Bad news Ted Sleazy – the kind of folks who rise to high positions in the DOJ without political appointments during, at least, Democrat Presidencies tend to be both smart and qualified, and real lawyers. Which is why Sally Yates just had your ass for lunch.
Islamophobic and racist in charge Republican Ted Cruz entertained a bigot to speak before Congress, and attack the only two Muslim members. I think Cruz should be investigated for his ties to domestic terrorism.
Reps. Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, the two Muslim members of Congress, were accused by a witness at a Senate hearing of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
In explosive testimony Tuesday, a witness before a Senate panel about Islamic terrorism accused the two Muslim members of Congress of having attended an event organized by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The charge was leveled by Chris Gaubatz, a “national security consultant” who has moonlighted as an undercover agitator of Muslim groups that he accuses of being terrorist outfits, and it was directed at Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and André Carson (D-Ind.). At the heart of his accusation is the attendance by those two members at a 2008 convention hosted by the Islamic Society of North America — a Muslim umbrella group, which Gaubatz claims is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I attended a convention in Columbus, Ohio, in 2008, organized by Muslim Brotherhood group, ISNA, and both the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons had recruitment and outreach booths,” Gaubatz said in his testimony. “Both Congressman Keith Ellison, MN, and Andre Carson, IN, spoke at the Muslim Brotherhood event.”
Allegations that Ellison and Carson are secret Muslim agents with extremist leanings are usually found among fringe groups online, often discussed in dire tones on poorly designed websites. Rarely, if ever, do such sentiments get read into congressional testimony, with the imprimatur that offers.
Responsibility for this rare instance lies with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who oversaw the hearing as chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts and whose staff likely saw the testimonies of the witnesses.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) later addressed Tuesday’s hearing and defended Ellison.
“He is my congressman. He is a man of great patriotism,” she said, adding that he has advocated for additional funding for efforts to detect what attracts young people to join terrorist groups.
An aide to Ellison confirmed that he did attend the 2008 ISNA convention. He’s gone to a few of the group’s conventions, in fact. Carson’s office didn’t return a request for comment. But news reports show that both he and Carson led a discussion at the 2008 convention on how to mobilize Muslims politically. President Barack Obama has addressed the group as well, though only via a video recording.
Critics of ISNA have insisted that these politicians have either turned a blind eye to — or explicitly embraced — the group’s affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, an affiliation that is based on ties some of the founding ISNA members have allegedly had to the hard-line religious organization. ISNA has long insisted that no such connection has ever existed.
“I can definitely tell you we are not Muslim Brotherhood. We are not affiliated with them at all and never were,” said Faryal Khatri, an official with ISNA. “That much I can reassure you.”
ISNA is not the only group targeted by Gaubatz. In 2009, he told Talking Points Memo that he obtained an internship with the Council on American-Islamic Relations as part of an effort to secretly collect evidence against the group to be used in a book written by his father. The book, “Muslim Mafia,” alleged that CAIR, a Muslim advocacy group that works to combat Islamophobia, was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Cruz’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Gaubatz’s allegations against Ellison and Carson or whether it had given either member a chance to respond. But the senator has displayed a tolerance for these kinds of conspiracy theories in the past.
Before he suspended his presidential campaign, Cruz appointed known Islamophobe Frank Gaffney to his team of national security advisers. Gaffney, now head of the Center for Security Policy, has objected to Ellison and Carson serving on the House Intelligence Committee because he believes their Muslim faith could compel them to leak information to the Muslim Brotherhood. He has also accused Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and conservative heavyweights Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan of being closeted Muslim Brotherhood members.
When asked about his controversial selection, Cruz defended Gaffney as a “serious thinker” focused on “fighting jihadism across the globe.”
Trump gets crazier every day. Today’s story from a Tabloid claims that Republican Candidate Ted Cruz’s father was an accomplice who helped Lee Harvey Oswald murder President John F. Kennedy! Cruz’s dad is an established racist right wing pile of shit – but the evidence here is diaphanous at best.
