Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this nation.
— Ted Cruz, at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa on June 22, 2018
I don’t know what Ted Cruz believes or how he starts his day.
I also don’t know what Trump does when he gets up in the morning.
I am not a gambling man, but I’d put a lot of money on a bet that Trump does not believe in God and he does not start his day on his knees.
Here is a picture of smog in the U.S.
It shows nitrogen dioxide, which we produce in gasoline engines in cars and trucks, and by burning coal in power plants. Due to work by the EPA, which first started curbing nitrogen dioxide in 1971, its concentrations have been falling over time.
Power plants have installed scrubbers to remove pollutants from their smokestacks, and car manufacturers have adopted catalytic converters. Since 2005, electric utilities have reduced burning of coal and gone to the cleaner natural gas. Our air is much better today than it was 10 years ago, and much better than 30 years ago.
Do we really believe this would have happened without the EPA?
Yet, there is Ted Cruz who yells he wants to abolish the EPA because it is a “job killer.”
One must wonder about the sanity of these people. During the Obama years, we have added over 14 million jobs in an unprecedented job growth period of 70 uninterrupted months. We have created way more jobs than were destroyed during the Bush years, particularly toward the end, when the economy crashed.
Yet, somehow, the EPA is killing jobs.
Do we really want to remove the EPA, start burning coal again, subsidize petroleum companies, and turn the yellow and blue areas read again on the map above?
Because that’s exactly what would happen.
I vote that we keep the EPA. It’s doing a remarkable job in our country, and with the “job killing” that’s going on (adding 14 million in 70 months) I am fine with it continuing to “kill jobs” at that rate.
It is staggering when you think about the global challenges we are facing:
With all these challenges that our leaders should be concerned with, some of the frontrunners in the race for the presidency have nothing better to do than to muck with people’s personal lives, with what they do in their bedrooms, with the decisions women make about their own bodies, with the quiet enjoyment of people’s lives – like letting them decide who their marriage partners will be.
These are not leaders. These are puppets.
NASA has published an online study in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters which suggests that the Larsen B Ice Shelf among other ice glaciers in the Antarctica is fast collapsing and losing its shape due to global warming and other environmental factors, and that the ice sheets could be gone by 2020.
I know that Ted Cruz is what we call a “climate denier.” That’s a person that believes that either the world is not warming at all, or, if it actually is warming, it is part of a natural cycle and we can’t do anything about it.
Notwithstanding that the vast majority of climate scientists do not agree with that opinion and assure us that climate change is proven to be anthropogenic, Ted Cruz wants to stop NASA from studying climate related subjects.
Anthropogenic or not, if the Larsen B Ice Shelf disintegrates by 2020 and allows further glaciers behind it to slip down into the ocean, we’ll see some serious real estate implications in the next 20 years in Miami, New York, Boston, San Diego, Seattle – to list only a few obvious U.S. cities affected.
So Ted Cruz wants to gag NASA, the one governmental body by far the most qualified to study this issue in the world, and most likely the best at it. I don’t understand the rationale? If you don’t study a phenomenon, you won’t understand it with certainty. Studying and learning never hurts. Even if the warming is natural, the implications are serious, and we need to prepare for them.
Yet, Ted Cruz wants us to stick our collective heads in the sand. Why? The only motivation I can come up with is giving more time to Koch Industries, Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobile to rape the world.
Some responsible leaders we have elected.
Ted Cruz is trying to stop NASA from researching climate change.
The fact that Ted Cruz is Chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee in Congress is a travesty. He puts up a bogus chart, showing percentage increases or decreases of the budget of NASA with respect to four different parts of the mission of NASA. He disregards completely that percentages are meaningless without actual dollar values associated with them.
If I gave you an allowance of one dollar last year, and I take that dollar away, I cut your budget by 100%. If I gave your brother an allowance of $5 and I gave him the dollar I took away from you, I increased his budget by 20%. Talking only about percentages in this context is deceptive. That’s what Ted Cruz did with this chart.
This is not science, this is not finance, this is trying to dumb down the American public.
