Tag: Ted Cruz

Cruz and Paul and Inhofe, Oh My!

Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and James M. Inhofe and James Lankford, both of Oklahoma… okay, you know this will be about ignorance, maybe willful, maybe not.

Continuing their fight against science and knowledge, Cruz, Paul, Inhofe and Lankford tried to prevent a nonprofit educational organization called Climate Central from providing documented climate information to our nation’s TV weather forecasters. Climate Central provides information and graphics to about 750 meteorologists who have requested it. Material supplied by Climate Central has appeared in more than 1,200 broadcasts in the first half of 2019.

The four senators — is it necessary to mention they’re Republicans? — demanded an investigation into the $4 million federal funding the non-profit receives from the National Science Foundation. The four snowflakes said the NSF had “issued several grants which seek to influence political and social debate rather than conduct scientific research.”

After an investigation at who knows what cost, the NSF’s Inspector General said Naw, the program was thoroughly vetted, scientifically sound and non-political.

In other Cruz news, the Texas senator wrote to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and FBI director Christopher Wray urging an investigation into Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s handling of recent Antifa demonstrations in the Rose City. He says the Antifa group was mean to the far-right groups Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys who also were demonstrating in Portland. Cruz said it was like when authorities failed to protect civil rights demonstrators against violence from the Ku Klux Klan. To date, Mayor Wheeler has not commented on Senator Cruz’s demands.

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Your – Not Their – Tax Dollars at Work

The state of Texas prides itself as a bastion of independence and free enterprise. Business thrives without government regulation and fiercely opposes government interference in capitalistic enterprises. Except when it does want the government to interject itself into business. In a state with abhorrence for tax money subsidizing health insurance and the highest percentage of citizens without coverage, but where the Oil Depletion tax giveaway is sacred, Texas is now seeking a new federal subsidy for its favorite industry. The state wants government funding for oil and gas installations and it wants all U.S. taxpayers, not just Texans, to pay.

After more than a century-and-a-half of contributing CO2 to the world, the fossil fuel industry wants taxpayer-funded protection for the increasingly powerful storms and higher tides, effects of the changing climate. Climate-change deniers and fiscal conservatives – except when the money flows to their state – Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are pushing a scheme for $12 billion of federal money to build sixty-miles of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast. Petrochemical plants, including most of Texas’s thirty refineries, want us all to pay for protecting their facilities. (And if you believe $12 billion will be enough, well, you know…)

Texas has an $11 billion dollar “rainy day” fund, but the Republican controlled legislature opposes spending its own money to protect infrastructure in its own state.

From Talking Points Memo. Read all about it here.

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