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      Democrats want 'illegal aliens and child molesters' to vote, Ted Cruz says – report

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      Claiming Democrats want to expand voting rights to “illegal aliens” and “child molesters”, the Texas senator Ted Cruz warned that if Republicans do not block the For the People Act, major legislation now before the Senate, they will be out of power for years.Cruz also said there was no room for compromise, according to the Associated Press, which cited a recording of a call hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or Alec, a rightwing group which writes and pushes conservative legislation at the state level.Democrats say the bill passed by the US House, also known as HR1, is the only way they can counter voter-suppression legislation under consideration in many Republican-held states, aimed at reducing the voting power of groups, many of them minorities, that traditionally back Democrats.Increasingly, senior Democrats advocate reforming or abolishing the filibuster, which creates a 60-vote threshold for legislation in the Senate and gives Republicans an automatic block in a chamber split 50-50, as a way to pass HR1.“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights,” the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, told the Guardian this month. “That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic.”HR1 does contain protections for the voting rights of former felons. It does not propose extending the franchise to undocumented migrants, though the Biden administration has proposed to move some such groups closer to US citizenship.HR1 also contains campaign finance reform, measures to protect voting by mail and to limit partisan gerrymandering and new ethical rules for holders of federal office.Writing for the Guardian in 2019, when HR1 first passed in the House, Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, said HR1 was “designed to restore some integrity to a democratic system that the supreme court and Republicans have severely wounded.“Or, as LaTosha Brown, co-founder of BlackVotersMatter, asked in 2018, ‘Why is it a struggle for us to cast our damn vote?’”Speaking to CNN last week, Stacey Abrams, a former candidate for governor in Georgia who now campaigns for voting rights, put the issue more starkly still. Republican moves to restrict voting rights, she said, were “Jim Crow in a suit and tie”.Jim Crow was the common name for the system of laws in many southern states which undid post-civil war Reconstruction and suppressed the Black vote well into the 20th century.On the Alec call, Cruz reportedly insisted Democrats’ “only objective” was “to ensure that [they] can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century”.Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, although the electoral college system has placed their man in the White House after three such contests.Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots. Last year, he lost to Joe Biden by more than 7m – and lost the electoral college by the same score by which he won four years before.Republican moves to restrict voting access are backed by claims of electoral fraud which are not borne out by evidence. Trump continues to claim his defeat by Biden was the result of massive fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court.Republicans in states including Georgia and Texas are moving to pass legislation that will seek to restrict access to the vote.Such moves have broad support among conservative voters. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, a Washington advocacy group, told the AP: “It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high. We’ve had a bit of a battle cry from the grassroots, urging us to pick this fight.” More

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      ‘Don’t be assholes’: Ted Cruz criticizes press reports over his Cancún trip

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      The main lesson from the scandal over his flight to Cancún while Texas froze, Senator Ted Cruz said on Tuesday, is that people should not be “assholes”, and should treat each other with respect.The Texas Republican, who ran for the presidential nomination in 2016, is known for his caustic and brutal attacks on Democrats and willingness to buck even the appearance of bipartisan cooperation in the Senate in order to achieve his own goals, even by causing a government shutdown.He was speaking, without discernible irony, today on Ruthless, a podcast which offers “next-generation conservative talk”.The subject at hand was Cruz’s decision to take his family to warmer climes while his state shivered, and the decision thereafter of an unknown friend to leak the senator’s wife’s text messages to the press.Cruz landed in political hot water while at least 30 Texans died in the cold. Temperatures have now risen but water supplies are still affected by power outages which hit millions because the state energy grid was not prepared for the freeze. Many Texans also face exorbitant bills as power companies seek to profit from the disaster.Cruz has condemned such corporate behaviour, but on the podcast he defended Texan energy independence, insisting it was a good thing “the feds don’t get to regulate us so well” and saying it kept energy prices down.He did not go as far as other Texas Republicans to blame the Green New Deal, a package of progressive policy priorities which are not yet law. But while noting that Texas “produces a lot more wind than California does”, Cruz insisted “the wind turbines froze, that was a big problem, the snow and ice on the solar panels dramatically reduced the ability of solar panels to generate electricity”.Most experts say renewable energy sources were not a major factor in the Texas blackouts.“There were also problems with both coal and natural gas production,” Cruz conceded, “and so those drops significantly as well and it was kind of a perfect storm of all of those together”.Cruz’s most passionate complaint was about how the press treated him and his family in an affair in which he first blamed his young daughters for wanting to go to Cancún, then flew home solo and admitted his mistake.“Here’s a suggestion,” he said. “Just don’t be assholes. Just, you know, treat each other as human beings, have to some degree some modicum of respect.”[embedded content]He said his wife Heidi was “pretty pissed” that her messages were leaked, and had been “sort of walking through” the issue with neighbours, attempting to work out who might be responsible.Cruz said he had “lots of friends who are Democrats” and “in fact one of our friends who are Democrats said yesterday, ‘I can’t believe this. I’m defending the right.’”He also complained about coverage of his dog, Snowflake, a poodle pictured seemingly alone at his Houston home while the family was in Mexico. Cruz said Snowflake had been “home with a dog sitter and actually the heat and power was back on”.Cruz reserved special ire for pictures of his wife on the beach in Mexico that were published by the US press.“The New York Post ran all these pictures of Heidi and her bikini,” he said. “I will tell you that she is pissed.” More

