I see Donald Trump is now saying he’ll move the US Embassy to Jerusalem (a standard and never fulfilled commitment from all Republican candidates and many Democratic ones.) Honestly, from Trump I’d expect nothing less than rebuilding the Temple. Trump Temple. It could be public private partnership. Luxury money changing tables, holy of holies, possibly holy of holy of holies just to punch it up a bit.
The last rebuilder of the Temple was Herod, a grandchild of Idumean forced converts to Judaism, but a Trump like figure in his own way, a big builder, larger than life, a fair amount of family drama. He tore down the old Temple and rebuilt it in a really classy way for the ages.
Alas, it was torn down a few decades later.
It is worth noting that even though Sarah Palin passed over Ted Cruz in endorsing Donald Trump, this has not stopped Cruz from trying to hitch a ride on Palin Grievance Wagon, albeit as a tag along. Cruz slammed the “dirty … unprincipled … [and] wrong” decision of many media outlets to report Palin’s son Track’s arrest for domestic assault.
Professor Richard L. Hasen will stop by The Hive to chat with Prime members, Friday. January 29th at noon EST. Get your questions in here! He’ll be chatting about election law and his book PLUTOCRATS UNITED, which explores how both left and right wings avoid the key issue of the new Citizens United era: balancing political inequality with free speech.
The ‘GOP Civil War!’ line is perhaps the most well-worn cliche of progressive journalism, just as the parallel ‘Democratic Civil War!’ is on the other side of the equation. Yet here, for a moment at least, we seem to have a real one, whether or not it speaks to some deeper cleavage that will transcend the individual personalities in question.
Right now in the GOP primary you have two frontrunners – with the edge going to Donald Trump – who both seem to terrify established party leaders, for a mix of reasons ranging from ideology to electability to behavior and tone. But the crux of it is not who supports who so much as which of these two is worst or which – going a bit further – is not just worst but positively unacceptable as a presidential nominee. A GOP pal of mine says we should call it “The War between the Hates.”
Late last night, Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign conceded that the senator and his family do in fact have health insurance and never lost coverage, contrary to what the senator said at a campaign stop Thursday in which he used his (made up) personal experience to slam Obamacare. Even his campaign’s statement contains some dubious claims that don’t quite match with his Texas insurer told us yesterday. Here’s the story.
I was an early adopter to the belief that Ted Cruz is an odious weasel. But I did not make him out for a bald-faced liar, mainly because I would think that habitual lying would cause too much cognitive dissonance with his self-righteousness. But the new claim that he didn’t know his family had health insurance, I’m sorry, that does not add up. Our Tierney Sneed walks us through the original lie, the holes in the logic of the original lie, the campaign admission that the story was false and now the holes in that admission.
I see this morning that our friends at Mother Jones have entered their bid to write the definitive Ted Cruz asshole florilegium (TCAF). Here it is. It does lean heavily on recent congressional haters of Ted Cruz. But in fairness it also does go back into the pre-Senate, law school and collegiate days. Here at TPM we’ve opted for an iterative approach, in part because this is our traditional mode of coverage but also because of skepticism about whether, like topics such as ‘democracy’ or ‘modernism’, the literature may simply be too vast to be captured in any single monographic treatment.
Man who inadvertently /accidentally shot the women sitting in front of him at a screening of the new Benghazi movie says he brought a gun to the theater because he was afraid there might be a mass shooting at the theater.
It looks like the criminal investigation of Planned Parenthood that top Republican elected officials in Texas called for last year has not only failed to yield charges against Planned Parenthood but has resulted in the indictment of the head of the group that produced those anti-abortion sting videos and another activist.