Today Mister (of No More Mister Nice Blog) is taking a hard look at Ted Cruz. Ted is married to Heidi, a division head at Goldman Sachs. You have to ask why, particularly given that circumstance, as Mister notes, the Senator is "playing fast and loose with the United States Full Faith and Credit?" Good question. And Mister has the answer.
This has nothing to do with the Jooz, btw, of whom I am one, but everything to do with the liklihood that Ted Cruz and his wife are enaged in a little arbitrage and insider trading on the movement of stocks prior to a threatened credit ceiling crash.
Ted Cruz's outside power over the Senators and House Reps of his own party is not due to some mystical charisma or even to the ungovernable distributed and amoeba like power of the "grassroots" Tea Party--it is straight up due to control over a pot of money containing no more than a few million dollars donated by corporations. (Politico) ...NoMoreMisterNiceBlog
Both of those are likely loaded with truth. But it doesn't end there.
Jeepers, where have I been. All that international and corporate interest in our homegrown nuts! Particularly the ones who claim but clearly do not deserve the title of "conservative." Maybe "nuts" linked to Cruz is the wrong way to go. Maybe all that macho, fisty energy originates in the political coffers of Goldman Sachs.
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Brad DeLong has a discussion going about what (the hell) Republicans want. Recommended. I was particularly intrigued by one comment.
I think it's more "the GOP knows what they want, but it's so utterly reprehensible that not even the worst among them would dare to say it on the record". They've hinted at it in the margins, though:
* tying the franchise to owning property
* no regulations on corporate activity
* a state religion, either Catholicism or some sort of radical Evangelicalism depending on the speaker
* the death penalty for all sorts of things that aren't even crimes now (homosexuality, communism, etc)
* no regulation of firearms whatsoever
* absolutely no access to contraception or abortion
* no divorce, unless the woman is unfaithful (see also the death penalty line above for that case)
Actually advocating for these things would be electoral suicide, so instead the plan is to gradually collapse the state from within until most of them happen organically. ...Matt
