Small World

John Boehner has called Ted Cruz "Lucifer in the Flesh". This is, of course, an exaggeration.

But Cruz HAS been endorsed by Lucifer's wife.

Carly Again

Well, Cruz has chosen Carly Fiorina as his running mate, although we might be excused for wondering, "Running mate for what?" Ted Cruz isn't going to win the nomination. But it confirms a position I was taking last fall (though sadly not here, so I could point to it and say 'I told you so') that Carly was never running for the presidential nomination; she realized that whoever the GOP nominee was,  a woman would be an attractive ticket addition in a race against Hillary.

Okay, so she's not dumb. Evil, maybe. But not dumb.

Repeating a quote from Frank Bruni:

The Washington Post just published a humiliating account of her sluggishness to pay bills from that 2010 campaign. That she stiffed several vendors until January 2015 wasn’t really the damning part: That’s sadly common in politics.

But The Post reported that one of the people stiffed was the widow of the pollster Joe Shumate, who dropped dead of a heart attack, “surrounded by sheets of polling data” for Fiorina, shortly before Election Day in 2010. Fiorina mourned him as “the heart and soul” of her operation, then neglected for years to fork over at least $30,000 that she owed him.

Martin Wilson, who managed that campaign, told The Post that he occasionally implored her to settle up. “She just wouldn’t,” he said.

It’s striking that he’d tattle like that on Fiorina. She apparently doesn’t leave much love in her wake. Reuters interviewed about 30 people who worked for her in 2010, 12 of whom said: Never again. “I’d rather go to Iraq,” one unidentified campaign aide groused.

Cruzus Rafaelis Edwardi ?

Via Paul Krugman's Twitter feed:

Yes, it's for real.

The National Review for Twits

Kevin Drum quotes a National Review blogger laughing at dumb libruls:

Perhaps some of the voices calling for Tubman on the $20 just wanted any prominent African-American woman to replace one of the white males on our currency. If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares? The Obama administration has inadvertently given Tubman fans of all political stripes an opportunity to tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.

Drum observes:

Yeah. That's the ticket. All those folks in the Obama administration had no idea who Harriet Tubman really was. They were all just, check this out Jack: black, female, helped slaves, done. Boxes checked. Identity politics satisfied. Put her on the twenty.

The poor fools. She was religious! She carried a gun while helping slaves escape! She was a Republican! She fought for freedom against a tyrannical government! If you think about it, she's basically the poster child of the modern-day Tea Party. And none of those idiots in the White House had a clue.

Seriously. That seems to be what they think. Next they're going to remind us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican too.

 Yup.

Oh, This Is Sweet

Nothing can start my day off with a happier glow than a conspiracy theory that links Ted Cruz's father, a known nut-case named Rafael, with Lee Harvey Oswald. This takes the Kennedy Assassination conspiracists in a whole new direction, and guarantees another decade of life for the franchise.

This picture is the evidence:

The guy in the foreground is Oswald. The guy to his left, also in white shirt and tie, is a man who sorta looks like he could be Rafael Cruz (or a few thousand other men), who was known to be in either Dallas or New Orleans when this picture was taken.

Sempringham's Razor applies: If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't.

Anyway, if this is just too sweet for you to pass up, you can read about all the other ... um, evidence ... at Wonkette. Or, you can just do a search on "Lee Harvey Oswald Rafael Cruz".

More to This Guy than Meets the Eye

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explains quantum computing:

A Re-Post

This is a re-post of a video I posted in 2008, of Sting and Cheb Mami singing Desert Rose. As I said 8 years ago, "that should be good enough. But instead of the usual music video, you get to look at some of the amazing images created by my favorite photographer, Steve McCurry."

Make sure you click that little thing in the lower right-hand corner to make the images full-screen.



Makes me want to pick up my camera again.

The thing I love about McCurry's photos is the dignity he sees in every subject.

The Sound of Another Shoe Waiting to Drop

You've no doubt seen coverage of the leak of 11.5 million documents (2.6 terabytes, in more modern parlance) from a law firm in Panama, Mossack Fonseca, whose business, one of its partners claims, is "95% ... selling vehicles to avoid taxes." And he didn't mean Buicks.

Already the Prime Minister of Iceland has had to resign because of the leak.

Kevin Drum writes:

In any case, you might find this whole thing a bit boring because it implicates only a bunch of foreigners, mainly in countries already well known for their casual relationship with bribery and corruption. What about the United States? 

[Snip]

Editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung responded to the lack of U.S. individuals in the documents, saying "Just wait for what is coming next" — Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) 

So stay tuned. Maybe Hillary Clinton has millions of dollars stashed away in the Isle of Man! 

I'm not sure if Drum was being sarcastic, but if either Clinton's name comes up it will be the end of Hillary's campaign. 

What I hope to see, though, are the names of some of the biggest financial donors to the extremist right wing of the Republican Party. And I don't mean the Cokes.

We'll see.

But as Liam Stack reports in the NY Times:

One reason there may be relatively few Americans named in the documents is that it is fairly easy to form shell companies in the United States. James Henry, an economist and senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network, told Fusion that Americans “really don’t need to go to Panama.”

“Basically, we have an onshore haven industry in the U.S. that is as secretive as anywhere,” he said.

 Feel better now?
 

E.J. Dionne Jr. Channels Sempringham

From Dionne's column in the Washington Post:

Trump’s troubles threaten to go beyond Wisconsin. He could now lose in other big states that vote next, including Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey and possibly even his home state of New York. If this happens, it will be far easier for the Republican Party bosses (such as they are these days) to deny him the nomination. Trump will come to look less like the rank-and-file Republican favorite and more like a flash in the pan.

Second, Democrats Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would lose their ideal opponent. From their point of view, Trump’s collapse may come too early. It’s true that if the very right-wing Cruz were the Republican nominee instead of Trump, the Democratic winner — it’s still likely to be Clinton, despite Sanders’s current surge — would be favored.

But an utter Trump implosion might free the Cleveland convention to turn to someone entirely outside the current crop of candidates, someone unsullied by the ugly and vulgar GOP primary campaign. A sinking Trump would have far less power to resist such an outcome. Democrats need to prepare now for the strong possibility that they will not be lucky enough to run against The Donald. [My emphasis.]

Or even, for that matter, Ted Cruz.

I'm going back to a prediction I made several months ago: Paul Ryan will be the Republican nominee.