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      Republicans eye federal funds to help pay Texans’ exorbitant energy bills

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      Texas Republicans will use federal funds to help pay exorbitant energy bills hitting ordinary Texans after a deep freeze crippled the state this week, a senior congressman said on Sunday.Millions of Texans were subject to blackouts as the cold weather overwhelmed an unprepared state grid, by design independent of federal oversight. The outages contributed to dozens of deaths and a crisis over safe access to water that continued even as temperatures rose.On Saturday, Joe Biden declared a major disaster, releasing funding to help. On Sunday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told ABC’s This Week the president was “eager to go down to Texas and show his support” but would be careful not to disrupt relief efforts.Reports have proliferated that some Texans whose power stayed on are now facing enormous bills, as private companies seek to capitalise. The New York Times reported one case in which a 63-year-old military veteran living on social security in the Dallas suburbs faced an electricity bill for nearly $17,000, 70 times what he would usually pay for all utilities combined.“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Scott Willoughby told the paper, “but it’s broken me”.The Texas Republican Michael McCaul, formerly chair of the House homeland security committee, spoke to CNN’s State of the Union.“The current plans with the federal assistance bill are to help the homeowners both repair, because we have a lot of water leaks a lot of water damage pipes bursting, but also [pay] their electricity bills as well,” he said.Host Dana Bash challenged him, saying: “I’m hearing you say that the federal government is going to help to bail out, and to pay bills in a state which is in part in this mess because it wants to be separate from the federal government. That’s kind of rich, don’t you think?”McCaul dodged the question, saying instead Texas needed to prepare for more extreme climate events. The deep freeze, he said, was “just a preview of what to expect if the United States doesn’t confront the climate crisis head on”.Elsewhere on Sunday, the Democratic mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, told CBS’s Face the Nation: “The bill should go to the state of Texas. When they’re getting these exorbitant electricity bills and they’re having to pay for their homes, repair their homes, they should not have to bear the responsibility.”The Fort Worth mayor, Betsy Price, told CBS both the state and the federal government should be expected to help.The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, called an emergency meeting of state lawmakers on Saturday to discuss the problem, saying in a statement they had a responsibility to ensure Texans “do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills”.The disaster declaration issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or Fema, applied to 77 of 254 Texas counties, leading Abbott to say it should cover the whole state.Psaki said: “What happens here is the governor requested a federal disaster declaration. The president asked his team to expedite that. And Fema determined where … it should focus the immediate resources, where the counties that are hardest hit so that they can make sure they get to the people in most need.“That means not just getting people through this emergency but getting people through the recovery, people who don’t have water, don’t have heating, need a place to stay for a while, that’s what that major disaster declaration will help address, or that’s our hope.”McCaul was asked about remarks in which former Texas governor and US energy secretary Rick Perry claimed: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”McCaul said: “Power sharing would have been helpful if we could have shared with other power grids.” That could not happen, he said, because the Texas grid “was set up … to be independent of federal oversight and regulations. That’s very good with things like cybersecurity, not so good when it comes to an arctic blast like this one.“In 2011, the state legislature after we had a really bad freeze came out with a bipartisan report with recommendations to the energy companies as to how to winterise our operations.”Those recommendations were not followed.“So when it happened our entire energy system was not winterized for sub-zero degree temperatures,” McCaul said. “That is what we’re going to be taking a look at, these recommendations that were made in 2011.”McCaul was also asked about efforts by prominent Democrats including Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former from El Paso but the latter from New York, to help ordinary Texans. Such actions stood in contrast to the behaviour of Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz, who flew to Mexico with his family rather than remain in his Houston home, a move for which he has been pilloried.“I think we need to be helping as well,” McCaul said, “and we will with the federal emergency declaration that we got from the president. But I think it’s great that they’re crossing party lines to help Americans first and not just Republicans or Democrats.“… I know that some are taking heat. Like, when a crisis hits my state I’m there. I’m not going to go on some vacation. I know Mr Cruz calls it a mistake and he’s owned up to that. But I think that was a big mistake.” More

