Ted Cruz Responds to Caitlyn Jenner's Bathroom Break

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/ted-cruz-responds-caitlyn-jenner-s-bathroom-break-n565351

In an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, Cruz claimed Pres. Barack Obama, former Sec. Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump want to pass a law "that says any adult man can go into a girl's restroom if he feels like a woman at that minute."

He continued, "The real danger is not people who are transgendered. It's people who are predators."

The direct challenge from Jenner did not cause Cruz to back away from his position. "People who are predators…use that law as an excuse to go target our kids. And that is a real danger," he said.

Calling this a "common sense" issue, Cruz said, "I'm the dad of two little girls. It doesn't make any sense to allow grown adult men, strangers, to be alone in a bathroom with a little girl, and virtually all Americans understand that. And it is only the height of political correctness that refuses to acknowledge that."

Both the federal government and Minnesota’s state government will assess so-called “death taxes” or estate taxes on Prince’s assets, taking away more than half his estate. Between his physical assets—cash, investments, home, etc.—and his future royalties, Prince’s estate has been estimated to be between $300 and $500 million.

If Prince were married, he could have passed on the entirety of his estate to his spouse tax free. However, without a spouse, only $1.6 million of Prince’s estate will be free from Minnesota’s death tax and only $5.45 million will escape the federal death tax.

The combination of Minnesota’s top death tax rate of 16 percent, plus the federal government’s 40 percent rate, means that over 50 percent of Prince’s estate will go to the government.

Had Prince known ahead of time that he would die at such a young age, he may have been able to reduce the government’s reach into his estate through tax planning, but with a fortune as large as his, the government’s claim to his estate was inevitable.

http://dailysignal.com/2016/04/29/why-over-half-of-princes-estate-will-go-to-the-government/

This week, during a talk at Stanford University, former Speaker of the House John Boehner told students that Ted Cruz is "Lucifer in the flesh." And yesterday, a blogger for Patheos reached out to Satanic Temple founder Lucien Greaves (a.k.a. Doug Mesner) for his thoughts on the comparison:

Boehner's comment is illustrative of how well past time it is to adjust our mythologies to reflect our realities. Cruz's failures of reason, compassion, decency, and humanity are products of his Christian pandering, if not an actual Christian faith. It grows tedious when pedophile priests and loathsome politicians are conveniently dismissed as Satanic, even as they spew biblical verse and prostrate themselves before the cross, recruiting the Christian faithful. Satanists will have nothing to do with any of them.

But if Cruz's own political party, his own family, his college classmates, and now the Satanic Temple would rather have nothing to do with him, where will he go? The Illuminati? The Juggalos?

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a44464/ted-cruz-lucifer-the-satanic-temple/

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/04/29/human-centipede-2-high-school

And you thought your high school experience sucked: Some unlucky (or maybe lucky, depending on their feelings toward gross-out B-movies) students at a Tennessee school had to watch Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) during class — and parents weren’t happy.

For the uninitiated, The Human Centipede series revolves around a train of humans sewn together in, uh, let’s just say really gross ways. The second film follows a man who watches the first movie and then creates his own centipede. It was so grotesque that the British Board of Film Classification initially refused to give it a classification, therefore preventing it from entering U.K. theaters. (They later gave it an “18” classification after cuts were made.)

Why a teacher decided to show students this film is unclear, though franchise director Tom Six totally supports it: “It should be mandatory to watch THC2 in school classes,” he tweeted in response to the news. “It deals with a character that is bullied and what to do!”

Superintendent Verna Ruffin disagrees. “The matter has been addressed,” she told The Jackson Sun. “It is inappropriate and unacceptable.” A press release from the school obtained by Jackson Sun reporter Katherine Burgess specifies that the district has launched “an internal investigation regarding the alleged viewing of an inappropriate film” and that the teacher “was immediately suspended and remains suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.”

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/rafael-cruz-ted-cruz-campaign-god-sign

Ted Cruz decided to run for president after God spoke to his wife, Heidi.

That's how Rafael Cruz, Ted's father and a born-again pastor, described his son's decision-making process. Speaking on a syndicated radio show at the end of last year, the elder Cruz recounted that during a Sunday prayer session at a Texas church, Ted Cruz and his family sought God's guidance as to whether the senator should enter the presidential race, and after two hours of praying, God sent a message to Heidi that essentially said: Go for it.

