Sen. Ted Cruz Is a Naturalized Citizen, not a Natural Born Citizen

The United States Constitution requires  presidents to be "natural born citizens".   The original  Constitution doesn't define "natural born citizen", but the 14th Amendment states there are two categories of U.S. citizens:  those who are born in the United States and those who are naturalized under Acts of Congress.

Sen. Ted Cruz was not born in the United States so his citizenship is conferred by Congress under its naturalization authority.  Children born to U.S. citizens outside the United States do not automatically qualify as U,S, citizens under the Constitution.   They can only qualify if a parent meets the criteria required by the law.  For example, when Cruz was born one U.S. citizen  parent had to have lived in the United States for 10 years before the birth with at least five of those  years coming after the 14th birthday.  t

The criteria can be changed by Congress at any time.  For example, Congress might decide to require that both parents be citizens or change the residency requirements.  The specific criteria required of Cruz or others  aren't important.  The important point is that a person whose citizenship is due to naturalization law cannot be a "natural born citizen".

Cruz has stated that he never checked to see if he became a Canadian citizen when he was born in Canada until the Dallas Morning News said he was a Canadian citizen.  I hope that he checked to see if any required applications for U.S.  citizenship registration have been met.   If registration requirements have not been met, Cruz is not any kind of U.S. citizen.

Democrats Should Draft Sebelius for President

Democrats should encourage former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to run for president.    She would be a far better choice for president than Hillary Clinton who would never have gotten any place in politics if her husband Bill hadn't served as President of the United States;

Will the race for the Democratic presidential candidate be a repeat of 1968?     In 1968 Democrats entered the primary season expecting to nominate President Lyndon Johnson for reelection.   After Johnson's poor showing in New Hampshire, he withdrew from the race and Democrats had to find a new candidate.  Democrats may have more time to recover this year than they did in 1968.  Hillary is already slipping behind an unknown candidate,  Democrats need to recognize she has no chance even with the Clinton Broadcast System running a show designed to con people into thinking that Hillary was a capable Secretary of State.

Democrats who support Hillary Clinton ignore her past association with disasters including her decision before the 1992 election to represent the corrupt Whitewater Savings and Loan before a board appointed by her husband Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.  That decision caused the appointment of a special prosecutor which eventually resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton on an unrelated matter.  The health care proposal she developed was so unpopular it helped Republicans win control of Congress in 1994.

Hillary's service as Secretary of State was a disaster.   Her incompetence allowed al Qaeda to win a major victory in Libya when the terrorist organization used a mob to kill the American Ambassador to Libya.   Those familiar with al Qaeda knew it was likely to try something on the anniversary of the 9/11 attack during an American presidential year.   Clinton shouldn't have needed CIA torture to figure out that the instability in Libya made it an ideal target.   A competent Secretary of State would have reduced the potential for a successful attack in Libya by having the Ambassador and his staff attend some type of conference at NATO headquarters or some other European country.  At the very least she should have ordered the Ambassador to stay in the capital so the Libyan government could help protect him.

The Obama administration had been claiming a victory every time Americans killed an al Qaeda leader in some Middle Eastern country.  Thus the killing of the American Ambassador to Libya was a major al Qaeda victory.

Kathleen Sebelius made her own way in politics.    Her father had been a governor, but in Indiana rather than Kansas.   Her father-in-law was a popular member of the Kansas Congressional delegation, but he was a Republican and Sebelius is a Democrat.   Sebelius was elected governor as a Democrat twice in heavily Republican Kansas.    Clinton won election to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in heavily Democratic New York.

Sebelius had to deal with controversy during her tenure in the Obama cabinet because Obama assigned her  the near impossible task of implementing Obama's overly complicated health care system.   As I had expected there were some significant problems, particularly with the computer software,  but she handled them effectively.

I don't agree with some of her political views, particularly the global warming nonsense.  However, I would consider voting for her for president because she is a competent executive which is what we need in the White House.  If Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton I will have to vote for the Republican to keep her out of the White House.

Hillary Clinton has handicapped the Democratic Party in the coming presidential election.  She has preempted the publicity for the Democratic Party allowing the Republican candidates to be better known than other potential Democratic candidates.   Democrats need to encourage Sebelius, Vice President Joe Biden, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and other potential candidates to get in the race now so they won't have to start from scratch if Hillary's campaign crashes during the primary season.  

