Requiem for a jerk

Despite the booger-eating, the associations with the worst religious freaks he could wrangle, the unintentional physical trauma he has put his wife and children through, and even all the good things he has done for Democrats... I'm going to miss making fun of the big lug.

Maybe I'll drive past his house and throw eggs, pitch toilet paper up in the trees or something.

Ted Cruz is back home in Houston.

He and his wife Heidi visited and thanked loyal volunteers and campaign staff Wednesday evening at Armadillo Palace.

Close to a hundred people packed into the restaurant for the homecoming. Cruz mingled with the hometown crowd that was filled with many of the grassroots supporters that have been key to the rise of his political career.

"It's wonderful to be home," Cruz told KHOU 11 News as he was leaving the event.

Now he and his family are getting back to somewhat of a normal life. They didn't leave the restaurant with a driver or a motorcade, Heidi drove them home.

For the love of a Jesus Christ that she believes in and I don't, I hope she packs her bags and goes back to New York and Goldman Sachs before she has another nervous breakdown.

As for Ted, the Libs are beckoning.

Libertarians seeking their party’s presidential nomination say Sen. Ted Cruz should endorse them rather than Donald Trump, who rebranded the Texas Republican “Lyin’ Ted” before forcing him out of the GOP primary with a crushing victory in Indiana on Tuesday.

Cruz hasn’t said if he will endorse Trump, whose campaign trail attacks included retweeting an unflattering photo of the senator’s wife and repeating allegations that Cruz’s father was with Lee Harvey Oswald before President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

On Tuesday, Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”

The vicious GOP primary, the Libertarians hope, will push Cruz to endorse them and deliver his socially conservative, Constitution-toting base, which they view as rational for a variety of policy reasons as well.

“Ted Cruz has always been brave and stood up to the establishment of his own party, even when it came to shutting down the government, so I wouldn’t put it past him,” says Austin Petersen, one of three candidates seeking the Libertarian nomination at a Florida convention this month.

“With Donald Trump winning, I might be the only pro-life, pro-Constitution candidate on the ballot,” Petersen says. “[Cruz has] always shown the courage to buck the leadership of his own party. It would be shocking, but I don’t think it would be out of character for him.”

New Mexico’s former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson also is seeking the Libertarian nomination, which he won in 2012 before collecting more than 1 million general election votes. Johnson is doubtful Cruz would endorse him but says it would be welcome.

“That would be huge, that could be the quantum leap we need, the attention we need,” says Johnson, who was supported by 11 percent of responsdents in a recent hypothetical match-up against Trump (at 34 percent) and Democrat Hillary Clinton (at 42 percent) from Monmouth University.

“There is an opportunity here,” he says.

Golden.  Then again, he could return to Senate and become a... something besides a pariah.

As Cruz returns to Washington, does he maintain his firebrand, anti-establishment approach — which has inspired his base support but rubbed many of his colleagues the wrong way? Or does he take a more collegial tack, seeking to build upon some of the mainstream GOP support he received in recent weeks?

Because right now, GOP consultant Bill Miller pointed out, Cruz is a “dead man walking in the Senate.”

Former House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, recently called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.” Former President George W. Bush reportedly said last year, “I just don’t like the guy.” And Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who ultimately endorsed Cruz, has joked about Cruz being shot on the Senate floor.

“If he chooses to run again, he would need to soften his approach,” said Denton County GOP chairwoman Dianne Edmondson.

A kinder, gentler Ted.  We can all dream, I suppose.  See Kuff for his take.

DefeaTED

He went down swinging.

Cruz craps out; Sanders surprises pollsters again

At least he's good at shutting things down.

Moments before Ted Cruz publicly ended a campaign for president that had lasted more than a year, he stood backstage and thanked his closest friends, supporters and advisers for their help and support.

Some sat at round tables. Conservative commentator and TV host Glenn Beck stood and watched. A bar table covered with Starbucks cups and an ironing board with an upright iron stood off to the side.

When Cruz finished speaking, the group of about 50 people applauded — several of them wiping away tears — and Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, walked away from them, looking down, and shook his head.

Cruz’s speech to a group of a few hundred devoted followers from the main stage minutes later was met with disbelief and anguish.