Image of Lee Harvey Oswald (l – in white shirt), and a previously unidentified man (m – white shirt) now claimed to be Ted Cruz Sr in Cuba.
As Donald Trump reminded the world Tuesday morning, the Republican Party is on the verge of nominating a conspiracy theorist who regularly uses debunked Internet and tabloid rumors to smear his enemies.
In the latest case, Trump seized on a ludicrously thin-sourced National Enquirer story to insinuate Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was involved in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know, shot,” Trump told Fox News over the phone. “I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”
Trump’s evidence? A photo, disseminated in fringe circles online and then by the National Enquirer, that conspiracy sleuths claim shows the elder Cruz near Oswald. There is zero evidence the person in question is Rafael Cruz.
“This man is a pathological liar,” Ted Cruz told reporters in response. “He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying.”
Cruz has a point. Even by normal political standards, Trump’s relationship with the truth is abusive: Politifact named his entire campaign its 2015 “Lie of the Year.”
The GOP presidential front-runner, whether by choice or by nature, appears fundamentally unable to distinguish between credible sources and chain e-mails.
Equally significant, though, is that he uses these falsehoods to elevate fringe conspiracy theories and anecdotes that politicians are normally careful to keep far away from mainstream politics. He’s spread discredited claims linking vaccines to autism, for example — a debunked theory that medical officials say has harmed efforts towipe out preventable diseases.
Trump has an online fan base of white nationalists, whom he sometimes retweets to his millions of followers. It’s important to note that many of the most egregious examples of Trump’s false claims have a strong racial and ethnic component.
Tuesday’s JFK story was a perfect example: A smear whose effect was to make Ted Cruz and his Cuban-born father appear strange, foreign, and untrustworthy. There are many others….Read The Rest Here…
Coinciding with a poll resulting in Republicans having the lowest approval rating since 1992 – it seems that even Republicans don’t like Republicans anymore…
Maybe they should pass a separate bathroom law for conservatives?
Here the former Republican Speaker of the House unloads on Ted Cruz.
The former House speaker also says that he would vote for Trump, and called the two of them ‘texting buddies.’
When it comes to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, even a few months’ time out of Congress has done little to lessen former House Speaker John Boehner’s contempt for his former Capitol Hill colleague.
“Lucifer in the flesh,” Boehner told an audience at Stanford on Wednesday night, according to the Stanford Daily. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
In fact, Wednesday night was not the first occasion that Boehner has compared Cruz to “Lucifer,” using the epithet last month during a question-and-answer session with reporters at the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Florida.
Cruz is notorious for his toxic relationship with his congressional colleagues. It turned radioactive in 2013 when the Texas senator played a pivotal role in shutting down the federal government with his high-stakes attempt to defund Obamacare.
Republicans were widely blamed for the historic disruption, and Cruz’s colleagues heaped scorn on him as a result.
The vitriol has waned some, but Trump has gleefully exploited it, maintaining that as the standard-bearer, he can unite the party — unlike Cruz, who has little support among the people who work with him in Congress.
On Thursday, Republican Rep. Peter King seized on Boehner’s comments and again showed he’s not letting bygones be bygones over the shutdown.
“Maybe he gives Lucifer a bad name by comparing him to Ted Cruz,” King said on CNN. “Listen, what John Boehner was most concerned about was Ted Cruz perpetrated a fraud and a hoax when he brought about the shutdown of the government on some kind of a vague promise that he was gonna be able to take Obamacare out of the budget or to end Obamacare.”
Got this one from over at Subrealism, which is a great somewhat right of center site run by a friend.
Anonymous is now threatening to expose Cruz’ visits to the ladies of the night. Not sure anyone in the Republican Party other than his wife and kids cares…But it is a thought.
Now…Who did Trump hire to do the video work?
Times are good over at Lawn Jockeys ‘R US with the Republican candidates actively on the hunt for black buffoons and race prostitutes. Ted Cruz’s Sugar Daddy has found their boy.
Professional Lawn Jockey Raynard Jackson and Dick (Darth Vader) Cheney
“Black Americans for a Better Future” is bankrolled by white billionaire Robert Mercer and has just one apparent member: an extreme-right black political operative.One of the GOP’s leading billionaire donors is also funding 96 percent of a super PAC named “Black Americans for a Better Future.”
