Moderators: LawBeefaroni, $iljanus
We could just ban Boeing.“Instead of providing low-interest loans to multi-national companies that are shipping jobs to China and other low-wage countries, we should be investing in small businesses and worker-owned enterprises that want to create jobs in the United States of America. If the Export-Import Bank cannot be reformed to become a vehicle for real job creation in the United States, it should be eliminated.”
This week’s charts use participant record data from the Export-Import Bank to display the Bank’s top exporter beneficiaries in general and for each financial vehicle the Bank offered for FY 2013: loan guarantees, insurance coverage, direct loans, and working capital guarantees.
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The Bank’s second top overall exporter beneficiary is alarming: the Bank’s data simply lists several exporters as “Unknown.” A later chart shows that most of these unidentified exporters benefit from insurance assistance. At least for now, almost $3 billion in Ex-Im activity cannot be accounted for with this dataset.
Clinton Foundation?hepcat wrote:The "unknown" category is a bit disturbing.
No need to ninja your response. I'm not a big fan of the Clintons, remember?Rip wrote:Clinton Foundation?hepcat wrote:The "unknown" category is a bit disturbing.
I'm pretty sure that Rip has written a program to auto-reply into each new R&P thread a response from a list of variations of "but the Clinton Foundation also did this scandalous behavior."hepcat wrote:No need to ninja your response. I'm not a big fan of the Clintons, remember?Rip wrote:Clinton Foundation?hepcat wrote:The "unknown" category is a bit disturbing.
I hadn't dug into this much until this thread but just did some reading on it and I'm thoroughly unimpressed by Cruz's or Bernie's position on this. I get the Corporate welfare angle and agree that maybe it is tilted too much to big corporations but the Boeing angle is sort of misleading as well.Isgrimnur wrote:We could just ban Boeing
Fair enough but the original author's work still seems misleading to me. They compiled a report that lumped all the financial assistance together in a way that is plain misleading in my mind. The loan guarantee is probably a fairly cheap product for the Ex-Im to provide versus Boeing having to go to private financing (tieing up far more capital in the process). And yes that might be stealing dollars from the big banks...but frankly who gives a shit...they are vampires too.Isgrimnur wrote:The 'ban Boeing' thing was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
That's true. But I was thrown off by the fact that the bot malfunctioned and left off the obligatory photo of Hillary looking at something.El Guapo wrote:I'm pretty sure that Rip has written a program to auto-reply into each new R&P thread a response from a list of variations of "but the Clinton Foundation also did this scandalous behavior."hepcat wrote:No need to ninja your response. I'm not a big fan of the Clintons, remember?Rip wrote:Clinton Foundation?hepcat wrote:The "unknown" category is a bit disturbing.
hepcat wrote:That's true. But I was thrown off by the fact that the bot malfunctioned and left off the obligatory photo of Hillary looking at something.El Guapo wrote:I'm pretty sure that Rip has written a program to auto-reply into each new R&P thread a response from a list of variations of "but the Clinton Foundation also did this scandalous behavior."hepcat wrote:No need to ninja your response. I'm not a big fan of the Clintons, remember?Rip wrote:Clinton Foundation?hepcat wrote:The "unknown" category is a bit disturbing.
“Just a few weeks ago, I was down in Fort Hood, where the soldiers who were shot by Nidal Hasan were finally, finally, finally awarded the Purple Heart,” Cruz told activists last weekend at the conservative Freedom Forum in Greenville, S.C. “I’ll tell you the reason those Purple Hearts were awarded. I was very proud last year to introduce legislation in the Senate to mandate that the Pentagon award those Purple Hearts.”
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At the end of 2014, Congress passed a bill requiring the Pentagon to reclassify the 2009 attack, and the Fort Hood victims were indeed awarded the Purple Heart.
But Cruz voted not once but twice against the Pentagon authorization bill that changed the Purple Heart policy. A Cruz spokesman told the Dallas Morning News that Cruz voted against the bill over an issue unrelated to the Fort Hood shootings but that “he would have found another way to get it done” had the bill had not passed. “Supporting one amendment certainly does not mean a senator is obligated to support the entire bill.”