Here's the story, according to Rafael Cruz:

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/tom-petty-prince-hall-of-fame/

As the New York Times reports, it came together when Joel Gallen, the producer and director of the ceremony, wrote to Prince asking him to play lead guitar — he was already going to be there because he was being inducted. But when it came time to rehearse, there were problems. Marc Mann, Jeff Lynne‘s guitarist, recreated Eric Clapton’s famous solo in the middle note-for-note. “And we get to the big end solo,” Gallen says, “and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too!”

Before leaving, Prince reassured Gallen that, even though they didn’t get to rehearse it the way Gallen envisioned it, everything would be fine when it came time to the performance. Let Mann do the first solo, he told Gallen, and he would take over for the end. “They never rehearsed it, really,” Gallen continued. “Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.”

The next day, Prince stepped out of the darkness and blew the roof off of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Petty, who had a perfect view of the proceedings, recalled it with awe. “You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on,'” he said. “I remember I leaned out at him at one point and gave him a ‘This is going great!’ kind of look. He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here.’”

But there’s still one pressing question from the evening: What happened to the guitar that Prince threw up in the air after his solo? As you can see above, although the camera lingers on Prince for several seconds, it doesn’t seem to land. It’s something that’s puzzzled Steve Ferrone, Petty’s drummer. “I didn’t even see who caught it,” he said. “I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again. Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-compendium-of-people-who-hate-ted-cruzs-guts-20160429

Is Ted Cruz really "Lucifer in the flesh," as House Speaker John Boehner declared earlier this week, or is he merely — as 38 percent voters in Florida are willing to believe — a serial killer? Based on the way his 8-year-old daughter, Caroline, recoils from his touch, we could easily be convinced of either possibility.

At a rally in South Bend, Indiana, Thursday, young Caroline was happy to dance with her sister Catherine, but scampered away in horror when her father attempted to scoop her up in a hug. Such behavior has become a recurring theme on the trail: At a February campaign stop in Iowa, Caroline flicked her dad away when he tried to come in for a kiss, screeching, "Ow, ow, ow!"

It's hard to blame Caroline. If your father subjected you to this woman's singing voice, or divulged embarrassing secrets to the world, like the fact that your first sentence was "I like butter," you'd probably despise him too. The fact that he's Ted Cruz — a person who almost no one in the world likes — is secondary.

As Cruz's former college roommate, Craig Mazin, once put it, "One thing Ted Cruz is really good at: uniting people who otherwise disagree about everything else in a total hatred of Ted Cruz."

With varying enthusiasm, GOP elites are accepting Trump as their nominee

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gop-elites-are-now-resigned-to-donald-trump-as-their-nominee/2016/04/28/7ee8cf72-0cbc-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html

Throughout the Republican Party, from New Hampshire to Florida to California, many leaders, operatives, donors and activists arrived this week at the conclusion they had been hoping to thwart or at least delay: Donald Trump will be their presidential nominee.

An aura of inevitability is now forming around the controversial mogul. Trump smothered his opponents in six straight primaries in the Northeast and vacuumed up more delegates than even the most generous predictions foresaw. He is gaining high-profile ­endorsements by the day — a legendary Indiana basketball coach Wednesday, two House committee chairmen Thursday. And his ­rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are making the kind of rushed tactical moves that signal desperation.

The party is at a turning point. Republican stalwarts opposed to Trump remain fearful of the damage the unconventional and unruly billionaire might inflict on the party’s down-ballot candidates in November. But many also now see him as the all-but-certain nominee and are exhausted by the prospect of a contested July convention, according to interviews this week with more than a dozen party figures from coast to coast.

“People are realizing that he’s the likely nominee,” said Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor and onetime endorser of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “The hysteria has died down, and the range of emotion is from resignation to enthusiasm.”

The Texas Republican blasted Boehner, who stepped down from his Congressional seat in September after a lengthy career in the House, as symptomatic of "everything that is wrong and corrupt with Washington."

"What Boehner is angry with me for isn't anything I've said to him -- I haven't said much of anything to him," Cruz said. "What Boehner is angry with me for is standing with the American people -- is energizing House conservatives to stand with the American people and actually honor the commitments we've made."

Cruz's claim that he's never spoken more than fifty words to Boehner is a dubious one, however.

As the Washington Post reported in 2014, Cruz was once Boehner's lawyer -- a fact Boehner divulged during an appearance on Jay Leno's "The Tonight Show."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-cruz-reacts-to-john-boehners-insults-i-dont-know-the-man/