Taliban Like Attitudes in American South

The world cringed when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist Statues in Afghanistan.  The Taliban destroyed the historic artifacts because Buddhist statues represented something the Taliban considered immoral.  They didn't want people to be reminded that people in the region had at one time been involved in something that was no longer considered morally acceptable.   Buddhist statues were not "politically correct" under the Taliban's view of the Muslim religion.  Allowing the statues to stay advertised that Afghans had once behaved in what the Taliban regarded as an immoral fashion.  Recent reports claim that ISIS may be doing the same thing to historic artifacts where they are operating.

People in New Orleans, La., and other southern cities want to remove statues of men who had the audacity to not have the same moral values people have today.   Many southerners prior to the Civil War accepted the African and Muslim moral value that it was acceptable for one person  to own others.   Africans had been  buying, selling and owning each other for thousands of years and they had no problem with selling their fellow  Africans to Europeans like they had been selling their fellow Africans to people in the Middle East.

The men whose statues are the subject of controversy in New Orleans were born into a society that had long accepted slavery.   They thought they had no other option for recruiting workers for their plantations because people wouldn't voluntarily do such work.   As far as they knew, plantations had always been worked by slaves.  They were not evil men.  They simply lacked the ability to "think outside the box" of slavery.

Instead of trying to censor history, southern cities should use the Civil War as an example of what can happen when politicians cannot find ways to resolve their differences.  Slavery had caused the United States to become two different nations with different economic needs and perspectives.   Politicians from the north and the south were so stuck in their own little worlds that they couldn't consider the  needs of the other part of the country. 

About the only thing the white people who controlled both the northern and southern states could agree on was that they both supported the myth that black people were inferior to white people.   Northern whites didn't want slavery in their states because they were bigots who hated the people who were held as slaves.

As the great grandson of a Union soldier I have never really understood why southerners would want to erect statues of losers.   I doubt that the statues were erected because without the actions of men like Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee slavery would likely have continued for decades. The decision by the southern states to leave the Union provoked northern politicians into acting against slavery.  Gen. Lee's ability to prolong the war even convinced northern politicians to guarantee the freed slaves and other blacks equal rights that many northern states denied to their black residents.

Is Princess Hillary too Thin-Skinned for Presidency?

 The American media's heir apparent to the presidency, Princess Hillary Clinton, has had a hissy fit because that cad  Donald Trump slipped a pea under her mattress.  She's all a flutter  because he used a sexually oriented word  that 99% of Americans have never heard of.   Princess Hillary seems to believe that women should be protected from such language like they were in the 1950's.    Or,maybe she's been so protected she doesn't know some women use more well known words with a similar meaning.  I've even heard teenage girls use such terms in church.

I started  writing when the incident happened but decided I didn't want to disrupt my Christmas mood by writing about politics.   I forgot about the subject until a few days ago when  I  saw a commercial that used a comparable term that more Americans are familiar with.   I don't want to risk offending anyone, or upsetting the text editor,  so I won't use it.   I'll only say it involves the type of activity that got Bill Clinton in trouble.  I also belatedly watched Blake Shelton's  "Christmas" special which featured other sexually related words that have become acceptable.

When I first heard the bleeped version of Trump's comment on television, I thought maybe he was suggesting Princess Hillary was what many people believe Trump is the son of.   That prompted an unsuccessful search for a quote from the 1972 Democrat race for the presidential nomination.  I don't remember which candidate's wife  said it about the wife of another candidate, but here it is:  "she's an I can't say it but it rhymes with rich." 

I was surprised to find out it had been used again during the 1984 general election race.  Barbara Bush, whose husband George H.W. Bush was the incumbent Vice President, used the phrase to describe the Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.   Some sources suggest she said "rhymes with witch."

Trump also has been criticized for retweeting a message from Texas cowgirl Sawyer Burmeister: "If Hillary can't satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?"  Burmeister later retracted the tweet.   Burmeister's tweet raises the question of what Princess Hillary meant when she said that Trump's word was humiliating to women.  Did Princess Hillary mean that talking about sex was humiliating to women or that sex was humiliating to women?

While looking for a link for this post I was reminded of Princess Hillary's bathroom break during a debate.  I know what my mom would have said: "she should have gone before the debate."  My mom always had us kids use the bathroom before we went any place.