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Ted Cruz recuses self on anything before 1970

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[Q]: A third Texas president, L.B.J., created Medicare in the mid-’60s. Your hero Ronald Reagan campaigned vigorously against that, saying it would lead to socialized medicine, would end liberty in the United States. Who was right: L.B.J. or Reagan?
[Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz]: It’s not worth tilting at windmills. I don’t know. I wasn’t alive then.
Who was right? Who’s to say? That was in the before-times. I have no opinions on the before-times.

Republican field; sob, stop quoting me!

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Rand Paul spent the first day of his official candidacy testily explaining to reporters that nothing he said before about 2009, when he began running for office, is in any way relevant to his presidential run now and so it’s all off limits. In one case, he even claimed that something he said in 2009 was said in 2007, pushing it back out of the acceptable-to-ask category, per his rules.

Worker loses her job

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/30/after-a-story-is-published-a-minimum-wage-worker-loses-her-job/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_3_naShanna Tippen was another hourly worker at the bottom of the nation’s economy, looking forward to a 25-cent bump in the Arkansas minimum wage that would make it easier for her to buy diapers for her grandson. When I wrote about her in The Post last month, she said the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief. (she’d need to earn nearly $12 an hour to live above the poverty line.)http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/17/the-25-cent-raise-what-life-is-like-after-a-minimum-wage-increase/In 1968, somebody could live above the poverty line with a family of three on a full-time minimum wage job.

Government Handouts The Rich Get

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In case you are still skeptical the rich receive benefits from government (for which we don’t make them pee in a cup or promise not to buy luxuries),
1. The mortgage interest deduction for big houses and second homes. Thanks to this tax break, the 5 million households in America making more than $200,000 a year get a lot more housing aid than the 20 million households living on less than $20,000. Deductions for mortgage interest incentivize people already capable of buying big homes to buy even bigger ones.

Making the poor prove they’re worthy

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We don’t drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don’t require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they’re pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don’t require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don’t use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this).

A major party gone mad?

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There was never any evidence to support strong supply-side claims about the marvels of tax cuts and the horrors of tax increases; even freshwater macroeconomists, despite their willingness to believe foolish things, never went down that road.
Since the 1970s there have been four big changes in the effective tax rate on the top 1 percent: the Reagan cut, the Clinton hike, the Bush cut, and the Obama hike.  they predicted dire effects from the Clinton hike; instead we had a boom that eclipsed Reagan’s.

Tom Cotton: Bombing Iran would take just days

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In short, Tom Cotton, 2015: “Several days air and naval bombing … “
Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, on the prospect of war with Iraq: “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
Uh-huh. About that …
If the war in Iraq had ended after the six months that Rumsfeld thought was so unlikely, maybe Cotton could fool Americans into thinking that bombing Iran now wouldn’t have broader implications.

Gerrymandering congressional districts: North Carolina Republicans

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It’s such a radical plan even some Republicans are opposed to it. Gov. Pat McCrory blasted it. “If someone wants to change the form of government in one of your cities, then go run for city council, for mayor,” he told Raleigh’s News & Observer. Jerry Daniels, a Republican Trinity City Council member is appalled. One bill would shrink his council from nine members to six. “She’s trying to get Republicans on the board and Democrats off.

The “Special Snowflake”

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 It’s the religious far-right’s “special snowflake” syndrome: conservative Christians thinking that because they believe God sanctions their particular brand of bigotry, they’re special snowflakes who shouldn’t be restrained by human decency, much less the pesky laws that the rest of us are obliged to follow. If you hate hard enough, the rules don’t apply to you because you are a special snowflake, who really, really believes in what you’re doing.