Ted Cruz has now responded to the brouhaha over his Manhattan fundraiser hosted by two prominent gay hoteliers. He argues that there’s no contradiction between his opposition to gay marriage and saying that he would love his daughter if one of his two daughters was gay. In truth, there really is not a necessary contradiction. That’s a totally valid point. But that hardly exhausts the issue or the balancing act (to use a generous formulation) that national Republicans are trying to pull off. They have to balance between a base that remains committed to opposing not only gay marriage but what we might call the normalization of gay life under the law, and a general public that has really moved on from this issue and is beginning to see legal inequality as on the par with de jure racial discrimination. As I said yesterday, we’re seeing the rise of a gay rights policy mullet – same old same old when talking to the base, but a very different way of talking about attitudes toward LGBT Americans when talking to the general public – and specifically, super-rich campaign donors.
This is a fascinating story. But it might also be seen as another chapter in the efforts of white nationalist/neo-fascist hate groups to rebrand themselves as another aggrieved ‘minority’ group looking to stand up for its rights.
We’ve gotten a veritable avalanche of emails in response to my post on the secret history of Canola Oil. Some are particularly vehement. Which brings me to one in particular from TPM Reader CB. He actually says in his email “Please don’t use my name anywhere” so I am simply referring as ‘Canola Oil Badass’ (i.e. ‘CB’) who accuses me of “playing up the ‘secret conspiracy’ angle [to] you denigrate a very healthy and affordable food oil by smearing it as the product of some sort of nefarious, secret scheme.”
From CB …
Josh’s Canola post had a slightly off smell to it for me: I’ll try to explain why.
1. Why revel in your ignorance? That Canola is from a plant developed from plants in the large family of rape vegetables is not a secret, and most cooks know what it is.
2. Which leads me to, “You don’t cook, do you?” Canola is better for pan or wok frying because its smoke point is up to 100 degrees higher than olive oil.
I flagged this story yesterday. Joe Arpaio, the antic Sheriff from down in Maricopa County, Arizona, hired a PI to investigate the wife of a federal judge who was overseeing HIS trial. He admitted this yesterday under oath. That sounds like the kind of thing that can get you in big big trouble. Curious to hear from our lawyer readers, particularly with experience with the federal courts, just what the fallout from something like this could be.
This afternoon I picked up this weird story about a little town in Saskatchewan that is considering changing it’s town slogan from “The Land of Rape and Honey.” As I noted in the post, “rape” in this case is “rapeseed”, which is an oil seed which produces a huge amount of the world’s vegetable oils in its original and some man-made breeds of the plant. When I saw the headline I put it in one of our TPM chats. There were a couple WTFs and guffaws and then David Kurtz chimes in with something like “Ahhh, rapeseed? The oil seed?” And I’m thinking, Where the hell does he come up with this stuff? Who the hell’s ever heard of rapeseed? What’s rapeseed? Is there like cockwheat that I’ve never heard of either?
The small Canadian town of Tisdale is reconsidering whether it should replace the town’s current slogan “Land of Rape and Honey.”
Sheriff Arpaio hired a private investigator to investigate the wife of the federal judge overseeing his racial profile case.
Hater with the base, loving my gay child in Manhattan.
Or, I guess, more like loving my gay child at the Manhattan fundraiser.
Following on my post yesterday, Senate GOP leaders have just endorsed a bill extending Obamacare subsidies through 2017. In other words, if the Court adopts the GOP argument and strikes down Obamacare subsidies, Republicans – especially Senate Republicans – really, really, really want to keep Obamacare off the ballot in 2016.
Cat is really out of the bag.
Bundy family heads to Oregon gold mine for latest confrontation with Bureau of Land Management.