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      Saturday Night Live: Regé-Jean Page hosts, cast use Cruz news for boos

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      We open on a Las Vegas talk show, Oops, You Did it Again. Hosted by Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman), who we all know from her “upbeat Instagram videos and the word ‘conservatorship’”, the show is a forum for public apologies.After a much-deserved potshot at Justin Timberlake, Spears welcomes her first guest: Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant). Sporting cornrows and drinking a piña colada, the Texas senator, who this week got caught vacationing in Cancún amid his state’s energy crisis – and who blamed the whole thing on his young daughters – admits “I’m in a little bit of hot water, which is something I’m told people in Texas don’t have.”Next, Spears welcomes New York governor Andrew Cuomo (Pete Davidson), begrudgingly apologizing for “the nursing home stuff”. It pains him to eat crow, and he reaches breaking point after learning that “bird bitch” Mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks he should be investigated. Still, at least Cuomo’s not as pathetic as Cruz, whose sympathy he harshly rebuffs: “Do not. Associate yourself. With Me. I am a man. You are a clown. If you mess with me, I will send you to a clown hospital. And when you die, I will not count your body.”Last up is Mandalorian actor Gina Carano (Cecily Strong), let go from the Disney show for, among other things, comparing criticism of conservatives to Nazi persecution. She huffs and puffs about cancel culture and asks why Disney has the right to take the moral high ground: “Have you heard Brer Rabbit’s accent on the Splash Mountain ride?” This is a fair point, but having it come from Carano feels way off. Regardless, even she wants nothing to do with Cruz, telling him, “Do not. Associate yourself. With me.”The show gets points for going with an original setup for the cold open, as well as its mercilessness towards Cruz. That said, the cast constantly breaking hampers things. Nothing is that funny.Our host is Bridgerton actor Regé-Jean Page. After a quick Ray Jay Johnson reference that I assume went over his fans’ heads, he fends off the female cast. They’re all obsessed with the sexual dynamo he plays on the hit Netflix costume drama, although Aidy Bryant assures him, “We definitely have other sketch ideas where you aren’t just being an extremely hot sex man.” SNL has shown a tendency to over-rely on hosts’ hotness – see the recent Jason Momoa and Jennifer Lopez episodes, both dire.On Actor’s Spotlight, two black British actors – Kingsley Ben-Adir (Page) and Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Redd) – join Ice Cube (Kenan Thompson) to discuss their new movies. Cube tries to get in on the critical love by pretending he’s British too, claiming, “Me name’s not Ice Cube in Britain, it’s Coldy Squares.” No one buys it until Hugh Grant (Alex Moffat) shows up and recognizes him from the old neighborhood.After a short rap from Ego Nwodim, Davidson and musical guest Bad Bunny about going crazy during quarantine, a barroom game of pool is interrupted when a player puts on Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License. The dudes all make fun of the song, but eventually reveal they’re huge fans. In-depth discussions of the convoluted backstory and reminiscences of their own heartbreak lead to the male cast joining for “the bridge of our lives”.Next, Page interviews for a job at an ad company that works on spec, creating slogans for brands that didn’t ask. Disastrous examples include “Charmin – Use after you poop!”, “Legos – Bet you can’t eat just one and!” and “Netflix – We have porn now!”. Funny as the ads are, and good as the interaction between Page and Beck Bennett’s aloof boss is, the funniest bit is a recurring gag in which Bowen Yang’s harried assistant hands the two strange notes which read “We’re losing millions”, “They have your daughter”, “Your mom is topless in the lobby” and, simply, “Hi”. A bit overstuffed, this zany pre-filmed segment is still one of the best of the season.Bad Bunny takes the stage alongside Rosalía for a steamy duet on La Noche de Anoche. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost kicks things off by hammering Cruz, noting “if you hate Ted Cruz, this is a pretty fun week … and if you like Ted Cruz, well, you’re probably Ted Cruz.” Michael Che notes that the winter storm brought “the most snow seen in Texas since Michael Irvine’s Super Bowl party”.Jost welcomes “relationship expert” Davidson to discuss the “first and hopefully last” Valentine’s Day of the pandemic. Davidson recounts spending the holiday watching the Britney Spears doc with his mom, which convinced him to finally move out and get his own place.“My mom is a lot like this show,” he explains. “No matter what I do, I’m never asked to leave.”After taking a few more digs at Cruz and Cuomo (as well as making a joke about Israel only vaccinating its Jewish populace that’s sure to generate backlash), Che welcomes Jessie Rauch (Heidi Gardner), a community activist who wants to discuss food insecurity. She doesn’t get the chance, as Che can’t get over the fact she’s dressed like Freddy Krueger. I’m not sure what the point or punchline of this was, but Gardner’s silly charm keeps it from totally tanking.A History Channel show looks at sea shanties. A whaling crew sings one, quickly revealing no one knows what they’re doing and they’re all doomed: “Yoho, we’ll never go home/ We’re stuck out here and we’re all alone!” The funniest bit is a brief aside wherein the crew describe to a new sailor their various “sea wives” – a whale’s blowhole, a blanket stuffed into a barrel, two jellyfish tied together, and their hands.A get together between new neighboring families, one white, the other black, sees them engage in a grace-off, trying to one-up each other through gospel. You keep waiting for things to take a dark or awkward turn but everything stays surprisingly sweet. Kudos to Bennett, who shows off some seriously impressive dancing.On the set of Bridgerton, Page and a costar are set to film a sex scene but the intimacy coordinator is out sick. Her replacements are two dirtbags (Davidson and Mikey Day) who have no idea what they’re doing or even what the show is about – they seem to think it involves incest. The set up promises something edgy or risqué, but unfortunately it just meanders.Bad Bunny returns and performs Te Deseo Lo Mejor. Wrestling fans will get a kick out of him proudly sporting the WWE 24/7 Championship belt, which he recently won. I imagine non-wrestling fans will just be confused.The last sketch of the night is a music video set in a grocery store, in which a dopey trio of ironic white rappers keeps getting interrupted and shamed for not wearing masks. It ends with them tasered and tackled by the manager.There was a noticeable patchwork quality to most of the sketches tonight, but that wasn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it led to a lot of unexpectedly funny moments. It also made excellent use of Page’s musical abilities and Bad Bunny’s decent comic chops, the end result a lively, enjoyable episode. More