And although Cruz played an important role on the Senate Armed Services Committee at last year, the credit for changing the Pentagon’s long-standing policy belongs to at least a dozen senators and members of Congress who had pushed the issue relentlessly for years before Cruz ever arrived in the Senate.
It was Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), not Cruz, who originally introduced legislation to award the Purple Heart to the Fort Hood victims in 2009. Cornyn’s bill coincided with a similar bill from Representative John Carter (R-TX), whose district includes much of Fort Hood. Cornyn and Carter would introduce their bills again in 2011 and 2013. Representatives Roger Williams (R-TX), Frank Wolf (R-VA), and Peter King (R-NY) all pushed the matter in their own committees.
Representative Michael McCaul, another Texas Republican and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, held hearings on the matter. Senator Joe Lieberman (I/D-CT), the former chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, did the same and commissioned a months-long investigation into the causes of the Fort Hood attack.
Lieberman introduced a bill of his own, along with Cornyn, in 2012 to mandate that the Pentagon change its criteria for awarding the Purple Heart that would include the Fort Hood victims. In 2014, Senator John Boozman, a Republican from Arkansas who is also on the Armed Services Committee, wrote legislation similar to Cruz’s to mandate that the Pentagon award Purple Hearts to victims of a similar shooting at a Little Rock military recruiting center in 2009.
Neal Sher, a lead attorney for the Fort Hood victims and their families who sued the Pentagon over the policy, said the reclassification was the result of efforts by multiple offices for multiple years on and off Capitol Hill.
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Cruz ran into a buzz saw with Senator John McCain last month after the Texas senator told a New Hampshire audience that he had been pressing McCain to hold congressional hearings to allow members of the military to carry personal firearms on military bases. Cruz suggested that McCain had yet to respond.
McCain said Cruz had never spoken with him about it at all.
Thank you.Isgrimnur wrote:Can we get a bigimg tag so our Technical Admin isn't breaking the margins?
The Clinton Foundation breaks the margins.Isgrimnur wrote:Can we get a bigimg tag so our Technical Admin isn't breaking the margins?
Yet oddly appropriate if the Dem rallying cry turns into "stop Bush."Holman wrote:Ted Cruz's online ads now end on the dramatic tagline "Stop Obama."
Isn't that a pretty low bar to set for the 2016 election?
Call it a public display of political affection: Sen. Ted Cruz has invited Donald Trump to Washington next month for a rally against the Iran nuclear deal.
The two Republican rivals are set to appear at an event organized by the Tea Party Patriots, the Center for Security Politics, and the Zionist Organization of America, according to the Cruz campaign.
Mort Klein, the ZOA president, said the rally has been in the works for weeks, though Trump's inclusion is a relatively new development.
"I think it's of great value to have a person who will likely command coverage of this rally, of this issue, like Donald Trump would be able to," he said. "I think it's a good thing. I don't care if he sucks the air out of the room."
That's one way to endear yourself to your fellow Republican.Moliere wrote:"I think it's of great value to have a person who will likely command coverage of this rally, of this issue, like Donald Trump would be able to," he said. "I think it's a good thing. I don't care if he sucks the air out of the room."
It was the surest sign yet that Cruz's apparent strategy of wooing the controversial candidate — and positioning himself to win over Trump supporters if (or when) the businessman flames out of the race — is starting to pay off.
However Trump’s magic-carpet ride through GOP primary season ends, it will be remembered for (among other things) just how ill-prepared his fellow candidates were to take him on. Jeb Bush tried this week, in his characteristically genteel way, to respond to the insults that Trump has been hurling at him like spitballs all summer: “There’s a difference between Donald Trump and me: I’m a proven conservative with a record,” he told a gaggle of reporters last week with his hands clasped uncomfortably in front of him. Trump, not just undeterred but energized by the reaction, told the New York Times that Bush was a “low-energy person” — a phrase he’s repeated several times, knowing that it tweaks the younger Bush brother — and took to Twitter to mock him for rarely using his last name. Scott Walker has tried to ignore him, refusing to answer whether or not he supports birthright citizenship and declaring himself “unintimidated” so often it’s hard to believe him. But the Donald’s diatribes have caused him to slip in the polls, too.
