Why are people so afraid of Ted Cruz?

I happened to be standing in the lobby of a car wash when Sen. Ted Cruz was making his presidential announcement speech at Liberty University. Someone in the room muttered, “He’s crazy.” I hear that a lot. It’s a sentiment repeated by people who have no actual knowledge of Ted Cruz or what he stands for. People who say this are simply repeating what they’ve heard in the mainstream media, the same mainstream media that are, quite frankly, scared to death of Ted Cruz.

So, let’s explore where this “Ted Cruz is crazy” mantra comes from. It stems from the accusation that Cruz launched a one-man filibuster to shut down the government. In fact, the liberals are now saying that he did shut down the government and it cost taxpayers billions. None of that is even remotely true. Ted Cruz, remember, was in the Democrat-controlled Senate. He did not have the power to single-handedly shut down the government. He never filibustered. He did make a marathon speech (21 hours and 19 minutes) but, as the New York Daily News noted, “Cruz’s speech was not really a filibuster — he wasn’t blocking anything.”

CBS News wrote, “Though he can’t prevent the Senate from voting to end debate on the House proposal tomorrow, Cruz can speak throughout the night to draw attention to the issue.” And that’s exactly what he did. At issue was the funding of Obamacare in the fall of 2013. The law that Americans overwhelmingly opposed was to go into effect and Republicans — at least some of them — were trying to stop it. In a rare moment of resolve, House Speaker John Boehner pushed through a spending bill that contained no funding for Obamacare. The Senate passed its own version that did. Thus was the impasse that led to a 16-day government shutdown but Cruz didn’t do that. 

Boehner predictably caved and the House passed a bill fully funding Obamacare. That’s when Cruz stepped in with his marathon speech to bring the country’s attention to the problem. Cruz was urging his colleagues on the Republican side to keep the debate open to delay a vote until Harry Reid and the Democrats agreed to defund Obamacare. A handful of Republicans joined with all the Democrats and ended debate thus allowing another Senate vote on a bill that fully funded Obamacare. Senators like Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker cleverly voted to end debate then turned around and voted against the bill so they could go on record as saying they voted against anything that funded Obamacare. They clearly allowed the vote to take place and without a doubt were among the henchmen who allowed Obamacare to be implemented.

Many Republicans predicted Cruz’s “stunt” would have disastrous effects on the party. Instead, Republicans won by a landslide a year later primarily because of Americans’ aversion to Obamacare. Ever since Cruz’s failed attempt to get the Republicans to do the right thing he has been vilified by the press and discounted by the RINOs. They’ve attempted to brand him as some dimwitted tea partier who doesn’t quite understand how Washington works. The truth is, Ted Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. His father escaped Castro’s Cuba when he was 18 and worked as a dishwasher to put himself through college.

He’s not only the new face of Hispanics in America, he’s the new face of conservatism. Do you think Hispanic mothers would rather their kids grow up to be like Ted Cruz or grow up to clean Hillary Clinton’s mansion in Chappaqua? 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

You can't call a freak a freak

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe. I came across a story about how to correctly speak to a transgender. Not a transexual, mind you. Transgender. Generally speaking, transexuals are people who have gone through a sex change operation; most famously, what Bruce Jenner is going through. Transgenders are basically guys who like to dress up as women. It’s what we used to refer to as transvestites.

This article covered the finer points of not offending transgender people and speaking in politically correct terms. So, I posted the story to Twitter and said they forgot one term: freak. Oh, you’d have thought I’d written a scathing review of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. People called it #hatespeech and said I was a #bigot and I was, like, #Idon’tcare. This led to a back and forth between several tweeters and me that spilled over to my radio show.

They were telling me that I have no right to discriminate against a guy who wears a dress. Think about that for a moment. You’ve got Bob in the office who’s set to make the big pitch to the meeting of clients and the morning of, Bob comes walking into the conference room in a dress with lipstick and a wig. And we’re not supposed to think Bob’s a freak? And if we can’t “discriminate” then we allow Bob to lose the account and possibly millions of dollars in the process. Is that the kind of wacked-out world these folks think we live in? Again, parallel universe.

Let’s just say I’m at a restaurant and some dude shows up to take my order in fishnet hose and a mini-skirt. Am I just supposed to roll with that because I’m hip or I’m “with it” or I don’t want to be a dinosaur? Somebody has to say this is crazy and I’m here to say just that.

Look, I don’t care what you do on your own time. If you’re a guy and you wanna dress up like a chick and paint the town red, go right ahead. But don’t act like I’m nuts because I think you are. For those of you who don’t think there’s anything wrong with a guy showing up at work one day in a dress, how about if he showed up wearing nothing at all. There are those people, too. The “clothing-optional” crowd thinks that we weren’t meant to wear clothing and that we’re meant to be au naturel. Any problem with Bob showing up in the nude? Oh, you have a problem with that? What are you, a dinosaur?

Every generation wants to push the limits of conformity. I’m not necessarily against being an iconoclast. In fact, I’m probably one myself. There are, however, certain societal norms and guys being guys and girls being girls is one of those norms. But, here’s what they say now. Your sex is what you were born with. Your gender is who you think you are. Really? No, it’s pretty cut and dried. Your gender is your sex. The dictionary defines gender as “either the male or female division of a species.” 