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      Texas freeze shows a chilling truth – how the rich use climate change to divide us | Robert Reich

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      Texas has long represented a wild west individualism that elevates personal freedom – this week, the freedom to freeze – above all else.The state’s prevailing social Darwinism was expressed most succinctly by the mayor of Colorado City, who accused his constituents – trapped in near sub-zero temperatures and complaining about lack of heat, electricity and drinkable water – of being the “lazy” products of a “socialist government”, adding “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” and predicting “only the strong will survive and the weak will perish”.Texas has the third-highest number of billionaires in America, most of them oil tycoons. Last week, the laissez-faire state energy market delivered a bonanza to oil and gas producers that managed to keep production going during the freeze. It was “like hitting the jackpot”, boasted the president of Comstock Resources on an earnings call. Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, holds a majority of Comstock’s shares.But most other Texans were marooned. Some did perish.The white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundanceThe Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power, exempted affluent downtowns from outages, leaving thriving parts of Austin, Dallas and Houston brightly lit while pushing less affluent precincts into the dark and cold.Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut or restart.In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even if they’re able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. If they can’t pay, they’re cut off.Rich Texans take spikes in energy prices in their stride. If the electric grid goes down, private generators kick in. In a pinch – as last week – they check into hotels or leave town. On Wednesday night, as millions of his constituents remained without power and heat, Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancún, Mexico for a family vacation. Their Houston home was “FREEZING” – as his wife put it.Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.Yet the white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what’s good for Black and Latino people is bad for them, and that whites are, or should be, on the winning side of the social Darwinian contest.White grievance helps keep Republicans in power, protecting their rich patrons from a majority that might otherwise join to demand what they need – such as heat, electricity, water and reliable sources of power.Lower-income Texans, white as well as Black and Latino, are taking it on the chin in many other ways. Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the share of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state. Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation’s average.And although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.Last Wednesday, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News to proclaim, absurdly, that what happened to his state “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States”. Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that “wind and solar got shut down”.Rubbish. The loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change.In Texas, oil tycoons are the only winners from climate change. Everyone else is losing badly. Adapting to extreme weather is necessary but it’s no substitute for cutting emissions, which Texas is loath to do. Not even the Lone Star state should protect the freedom to freeze. More