I have met Charles Bolden, when he was a mere NASA astronaut and space shuttle commander. Bolden is a remarkable man, and a brilliant technologist. He is the right man for the job of NASA administrator. He belongs in his position.
And Ted Cruz is a doofus.
Now that Ted Cruz announced he is a presidential candidate, his views are getting analyzed more carefully by the experts. This debate should be fun over the next few months.
Ted Cruz on Global Warming:
My view actually is simple. Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem cause the science doesn’t back them up. And in particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming. None whatsoever. It’s why — you remember how it used to be called ‘global warming’ and then magically the theory changed to ‘climate change’? The reason is it wasn’t warming, but the computer models still say it is, except the satellites show it’s not.
Summary by Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:
In claiming the globe hasn’t warmed in 17 years, Cruz selectively highlighted satellite temperature data, rather than other data (which NASA and NOAA recently used to call 2014 the hottest year on record). He also selectively focused on one year (1998), rather than examining the aggregate temperatures of many years or decades. And finally, a key scientist who studies this type of satellite data, and whose work was cited by Cruz’s spokesman (as backup), criticizes Cruz’s approach.
I respect Senator McCain’s view on torture and his outspoken and candid approach about it.
The book The Faith of My Fathers is John McCain’s biography. I read and reviewed that book over six years ago during McCain’s run for the presidency. In it he describes in detail and at length the suffering he has endured under torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Here is a brief post I wrote about a visit of McCain back to Vietnam.
John McCain has more authority and standing, by far, than any of his colleagues in the U.S. Senate when it comes to rendering judgment about our nation’s endeavors into torture.
Yet there are his fellow-Republican frat boys who are expressing outrage over the report’s release.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio said the Democrats who run the intelligence committee were exposing the CIA’s shocking treatment of detainees purely for “partisan joy.” What a ridiculous comment. This is America. We deserve to know the truth. “Truth” is defined as what really happened, whether it is convenient, pretty or outrageous. Deal with it, Senator Rubio. I want to know and have a right to know what my government is doing in my name, with my money.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz said the “partisan report will endanger lives, drive away our allies – who have never been needed more than now – and undermine the ability of our intelligence officers and soldiers to protect our national security.” Too bad, Senator Cruz. If our nation had stood up for its own values and behaved like we all hypocritically pretend it should, we would not have created this problem for ourselves in the first place. Most of this mess we are in we have created for ourselves in over 50 years of meddling with people we don’t care about and we don’t understand, mostly because we wanted their oil. This is what happens when you stir a hornets nest. And now you’re vilifying a report about something we did. We did it alright. Deal with it, Senator Cruz.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said he had “mixed feelings” and was concerned that the “gruesomeness of the details may well inflame people.” Well, if we hadn’t done the gruesome things you’re talking about, we would not be in this situation. But we did.
Marco Rubio never served in the military.
Ted Cruz was valedictorian in high school and has had a brilliant academic career, including Harvard University. He never served in the military.
Rand Paul has an M.D. degree. He never served in the military.
Overall, there are only 18 senators who have any military service in their background.
And then there is Dick Cheney. Even though he was Secretary of Defense, he never served in the military. He said he “never served” because of deferments to finish a college career that lasted six years rather than four, which he attributed to subpar academic performance and the fact that he had to work to pay for his education. Dick Cheney had asked for and received five deferments, four because he was a student and one for being a new father.
I’ll take Senator McCain’s opinion about torture over that of any other senator, especially that of the frat boys and their cronies.
Ted Cruz has been blabbering about Net Neutrality being Obamacare for the Internet.
Ted Cruz – the Internet, and its neutrality, were around 20 years ago when you were still getting debating awards at Princeton. Obama was still an attorney in a Chicago law firm. The Internet was working just fine without you, Ted Cruz, and you, Barack Obama, messing around with it.
For anyone who doesn’t know what Net Neutrality means, and why this is important, you should read this piece in the Oatmeal. Your 7-year-old will understand it after reading this.
By speaking about ensuring Net Neutrality, Obama is doing the right thing at the right time. In a free Internet we trust.