TPM’s David Taintor is out with another story this afternoon on John McCain’s interactions with an Arizona couple whose son was killed in the Aurora movie theater massacre last year.
You may have already seen the video where McCain told the young man’s mom that she needed “some straight talk” on assault weapons. Now you can see the impersonal form letter McCain’s office sent earlier this month in response to a very personal email written by the man’s father.
Indiana Republicans pushing new transvaginal ultrasound mandate bill.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer tells Cavuto the majority of Americans oppose a ‘path to citizenship’ (even though the opposite is true). Watch.
In addition to being abrasive and serially disliked, it seems Sen. Cruz’s penchant for imitating Joe McCarthy may have been even greater and of longer standing than we knew. In this case, the habit of lying for political advantage seems even more clear.
Jane Mayer just posted this piece at The New Yorker website in which she notes that only two and half years ago Cruz gave a Fourth of July speech in which he accused at least twelve members of the Harvard Law School faculty of being not only “Marxists” but communists “who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Read More
Marco Rubio’s political future is based on convincing Tea Partiers and base Republicans that his immigration reform plan is vastly preferable to the awful Obama plan — even though Rubio hasn’t decided what his plan includes on really any key point. So who’s the first anti-reform fish to get reeled in? Apparently, it’s Charles Krauthammer. He seems to get that there’s no real difference between the plans. And that both amount to what he calls “instant amnesty”. But still Rubio’s plan is worth getting behind because … well, he’s not Obama.
Phony Dem candidate who was put forward by former Rep. David Rivera to be charged by Feds.
While you weren’t looking, we put together a handy guide to the confusing debate over sequestration.
The short version is that partisan whining about how the sequester came into existence is a huge distraction from the more important, though badly misrepresented, fight over how to replace it. And both threads point away from the basic question of what the sequester is, how it works, and why it ought to be avoided.
Enjoy.
As I’ve noted in a series of posts, after speaking to numerous people who’ve been associated with Ted Cruz over the last quarter century, I’ve been struck by how unanimous the opinion of him as been at basically every step. But I did get this note from one close observer which, while not terribly different from the others, points to how powerful a political force Cruz could still be.
From TPM Reader XX …
You’re probably getting a lot of feedback about Cruz about now. He wasn’t a shrinking violet in college.
I knew Cruz through the college debate circuit. He was a top-flight debater.
Arrogant? Sure. I always chalked it up to deep confidence, but being in the law for as long as he has would probably coagulate that into arrogance.