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      'It was obviously a mistake': Ted Cruz on decision to fly to Mexico as Texas freezes – video

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      Ted Cruz has provoked an outcry after the Republican senator from Texas left the state for a trip to the sunny Mexican tourist resort of Cancún, as millions of his constituents endured deadly power outages and freezing temperatures.
      Cruz was spotted waiting for, then later boarding, a flight to Cancún on Wednesday night.
      A day later, after the images went viral, he returned to Texas
      Ted Cruz flies to Cancún as millions of Texans freeze in the dark
      Ted Cruz can’t escape Mexico vacation memes More

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      GameStop: US lawmakers to quiz key players from Robinhood, Reddit and finance

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      Frenzied trading in the shares of GameStop and other companies will be the subject of what is expected to be a fiery hearing in Congress on Thursday, when US politicians get their first chance to quiz executives from the trading app Robinhood, Reddit and other players in the saga.The House financial services committee will hold a hearing at noon in a first step to untangling the furore surrounding trading in GameStop, AMC cinemas and other companies whose share values soared to astronomical levels as small investors piled into the stocks.The hearing, titled Game Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide, is expected to be fractious.Shares in GameStop, a troubled video games chain store, soared 1,600% in January, as an army of small investors, many using the trading app Robinhood, appeared to have bet that Wall Street hedge funds had overplayed their hand when betting the stock price would collapse – a practice known as short-selling.Spurred on by meme-toting members of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets, investors kept buying the shares, driving up the price and triggering huge losses for some hedge funds.Robinhood briefly suspended trading in GameStop and other hot stocks at the end of January and sparked allegations that the hedge funds and others may have pushed Robinhood and other trading platforms to stop the rout.The news managed to – briefly – unite Washington’s deeply divided political elite. Both the rightwing senator Ted Cruz and the progressive representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked Robinhood’s decision to halt trading in GameStop by small investors.Ocasio-Cortez sits on the bipartisan financial services committee.Among those testifying are:Robinhood’s CEO, Vlad Tenev.
      Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman.
      Gabe Plotkin, founder of the Melvin Capital Management hedge fund, which was forced into a rescue after retail traders crushed its bets against GameStop.
      Ken Griffin, billionaire CEO of Citadel, an investment firm that executes Robinhood clients’ trades and also helped to bail out Melvin.
      Keith Gill, a trader variously known online as Roaring Kitty and DeepFuckingValue and a longtime GameStop booster.
      The hearing marks the first time the major players in the GameStop controversy have all been forced to publicly reckon with the anger the episode provoked among small investors and across the political spectrum.Gregg Gelzinis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress, said: “The GameStop drama raised quite a few public policy questions but first it’s important for members of Congress to understand how events played out.”Gelzinis said there were still questions about the timeline of events. More broadly, he said, GameStop had highlighted many crucial issues for regulators, including the role and regulation of hedge funds, whether or how Wall Street is using social media to drive investment strategy, the “gamification” of investing by trading apps and the economic incentives at play for the trading platforms.“What would have happened if Robinhood had failed? What would have been the knock-on effects for financial markets?” he asked. “These are huge investor protection questions.“I saw someone on Twitter describe it as a Rorschach test for financial regulators,” he added.The hearing will not be the last inquiry that the executives at the center of the controversy will face. Federal prosecutors have begun an investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US’s top financial watchdog, is reportedly combing through social media posts for signs of potential fraud.In the meantime, evidence has emerged that small investors were not the largest buyers of GameStop and other hot companies. According to an analysis by JP Morgan, institutional investors may have been behind much of the dramatic rise in the share price.“Although retail buying was portrayed as the main driver of the extreme price rally experienced by some stocks, the actual picture may be much more nuanced,” Peng Cheng, a JP Morgan analyst, told clients in a note.Gelzinis said Thursday’s hearing was likely to raise as many new questions as it answered but was a necessary first step to understanding the seismic changes in investing that GameStop highlighted.“This is only the start of the story,” he said. “It’s clear this is not just a clearcut small investor versus Wall Street story. It’s a fairly messy picture but hopefully by the end we can paint a clearer picture and draw up some public policy conclusions from it.” More