Funny thing is, that donor, eccentric billionaire Robert Mercer, is white.
Two eagle-eyed watchdogs, Derek Willis of ProPublica and Dave Levinthal of Public Integrity, spotted the funding in a recent set of FEC filings, and The Intercept first reported the news. As the filings showed, Mercer has provided $400,000 of the group’s $417,250 donations so far.
Is it odd that an organization that says it’s made up of “Black Americans” is in fact bankrolled by a white billionaire? Sure, but that’s just the beginning.
The organization, “Black Americans for a Better Future,” essentially a one-person shop run by longtime GOP political operative Raynard Jackson.
Jackson is an unusual character. This is clear even on the surface: his slapdash websitelooks like a bad parody of 1998, and is littered with typos and grammatical mistakes. (“Is homosexual entitlements the new civil rights?” “I am also available for speaking engagements also.”)
But the weirdness goes deeper than that.
So far, the only expenditures for “Black Americans for a Better Future” are Jackson’s own salary of $155,000, travel costs (including, as The Intercept reporting, $5,000 at Morton’s Steakhouse in New York), and the $13,000 cost of its only activity thus far, a November 17 luncheon at the National Press Club.
Jackson himself is a profilic blogger who often takes fellow African Americans to task. His favorite target, unsurprisingly, is President Obama, of whom Jackson says, “He is light skinned, has no connection with the Black community, Ivy League educated, and seems very uncomfortable around Blacks who are not part of the bourgeoisie.”
Jackson is also not fond of Spike Lee, describing Lee’s newest film, Chi-Raq, as a “profanity laced, liberally biased, finger pointing diatribe that blames Republicans and Whites for all the murders taking place in Chicago.”
It’s an odd critique, given that Chi-Raq, a retelling of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, is about black women demanding that black men stop killing each other (and withholding sex until they do), clearly placing responsibility, for the most part, on black men.
Maybe that’s because Jackson’s “review” is actually a pitch for one of his pet projects.
“It is extremely imperative that Republicans have an active surrogates program,” Jackson writes. “Black Republicans are constantly ridiculed in movies, TV sit-coms, and in pop culture. I have constantly expressed to party leaders the necessity of having a vibrant surrogates program where Black Republicans are seen on TV, heard on the radio, and interviewed in newspapers.”
Who does Jackson like? “Black men need more white women like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham,” Jackson wrote in a 2014 post. Even though they are conservative media personalities, they have done more to promote the well-being of black males than many of the very women who stridently complain about the lack of ‘eligible’ black men.”
Jackson explains that Coulter’s anti-immigration stance helps black people, quoting her statement that “We owe black people something… We have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven’t even been in this country.” As for Ingraham, Jackson quotes her statement that Democrats “turn their heads away from the millions upon millions of black babies slaughtered in the womb over 10 years.… Is that racist?”
Jackson concludes, “We black men need more white women like Coulter and Ingraham, not back [sic] women who will give a pass to a failing black president.”
Of course, it’s not just black women; President Obama received 96 percent of the African American vote in 2012. But Jackson says they are deluded by Black leaders who refuse to criticize the president else they “jeopardize their invitations to the White House’s Christmas party.”
So, Jackson continued, “it’s ok to do specific things for the Black bourgeoisie—private invitations to the White House, rides on Air Force One, private movie screenings at the White House, but [Obama] can’t do things specifically to address the high unemployment rate in the Black community?”
(The black unemployment rate when Obama took office was 12.7 percent; as of June, 2015, it was 9.5 percent. Obama also started the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative in 2014 to focus on improving the lives of young African American men.)
In fact, the predominant theme in Jackson’s many online screeds seems to be his own resentment at being excluded from such elite circles. In a 2015 blog post, he complained that GOP chairman Rience Priebus stole his idea of giving out a “Black Republican Trailblazer Award” each February.
