Ted Cruz was a king in Parliamentary Debate Land.
.. Indeed, emotion — not just intelligence — was very much in Cruz’s skill set.
.. The other team, Vinnakota recalls, had “crushed Ted’s argument.” By the time Cruz arrived onstage to speak a final time, the case was “dead on arrival.” “But Ted gave one of the most impassioned, flourished speeches. His focused anger and the power of his rhetoric just won over the crowd. If you were flowing the argument” — charting the debate — “he didn’t say anything. You have to be impressed by it. He is a gifted, gifted speaker.”
.. THE CHALLENGE FOR Cruz — which The New York Times highlighted several months ago in a piece about his debating career — was that he wasn’t necessarily likable. “I remember him as a scary, driven machine who fought a protracted, bloody land war for total victory,” says Ted Niblock, a Johns Hopkins University debater in Cruz’s year who is now general counsel for a clean-energy startup.
.. “I was not as smart, committed, or skilled as Ted was,” says Niblock. “I was completely random and unpredictable. You can’t outsmart a truly crazy person.”
.. This might be my biggest problem with him: He took all the fun out of it. He prepared and prepared, came to the tournament on the weekend, executed his plan, and then went back to Princeton to take the fun out of something else.”
Four quotes from the sixth GOP presidential debate, explained by experts
When you look at the “line of migration, you see no women. Where are the women? I see no women… I see strong, powerful men.” – Donald Trump
But the consensus among scholars of immigration and crime is that immigrants commit significantly less crime, per capita, than the native-born.
One way to understand Trump’s obsession with immigrants is with pacification theory. Drawing attention to a demonized “other” creates solidarity against that group, conveniently diverting the public’s attention away from contentious issues such as the impact of deregulation and tax breaks for the wealthy on the middle and working class.
.. In response, Cruz denied the facts of the case, used differentiation to explain the circumstances of the loan on his own grounds, and used bolstering to shift blame to despised figures such as Hillary Clinton and The New York Times. Here’s how he did it:
.. It was not, as had been reported in the “hit piece,” corruption, duplictious or hypocrisy. Rather, by placing the loan within this new context, it was brave.
Ted Cruz’s Goldman Sachs Problem
Since he only got elected to the Senate in 2012, he didn’t have to vote on the 2008 TARPbailout, which many Republicans originally opposed; and, even after arriving in Washington, he didn’t express much concern about the details of bank regulation.
.. his political maneuvering may have distracted lawmakers from scrutinizing a rider, pushed by Wall Street lobbyists, that was attached to the spending bill. The rider reversed one of the new regulations introduced after the financial crisis, which had forced big banks to move some of their risky financial derivatives out of their federally insured divisions and into separately capitalized subsidiaries.
Ted Cruz Didn’t Report Goldman Sachs Loan in a Senate Race
As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.
“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.
.. Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,”
.. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year.
.. She told Politico in 2014 that she thought they should apply “common investment sense” and not use their own money for the campaign “unless it made the difference” in winning.
.. While the Cruzes were well paid — he made more than $1 million a year as a law partner, and she earned a six-figure income as an executive in Goldman Sachs’s Houston office