“From the beginning, I’ve said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory,” Cruz said. Murmurs rose in the audience.

“I’m sorry to say,” Cruz said — and cries of “No, no!” rang out — “it appears that path has been foreclosed.” This brought an even louder “NO!”

As Cruz announced that he was suspending his campaign “with a heavy heart,” a girl of about 12 began to sob. Her father stood nearby with his hand over his mouth and said, “What are you doing?”

Cruz sought to reassure his followers inside the Grand Hall Ballroom of the Crowne Plaza hotel. “Hear me now: I am not suspending our fight for liberty,” he said. His father and mother, divorced 20 years ago but standing next to one another on this night, stood behind him.

A gaggle of Cruz’s campaign staff stood 20 feet from the stage, many of them red-eyed. After Cruz finished his speech, he began to greet supporters in the front of the crowd, but then abruptly returned backstage after just a few moments, apparently too emotional to continue.

His supporters were left to pick up the pieces and to ponder their choices now that businessman and reality TV personality Donald Trump stands alone as the likely Republican nominee and the only alternative to Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Here's the best thing that happened last night for Clinton.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might vote for Hillary,” said Jason Winters, 40, a machinist from Crawfordsville, Ind. “She’s a criminal. She’s a murderer. But she’s better than an authoritarian dictator.”

I'm at a loss for words, but I'll pick up the pieces and go on. 

Bernie Sanders triumphed over Hillary Clinton in Indiana’s open primary Tuesday, boosting the grassroots candidate’s argument that the party’s superdelegates should flip their support to him in July’s Democratic convention. 

Sanders spoke to thousands of supporters in Louisville, Ky., before Indiana’s results were in. He called for an end to closed primaries and criticized Clinton for her ties to Wall Street and paid speeches to Goldman Sachs — a sign the heated rhetoric on the Democratic side shows no signs of cooling down.[...]

Sanders continues to trail Clinton by hundreds of pledged delegates and faces an extremely difficult path to close that gap. And Tuesday’s win doesn’t     propel Sanders very far; he and Clinton will roughly split Indiana’s 83 Democratic delegates because his victory was narrow. But the win fuels the senator’s argument that he should keep fighting until the end and creates a headache for Clinton, who has made a hard pivot from frontrunner to presumptive nominee. “I think we can pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States,” Sanders said in a press conference late Tuesday night.

I'm still thinking he can't, but I won't hide my glee at how angry his pushing ahead makes Hillary''s crew.  Once again, the polling failed.

Only a handful of polling outfits were surveying voters ahead of the Indiana Democratic primary—but none of them saw a Bernie Sanders win coming.

The RealClearPolitics polling average for the state had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton up by just under 7 percentage points as of this morning. But minutes ago, the TV networks began to call the race for the senator from Vermont.

FiveThirtyEight says NBD, but they have been wronger than anybody this cycle, and they only aggregate everybody else's polls, not conduct one.  That means everybody who bet +7 or more on Clinton were the biggest losers.  Those people should stay away from the racetrack this Saturday.

More on the reality Nate Silver is denying here and here.  One excerpt:

There is not a current, publicized investigation underway to figure out why the polls are almost always off, in a way that predicts that Sanders will not do as well as he ultimately does.

But since the polls have consistently predicted that Sanders will earn fewer voters than he goes on to win, the following questions arise.

If the latest RealClearPolitics poll says that Sanders beats Trump nationally by 14 points, does that mean that Sanders would actually beat Trump by more than 14 points, given that this polling source is one of the ones that has been wrong by underestimating Sanders?

If, as the Washington Examiner is reporting, Sanders is beating Clinton in national polls by two percent, and in the Indiana contest the poll was off by 9 percent, is Sanders really beating Clinton by 11 percent nationally?

No one has officially answered these questions. But Bernie Sanders has won another primary — Indiana — a “surprise” to those who continue to rely on polls that consistently under-predict Sanders’ performance. 

Food for thought.  I just don't believe Bernie is going to get to test this polling theory in 2016.  Hillary is a little more than likely to get enough delegates out of California in one month to end the conversation, finally.

But until then, there's going to be more chuckling from the left of the left and a little more teeth-grinding and cursing under their collective breath from the right of the left.