Most curiously, he complained in 2012 that “My Republican Party Has Abandoned Me” and rebuffed his efforts to attract more black voters. And yet, he wrote in 2012, “twice this year some of these same people have approached me about funding for some election year tricks that they (White Republicans) have conjured up and simply need a Black face to execute the plan. On these two separate occasions, these funders were willing to spend upwards of $20 million to have me organize a national campaign to identify Blacks who would be critical of President Obama.”
But wait, isn’t that exactly what Robert Mercer is paying him $400,000 to do in 2016?…More Here…
Lawn Jockeys ‘R Us Award
I have to admit it is a lot of fun watching this bit of lowlife Republican crap come back to bite them in the ass. As you will recall for over a year after President Obama was elected the right spewed continuous vitriol about his birth certificate, and not being American.
Back at C’ya!
Fox News Latino contributor Rick Sanchez made a case this week that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was not eligible to serve as president of the United States because he is not a “natural born” citizen as the Constitution requires.
In a column for Fox News Latino, Sanchez declared that “Ted Cruz is not a natural born American, and neither am I.”
“He was born in Canada. Period,” Sanchez wrote. “His parents weren’t there because they needed to be. They were there because they wanted to be. Ted Cruz, by the letter and spirit of the law, cannot be president!”
Sanchez explained that he also had dreams of becoming president.
“Unfortunately, the law says I, Rick Sanchez, cannot be President of the United States,” he observed. “Most immigrants realize that when the moment they become naturalized — that it’s the one thing you simply can’t achieve.”
“Now along comes Senator Ted Cruz who seems to be saying, ‘I know I wasn’t born here, but guess what — I want to change the rules, I want it all,’” the former CNN anchor continued. “The problem for Ted Cruz is that we know what the spirit and letter of the law says… Common sense says ‘being born in the United States’ means just what it says.”
Sanchez noted that Cruz’s parents had voted in Canadian elections, which requires citizenship in Canada.
“It’s pretty simple, if Eleanor and Rafael Cruz were eligible to vote according to the Canadian election board, that means they were Canadian citizens,” he insisted. “Did you hear that? They were Canadian citizens, not American citizens. And that makes Ted Cruz’s argument about being a natural American citizen at the very least arguable. After all, he was likely born to Canadian citizens.”
“That’s a problem — a serious one at that for a man wanting to be president. Sorry Ted, as a fellow Cuban American, I feel your pain.”
Newsweek reported this week that a “growing number of constitutional law scholars are arguing that Ted Cruz’s birth in Canada makes him ineligible to become president.”
Looks like the Obama “Birthers” bullsquat is coming back around to bite their boy in the rear!
It is beginning to look like Ted Cruz’s mom renounced her American Citizenship in favor of Canadian Citizenship before having Ted…
Meaning Ted is not a “Natural Born” American.
Getting crazy out there. Seems that the same scumbags who challenged President Obama’s have a new target – Sen. Ted Cruz who was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban citizen father. Even worse, Cruz failed to renounce his Canadian citizenship until just before he announced his run in the Republican Primary. My problem is the fact of the dual citizenship – not where he was born.
Insofar as the State Department –
The “Foreign Preference” criterion (Guideline C) of the December 2005 “Adjudicative Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Access to Classified Information” makes the “exercise of any right, privilege or obligation of foreign citizenship after becoming a U.S. citizen” a potentially disqualifying condition for a security clearance. Guideline C also states:
And the Department of Defense –
The security concerns underlying this guideline are that the possession and use of a foreign passport in preference to a U.S. passport raises doubt as to whether the person’s allegiance to the United States is paramount and it could also facilitate foreign travel unverifiable by the United States. Therefore consistent application of the guideline requires that any [DoD] clearance be denied or revoked unless the applicant surrenders the foreign passport or obtains official approval for its use from the appropriate agency of the United States Government.
In govermentese that means you cannot get a security clearance in the DOD (Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard) with a dual citizenship. You must renounce your other allegiance.
Ted Cruz should have been disqualified from being a Senator. Being able to be President is absurd, regardless of the birthright claims – because at no point did he renounce his foreign citizenship…
Until it became necessary for his campaign.