We were made male and female for a reason. Gender is designed for the progression of the species, including the human species. Anyone who defies gender definition is going against the norms of nature. You certainly have every right to do it, but we have a right to call it what it is. It’s a person who exhibits a strange deviation from nature. And that is literally the dictionary definition of a freak.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The Cowardly Congress and the Debt

At some point you have to start wondering what the point was of putting the Republicans in charge of the House and Senate. I know, it could be a lot worse with Democrats able to pass anything they like but, as it stands, Republicans are doing very little to undo the damage that was done by Democrats when they could.

The latest cave is on the debt ceiling. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell let it be known that he has no intention of not increasing the debt. And then he actually said that the Republicans would be attaching conditions to raising the debt ceiling. Look, Mitch, the game is over. You’ve already telegraphed what you’re going to do. Why on earth would the Democrats work with you on anything. It’s like telling the car salesman, “There’s no way I’m walking off this lot without that car,” then telling him you want $5,000 off. It ain’t gonna happen. He has you and he knows it. The Democrats have McConnell and they know it. In fact, we’ve all known it before he ever became senate leader.

Right now we’re spending about 9 cents of every dollar coming into the Treasury to service the debt. That’s like you or me paying just the interest on our debt. We’re not paying the debt down. We’re just treading water. In fact, it’s worse than that. We’re adding to the debt all the time and every so often we come up against the debt ceiling. This is a self-imposed limit on how much debt we can run up. Congress debates whether or not to continue the idiocy of piling on more debt and they inevitably vote to bust through the debt ceiling.

That means that 9 cents on the dollar we pay on interest grows. By how much will it grow in the future? Well, that’s debatable. What’s not debatable is the fact that it will grow. Some economists say it’ll be 40 cents on the dollar by 2030. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed but 2030 is just 15 years away.

So, think of that for a moment. We’re now squabbling over how to spend 91 percent of the money coming in. In just 15 years we could be fighting over just 60 percent of the money coming in. At that point, it’s all over. You have to ramp up deficit spending just to maintain the status quo.

Why won’t Congress do something about it? Because they either believe or they’re part of the lie that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling we’ll default on all our debt. Let me put it to you this way. You have a house note and three car notes. You’re keeping your head above water by paying the interest on each loan because you have revenue coming in. If you go out and buy another car that busts the budget are you going to default on the other three cars and the house? Of course, not. That doesn’t even make sense. You have enough revenue coming in to service your existing debts. You just can’t afford to add to that debt. So you default on the fourth car, not the rest of your debt.

This nonsense that we’re going to default on our entire debt and bring forth a global depression is simply a scare tactic used by those who are either unwilling or unable to stop spending. We could balance the budget within 5 years just by freezing spending and allowing revenue to catch up. But that would take courage, which is sorely lacking in Congress.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The fix was in on amnesty

Republicans never planned to stop President Obama’s unilateral amnesty. So says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. He told reporters, “The cake was baked from the start.” He said he knew all along Republicans wouldn’t vote to defund the Department of Homeland Security with ISIS on the March. He was right.

This whole amnesty debacle is yet another example of how the GOP has chosen to punt rather than tackle the most pressing issues before them: amnesty and Obamacare. They’ve had multiple opportunities to defund both but they refuse to. Instead, they pass meaningless show bills designed to get them on record as having voted against both so they can claim to their constituents that they’re doing all they can. Well, they’re not.

The problem is in the leadership. Neither Mitch McConnell in the Senate nor John Boehner in the House has any intention of dismantling Obamacare or amnesty. There’s a new wave of frustration sweeping the nation which gave us a new slate of tea party senators and congressmen but the old guard of the GOP is still intact and that’s where the problem is.

It’s obvious now what’s going on. McConnell and Boehner love these problems of Obamacare and amnesty as campaign issues. So much so that they want to keep them around for each new election. Then when each new Congress gets underway, they trot out bills to repeal both, which quietly die a natural death, and the issue is preserved to stoke another round of voters.

This is the way things work in Washington. It’s not how they work in the real world. In the real world, we solve problems every day. Sales are down? We find out why and we fix it. Employee productivity is down? We find out why and we fix it. Most Americans are solving problems at work on a daily basis so why can’t Congress solve anything?

Again, some issues are more suited for vote-trolling than they are solving. We should expect more. We deserve better.

The two issues are quite simple to solve. First, with amnesty, you block any funding for this illegal executive action. If that means parts of the government get shut down then so be it. Hopefully, the Supreme Court is going to step in before long and have their say about this executive branch overreach. Once that’s settled then you demagnetize America. The illegals came here for the benefits and the jobs. You cut those off. They will take the path of least resistance, which is back home. You completely seal the border then you start processing people the right way. Background checks, criminal searches, you look for terrorist ties, diseases. Once people have been cleared and there are sufficient jobs waiting to support them, you let those you’ve screened back in.

On Obamacare, it’s just going to have to be ripped out by the roots. We popped a pimple with a sledge hammer. Yeah, there were some folks falling through the cracks. We could’ve rolled them into Medicaid and been done with it. Instead, this president and the complicit Congress at the time completely revamped the entire healthcare system. They moved it away from a market solution and into a government solution.

The problem all along with healthcare is we’ve disconnected the patient from the service with cheap co-pays for medicine and doctor’s visits. Insurance should be reserved for the big stuff, like your car or homeowner’s insurance. You don’t use your homeowner’s to get the grass mowed.

Problems are pretty easy to solve, if you have folks who really want to solve them.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.