Not so with Ted Cruz, who may be the only top-tier candidate willing to embrace Trump. Yes — Ted Cruz is a top-tier candidate — even though he’s been more or less ignored by the rest of the field since he launched his campaign back in March. The most important poll numbers right now come from Iowa: They’re the first state to caucus, and the momentum a candidate is able to pick up there will be important in determining who moves forward in the race. In Iowa, Cruz is averaging fourth place in polls. (He’s running fifth in the national poll averages.) In the last fund-raising quarter, only Jeb Bush out-raised him in the Republican field.
He did, however, wade into one ethical morass — the European refugee crisis — saying that he believes that the United State should accept refugees, but only if they’re Christian. Cruz speculated that many of the Muslim refugees are terrorists using the crisis as a means of unfettered egress.
“I think the Christians are a very different circumstance because Christians are being persecuted, they are being persecuted directly for their faith and the Obama administration has abandoned Middle East Christians,” he said.
At The Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Forum in Des Moines, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee agreed. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum suggested that America should focus on helping the Christians refugees, but that they should do so in Middle Eastern countries, so that they might be better able to return to their homelands at a future point in time.
So we're going with that old chestnut, eh?“If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS," the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate told reporters. "We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. We will arm the Kurds. We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know if you go and join ISIS, if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.”
OMG, that's all I remember for two years leading up to the elections. "Continuing the failed policies of the Bush administration" Hallary and Obama were broken records on that account.raydude wrote:Weird. I don't remember any 'stop bush' ads. Care to link examples?
Isn't he late to the party? Wasn't that Trump's rallying cry before the Paris craziness? Maybe Cruz is stumping for Trump? Strumping? He's a strumpet?Smoove_B wrote:Ted Cruz has a plan:
So we're going with that old chestnut, eh?“If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS," the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate told reporters. "We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. We will arm the Kurds. We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know if you go and join ISIS, if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.”
My bad - Trump has indeed called for interesting tactics - namely violating the Geneva Convention:LordMortis wrote:Isn't he late to the party? Wasn't that Trump's rallying cry before the Paris craziness? Maybe Cruz is stumping for Trump? Strumping? He's a strumpet?
Sounds like they'd make a great team.“But we're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he claimed.
That's kind of the core point of waging jihad though, right? To die in righteous battle to secure eternal afterlife? He should be threatening to put every militant into suspended animation or something.Smoove_B wrote: We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know if you go and join ISIS, if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.”
If Donald Trump is your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving then Ted Cruz is the charming sociopath your sister brings to Christmas. During a speech at the Rising Tide Summit in Iowa, the freshman senator from Texas whipped the crowd into a frenzy by suggesting Pres. Barack Obama wasn’t doing enough to defeat radical Islam.
Cruz thinks he can do better. “We will utterly destroy ISIS,” he said. “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”
That’s right, Ted Cruz just promised to nuke the Middle East if elected.
Unlike Hillary I don't think he said nuclear.Isgrimnur wrote:Shoot 'em in the dark
If Donald Trump is your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving then Ted Cruz is the charming sociopath your sister brings to Christmas. During a speech at the Rising Tide Summit in Iowa, the freshman senator from Texas whipped the crowd into a frenzy by suggesting Pres. Barack Obama wasn’t doing enough to defeat radical Islam.
Cruz thinks he can do better. “We will utterly destroy ISIS,” he said. “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”
That’s right, Ted Cruz just promised to nuke the Middle East if elected.
He also earned cheers from the audience for calling multiple times to abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
While only the second candidate to speak, Cruz received the first, second and third total standing ovations of the day.
I would've thought Hillary bringing up a nuclear option for Iran would make your nether regions go all tingly, while causing you to gaze longingly at her picture as you hang it over your desk.Rip wrote:
Unlike Hillary I don't think he said nuclear.
If she had meant it. But I know she was just being a tease.hepcat wrote:I would've thought Hillary bringing up a nuclear option for Iran would make your nether regions go all tingly, while causing you to gaze longingly at her picture as you hang it over your desk.Rip wrote:
Unlike Hillary I don't think he said nuclear.