Since retiring from my "day job" I've taken a break from blogging. Now that I have more time on my hands I've been engaged in more hands on activism. I volunteer for the Harris County Democratic Party one day a week. I am also a Houston area neighborhood organizer for Battleground Texas. I register voters, make calls and knock on doors on behalf of Wendy Davis. It has been an empowering break from pounding away on the keyboard, week after week. But when I read about Ted Cruz's latest and most dangerous political stunt in our nation's Capitol last week, it brought me straight back here. - Carolyn Shore Aresu, aka Libby Shaw
Come home, Ted. You don't like Washington D.C. and Washington D.C. doesn't like you. Many of your Republican colleagues probably wish you were never born, much less elected.
It is not as if the majority of us want you to come back. Many of those who voted for you regret their decision. And honestly, Ted, the only reason someone like you could get elected in Texas is because we are a low voting state.
The thing is this. If you are in Texas instead of Washington D.C. you would not be able to inflict any more damage to our nation's financial stability, your constituents' health and economic well-being and to the already tarnished reputation of a state gone right wing red wild.
In a little over a year you, Senator, have turned Texas into the biggest and most loathed laughingstock in the U.S.
It has been bad enough for Texans, God knows, after having to live under the pay to play, crony capitalism and it's my way or the highway politics visited upon us by Rick Perry for the past fourteen long suffering years. During his seemingly endless tenure the Governor and his Republican right flank, which includes a toxic brew of the Texas Taliban, racists, xenophobes and corporate greed masters, have been masterful at dismantling the institutions and values that once made Texas great.
The Republican hard right has degraded public education. It has been on a tireless crusade to replace science with religion in school curricula. It has turned a taxpayer funded cancer research institute into a cash cow for itself and its crony donors. It has declared a misogynist war on women's reproductive rights. It proclaims to be pro-life while our state has a barbaric death penalty rate. It loves and protects the fetus but hates the born child, especially if the child is poor, black or brown. It punishes the sick who are poor by refusing to accept federally expanded Medicaid. It has outdone itself in making the right to vote harder for Texans who don't think and look like a member of its hard right white club.
This is the short list.
But as bad as all of the above is for the majority of Texans, at least none of the Governor's and his far right ideologues, for all their human wretchedness and depravity, moral bankruptcy, whoring politics, religious fanaticism, pathological greed, and abject heartlessness, have threatened to bring down the financial underpinnings of the state.
Alas, the same cannot be said for you, Mr. Cruz. For the stunt you pulled in the U.S. Senate last week should force you to find another job. After all, you have miserably failed to fulfill the basic tenets of the oath you took to serve the constitution and your constituents.
Worse, you seem to be on a one way mission to visit irreparable harm on the U.S.
Very few Americans know how close the country came to catastrophe this week.
What happens when a narcissistic demagogue and the jerk of all jerks goes to Washington D.C.
Cross posted on Texas Kaos.
There will be no more government shut downs, Ted, in which your little grand standing stunt cost the U.S. $24 billion in lost productivity. How's that for fiscal responsibility Ted? You threw a temper tantrum because you personally don't like Obamacare. And yet you nor your pathetic, cowardly Party have zip, zilch, nada of an alternative plan for millions of uninsured Americans.
I guess it never occurred to you. Apparently it isn't your problem. That or you simply don't care because everything is all about you and no one else. All of the time.
By the way, your cheap lying act of cowardice by trying to blame your $24 billion sinkhole on the President did not play well in the national media, even among some of the traditionally Republican friendly talk show hosts.
You might think you live in a cozy Koch boy manufactured alternative universe, Ted, but the rest of us live and breathe everyday reality.
Your reckless and unnecessary government shut down disrupted the lives and livelihoods of millions of hard working Americans.
Are you proud? No. You. Don't. Care.
No. You don't care at all because once again you played Russian roulette with default rather than agree to pay our country's bill. Maybe we should call you Deadbeat Ted.
The final tally shows that the Senate voted by a wide margin Wednesday, 67 to 31, to break Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster of an increase in the debt limit, thus avoiding a default on the United States’ full faith and credit.
Look at you Ted. On a self serving mission from hell to wreak havoc with the financial stability of the United States of America. A country you took an oath to serve. Breaking us hardly serves us, Ted the Taker.
Democrats, watching the spectacle, took the extraordinary step of ordering the Senate clerk not to read aloud the ongoing vote tally to avoid setting off a market panic; because the House had already left on a two-week recess, a failure of this vote would have left little chance of avoiding default on Feb. 27, when the Treasury was to run out of funds.
There you go Ted. Agent provocateur, smug and comfy, thinking you are winning a battle against your own country.
Watching the chaos from the side of the chamber was the man who caused it: Cruz, his hands in his pants pockets and a satisfied grin on his face. The Texas Republican strolled to the clerk’s table to check on the vote count and was met with a look of disgust from Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). And the feeling was widespread: Moments after Cruz walked into the Republican cloakroom, four senators emerged from it and changed their votes to “aye.”
And later you smirked Ted, because you made some of your colleagues walk a political plank to avoid a financial catastrophe. You would never do the same, even to avoid a earth shattering calamity, because your narrow minded and mean-spirited ideology would never permit it.
Cruz reemerged from the cloakroom, chewing gum, his hands again in his pockets. He smirked as his colleagues finally overcame his filibuster after a 59-minute struggle.
I've seen some of your biggest supporters in Houston. I have to say they are not the nicest people in the world. Earlier this year at one of your tea party rallies in northwest Houston, a young Hispanic man I know decided to attend. You were speaking that night Ted. The room was packed. Later when I asked the young man about the rally he said it was a very ugly, racist event. Some of your supporters called him a wetback and told him to go back to Mexico. The young man was born right here in Houston. Nice people, Ted. We are the company we keep after all.
But I am not surprised. You and your Party have been bringing out the worst in people for as long as I can remember. Your scorched earth divisive politics of Karl Rove are acts of desperation in my book. You have no ideas, no agenda other than perks for yourselves, your friends and donors. You have shown us time and time again that your Party is incapable of governing. You have resorted to becoming masters at playing the hate and fear cards. You have been blowing the shrill dog whistles since Tricky Dick Nixon. You have no vision for the future. Zip. Instead you break the government and then scream about a broken government. You offer nothing but hate, fear and divisiveness.
You pay spin masters millions of dollars to manufacture sound bytes, catchphrases and slogans that possess the power to convince folks to vote for candidates like you while throwing themselves under the bus. And when your supporters begin to smell a rat or two you find a scapegoat.
Alas, many of us are onto your game, Ted. We know what you and others like you do.
That said, Ted, it is time to come back to Texas.
You are far too dangerous to be in Washington D.C. You seem to be free of a conscience. You know no shame. Not only are you incapable of serving your constituents, you, Ted, are unworthy and unfit to serve the majority of us in the once great state of Texas.
To my fellow Texans I ask. Are you sick of this cynical treachery? Are you ready to flip this state from dark red to purple? And then from purple to blue? Are you ready for our elected officials to actually work on our behalves for a change?
Please join Battleground Texas. There is plenty for us to do. There will be a team near you, no matter where you live. If there is no team you will learn how to build a team.
BGTX