This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 24)

This Week's TWiA is abbreviated for lack of time, not for lack of news.

This Week in 2016

Terminator for president? Not Arnold--he's not eligible, although for a while Republicans were talking about trying to amend the Constitution so that he would be. In recent polling, the Terminator, Darth Vader, and the shark from Jaws are more popular than any of the current presidential candidates, from either party. Voldermort ranks beneath all the Democrats, but above most of the Republicans in the field.

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Gov. Scott Walker (R/WI), a rare presidential candidate who never graduated from college, hates universities.

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Just how bad a president would Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) be? In an interview with the Washington Post's brand-new site PowerPost, Cruz reveals the truth: he'd be terrible. According to the Post: "Cruz promised to do whatever it takes to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which he calls 'the single greatest national security threat to the United States.'”

That's crazy talk. Even if Iran had a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't use it, for the same reason nobody else has used one since WWII, even though multiple countries have them. They know to do so would be suicide. As for the idea that they would provide one to Islamic jihadists--most of those are Sunnis, and Iran's leadership is Shiites. If terrorists want nukes, they'd be far more likely to get them from sympathetic Pakistan, or from thoroughly insane, cash-poor North Korea, than to go begging from the hated Shiites. Iran is fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq; why would they provide their enemies a nuclear weapon?

In a world with ISIS, North Korea, a newly power-mad Putin in Russia, an emergent and aggressive China, and a nuclear Pakistan, to claim that Iran is the biggest threat shows that Cruz is reacting to what's in the right-wing media rather than thinking through our various foreign policy issues.

Of domestic affairs, he says, "“I intend to do everything possible to make 2016 a referendum on repealing Obamacare and adopting a flat tax.”

Also crazy. Millions upon millions of Americans now have health insurance, because of the Affordable Care Act. When the law first went into effect, right-wing media played up every conceivable story of people who "lost" their insurance plans "because" of it. Never mind that most of them were eligible for better, cheaper plans. Never mind that under the old system, people lost plans all the time--employers could, and did, often change insurance companies, and insurance companies could, and did, drop old plans and offer new ones. But that was big news on the right. If the Supreme Court guts the subsidies in King v. Burwell (which Cruz says he's "cautiously optimistic" about), at least 6 million Americans will lose their plans. If Cruz succeeded in "repealing Obamacare," many more millions would lose their plans. Republicans have had five years to propose a working alternative; they have yet to do so. Cruz literally wants to see Americans once again face bankruptcy or death because they couldn't afford the medical care they needed, all in service of some extreme ideology.

The flat tax idea is also insane--it's a huge giveaway to the rich, paid for by the rest of us. Marie Antoinette couldn't come up with a worse tax plan.

There's more, but it all adds up to this: Cruz is completely unsuited to the Senate, much less the presidency. He should be running a Republican committee in some Texas county, where he can spew his ideological nonsense all day long without hurting anyone.

Side Note: Rep. (and former VP candidate) Paul Ryan (R/WI) also thinks taking health insurance away from 6 million+ Americans is a good thing, because somehow, by enabling them to get health insurance, we've put them "at risk." Yeah, we don't get it, either.

This Week in Strange Bedfellows

The Republican Party gave up its independence years ago. Too many people and organizations outside the party have power and influence over too many of those the party is supposed to represent. Elected officials pay more attention to what Rush Limbaugh says than to the party leaders who are supposed to be working on their behalf. Now two of those organizations, believing they run the party altogether, are giving the RNC fits. Fox "News" wants to run the presidential debates, and the format they've come up with is one that allows Fox to "winnow the field," a task meant for Republican primary voters. And the Koch brothers want to run the party database, control its ground game, and maybe supplant it altogether. The RNC is pushing back on both fronts, but it might be too little, too late.

When a political party cedes control of its own operations to outsiders, what is its purpose? 21st century elected Republicans have become so extreme and at the same time so beholden to moneyed interests that it's no longer hard to see them fading away into obscurity over the next few cycles, while some other party finally becomes the competition for the Democrats.

We're not saying it's too late for Republicans. But if they can't break those ties, it might well be.

This Week in Gun Safety

This was reported last week (and happened in April) but we didn't see it until this week. The executive director of Gun Owners of America--a group so extreme they almost make the NRA look sane--finally explained why people need guns. "The Second Amendment was designed for people just like the president and his administration. And yes, if the New York Times and the Rolling Stone, and whoever else wants to have a hissy fit, yes, our guns are in our hands for people like those in our government right now that think they wanna go tyrannical on us, we’ve got something for ‘em. That’s what it’s all about. The Second Amendment is not about hunting, it’s not about target shooting, it’s about Democrats who want to take our rights.”

So that makes sense, right? People need guns to prevent other people from taking away their guns. Of course, if they didn't have guns, nobody would want to take them away, so then they wouldn't need guns. Guy's obviously a genius.

This Week in Bears

Mama bear and five (!!) cubs.

We've always said that bears are smart, so it's no surprise that so many of them want to go to school. That said, this one should have known better than to try to enroll in Man Elementary, because it's obviously species-intolerant.