flying cars, that will work out well.
Zinsky
Ted Cruz looks like Bill Murray’s dumber brother, who picks his nose all the time. Truly shit wrapped on skin…..
jonas
Jon Stewart picked up on this last night, but perhaps the biggest bit of derp in Cruz’s speech at Liberty was when he asked them to “imagine” a world where the government didn’t spy on your private communications, and then asked them to text “Constitution” to a number that would just add them to his social media outreach database.
And he apparently was not being ironic. Don’t let the government have your information! Give it to me!
Sure, these are mostly conservative evangelical college students, but even they are not that stupid. How many of them actually sent a text (which Ted made sound like they were really sticking it to the man)? A lot of them were just mocking him on YikYak.
Gin & Tonic
Only marginally Cruz-related, but while on a long drive Saturday we were listening to some piece on NPR, which I think was originally a CBC piece, about the surfeit of beeping noises in our lives. The story got annoying with all the beeping and we turned it off, but there was some part about “tuning” the beep to actually alert or waken people. I can now say with some authority that if you want to awaken people, the best sound is not a beep, but the sound of a cat puking on your bed. That awakens you right quick. If it comes an hour and half before the alarm is set to go off, that’s particularly unwelcome. I think this will be a very long afternoon.
boatboy_srq
@MattF: Grifting business rubes for politics is easier and more profitable than grifting individual rubes for Jeebus: the businessvolk are adults in possession of their faculties, and their pockets are much deeper.
Germy Shoemangler
@Gin & Tonic: Our cat sleeps at the foot of our bed. If she heard that cat puking alarm, would it trigger a sympathetic puking response in her? The way seeing someone yawn makes me yawn?
It would certainly wake me up, that’s for sure.
Mike in NC
@Zinsky: Cruz looks and sounds like a pedophile or serial killer. Need an FBI detail to look into that.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: Flying cars would have to be driverless cars, under totally automated control with no hope of the driver taking over in a pinch. There’s no other way to do it that makes any sense at all.
And even that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because even if the safety issues are solved, flying cars would be terrible gas-guzzlers. Heavier-than-air flight is an inherently inefficient way of getting around, and not practical without internal combustion engines of some sort.
Cervantes
@MattF:
As I recall it, yes, Orwell shared many of Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalin. Is that sufficient reason to call him a Trotskyist? I don’t think so, because he also criticized Trotsky and Lenin.
Certainly in comparison with Stalin, Orwell did think of Trotsky as a real intellectual, but still he felt that, had Trotsky prevailed instead of Stalin, he also would likely have betrayed the ideals behind the revolution. He says as much in, for example, an article you can find in his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, but I don’t have my copy immediately to hand or I’d give you a proper citation.
Matt McIrvin
…The fantasy people have, of course, is of rising into the sky and flying right over a traffic jam. But if we ever go to all driverless cars on the highways, the jams will probably be greatly reduced anyway, just because everyone will be doing perfect zipper merges, responding instantly to changes miles down the road and generally participating in collective flow control, and accidents will be much less common. That’s probably a long way off, but it’s a far more feasible vision than giving everyone a personal flying vehicle.
patrick II
I have not seen PBS’s NOVA do a program on climate change — have NOVA done one and I missed it? Koch brothers are contributors.
PBS also withdrew a documentary on the Koch brothers the brothers threatened to withdraw 25 million in contributions to PBS.
Public donations from Kochs come with some giant strings attached.
WaterGirl
@patrick II: Well, that explains a lot of what has happened to PBS in recent years.