In 2008, they went after Barack Obama. In 2016, they’re going after Ted Cruz.
The originators of the so-called birther movement are leading a charge this campaign cycle with the same accusations they had two campaign cycles ago.
Eight years ago, the loosely-organized group came together other-izing the man who would become the first black president. Now, they’re attempting to do so with the potential first Latino one. And it’s not just isolated fringe bloggers who have taken up the mantle. WorldNetDaily, a site that has touted both Donald Trump and Cruz and been essential reading for their fans, is supporting the cause as well.
The senator from Texas was born in Calgary, Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. Cruz released his birth certificate in 2013 and renounced his Canadian citizenship a year later in advance of his presidential campaign, in an attempt to put the issue to bed before it reached national headlines in this campaign cycle.
And that might have resolved it, if Donald Trump had not questioned his legitimacy as a candidate.
“How do you run against the Democrat, whoever it may be, and you have this hanging over your head if they bring a lawsuit?” Trump said in an interview on CNN this week. And just like that, with one question, the real estate mogul effectively brought this issue from the far-reaches of conspiracy internet sites to the forefront of American dialogue.
Trump later suggested that Cruz ask a judge for a “declaratory judgment” to definitively prove the status of his citizenship.
This, of course, would likely create a spectacle that could prove politically advantageous to Trump, who is currently losing to Cruz in Iowa, the first primary state.
“I’m doing this for the good of Ted… I like him. He likes me,” Trump asserted.
While this reads as a witch hunt to most eyes—akin to Trump’s previous efforts to get Obama’s birth certificate released—many of the original founders of the 2008 movement seem to agree with the leading Republican candidate. Unlike Obama, they like Cruz and they want him to clear the air on this birth issue before it’s too late.
“I think it does disqualify him,” said Teo Bear (an online pseudonym), who warned about the issue of Ted Cruz’s birth on his site Birthers.org in 2014. “Let me ask you a question, if you were dating a girl and you come to realize that she wanted to get serious and wanted to have children and you didn’t want puppies, don’t you think you should tell her ‘I don’t want puppies?’”…More…
Confined to the kiddie table in the “Adult” debate, Cruz tries to catch up to Trump…
With bigotry.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the Black Lives Matter movement embraces the murder of police officers at a campaign stop in Iowa on Wednesday.
“If you look at the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the most disturbing things is more than one of their protests have embraced rabid rhetoric, rabid anti-police language, literally suggesting and embracing and celebrating the murder of police officers,” Cruz said, according to ThinkProgress. “That is disgraceful.”
Many in the conservative media have accused Black Lives Matter of inspiring violence against officers, citing a few demonstrations where rhetoric toward law enforcement has gotten extreme.
But leaders of the movement do not support violence toward the police, and there isn’t any evidence to support claims that officers are now under increased attack because of Black Lives Matter. In fact, 2015 is on track to be the second-safest year for police ever, after 2013.
This has been a long time coming…The Adults are moving to take control back.
Ted Cruz can’t even get a protest vote in the Senate anymore.
On Monday night, Cruz’s colleagues ignored his attempt to disrupt Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to fund the government without attacking Planned Parenthood. In an unusual rebuke, even fellow Republicans denied him a “sufficient second” that would have allowed him a roll call vote.
Then, his Republican colleagues loudly bellowed “no” when Cruz sought a voice vote, a second repudiation that showed how little support Cruz has: Just one other GOP senator — Utah’s Mike Lee — joined with Cruz as he was overruled by McConnell and his deputies.
It was the second time that Cruz had been denied a procedural courtesy that’s routinely granted to senators in both parties. The first came after he called McConnell a liar this summer.
 | Karen Melton on Of Melungeons and Other Histor… |
| Impeaching Trump - R… on CBC To Take Up Trump Impe… | |
 | Sven Helms on Counter-terrorism Officer… |
 | btx3 on New Travels |
 | George on New Travels |
Politicians Who Have Been "Elected" By 12 Jurors
The New Jim Crow, More Sneaky Than the Old
Btx3's Blog 