Heidi Cruz suicidal

A police report has revealed that cops once found the wife of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruzwith her head in hands beside a Texas expressway and was ‘a danger to herself’.

According to the 2005 report which DailyMail.comhighlighted in June, Heidi Cruz, 43, had walked from her home after dinner on August 22.She then sat down beside N. Mopac and Enfield in Austin, at around 10pm.

While Mrs Cruz has not spoken out publicly about the incident, an adviser to her senator husband said she had experienced ‘a brief bout of depression’ ten years ago in response to questions about the police report.

A concerned passerby had made the call after spotting a woman in a pink shirt was just ‘sitting in the area with her head in her hands.’

The police report, which was published heavily redacted, states that ‘Cruz related to me that she had been particularly [BLANK], for the past three weeks, and was currently [BLANK].

OFFICIAL POLICE REPORT

It continues to say that she was not on any type of medication and had not been drinking, except for ‘a couple of sips’ of a margarita with dinner an hour earlier.

After talking to Mrs Cruz police officer Joel Davidson, wrote in his report: ‘I believed she was a danger to herself.’

In comments made to BuzzFeed, Heidi Cruz’s husband, Sen. Ted Cruz, released a statement about a period of their lives that the couple has not previously discussed in public.

‘About a decade ago, when Mrs. Cruz returned from D.C. to Texas and faced a significant professional transition, she experienced a brief bout of depression,’ said Jason Miller, an adviser to the senator in the statement.

‘Like millions of Americans, she came through that struggle with prayer, Christian counseling, and the love and support of her husband and family.’

Mrs Cruz, who is highly successful lawyer in her own right and served under Condoleeza Rice in the National Security Council, is said to not want to speak about her recovery as she doesn’t want to show off her own happy ending, a source told BuzzFeed.

The power couple married in 2001 after meeting while campaigning for George W. Bush in Texas.

In 2000, she worked on Bush for President campaign, where she met her husband Ted Cruz.  In 2003, she worked for the Bush administration as a top deputy to U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick, focusing on economic policy.  She eventually became the director for the Western Hemisphere on the National Security Council under National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 2003.  Cruz remembered liking her tenure with the Bush administration and found her work to be “personally fulfilling.”

After commuting to see her husband for a year, she left Washington DC in 2004 to be with her husband, who working as the Solicitor General for the State of Texas.  Cruz did not see this as her giving up her career but merely as relocating, and she took her time to become use to the new environment, initially difficult since most of her family was in California and she had several colleagues in New York.

In 2005, she joined Goldman Sachs, serving as a private wealth manager and is currently the Region Head for the Southwest Region in the Investment Management Division of Goldman Sachs in Houston.  Peter Conway, Cruz’s employer, assisted in her recruitment and was impressed by her being among the first to arrive and last to leave, remembering her doing well in a field of men. Conway would later recommend her to lead the office. Cruz used politics to gain common ground with her clients and deployed her husband to join her in meeting with potential investors. She had served as vice president for seven years before the promotion in 2013.  She took a leave of absence without pay for her husband’s 2016 presidential campaign. Cruz later said the absence was the result of her belief that America was in danger.

They have two daughters together and Mrs Cruz has left her high powered job at Goldman Sachs to join her husband on the campaign trail in his bid to become the Republican nominee for this year’s presidential elections.

Autonomous IS cells are 'worst nightmare' for security: experts

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Beirut (AFP) - Jihadist cells like the one that carried out the Brussels attacks are supported by the Islamic State group's leadership in the Middle East, but are choosing themselves where and when to strike, experts say.

And that degree of autonomy is making them all the more difficult to track, and doubly dangerous.

"These are security personnel's worst nightmare. Because they're almost impossible to prevent, they can hit almost any soft target possible," said Robert Taylor, a terrorism and security expert at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Tuesday's bombings at the Brussels airport and metro, which killed 31 people and wounded 270, were quickly claimed by IS as the latest in a wave of deadly attacks in Europe.

Less than two years after it declared its Islamic "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq, IS appears to have set up a network of cells made up of European nationals drawn to its extremist cause.

By providing these homegrown jihadists with training, planning and munitions, IS has managed to extend its reach into Europe's capitals.

Details of Brussels attacks perpepetrators and suspects still at large. (AFP Photo/Jean Michel Cornu …

"These are coordinated attacks. They're certainly rehearsed. People have planned them, and I think they are directed by a specific group," Taylor said.

"I doubt it goes all the way up to (IS chief Abu Bakr) Baghdadi. I think what we have are individual cells that are acting relatively independently."

J.M. Berger, a fellow at George Washington University, said it has become clear that attacks like the ones in Brussels and last year in Paris were more than just inspired by IS.

"It's certainly not a lone wolf attack when there are three or four confirmed attackers, not counting any other support they had," he said.

- Too complex for 'lone wolves' -

Belgian police officers stand guard near Maelbeek - Maalbeek subway station in Brussels on March 23, …

"ISIS central command in Iraq and Syria likely provided some or all of the personnel and technical and financial resources used in this attack," Berger said, using an alternative acronym for IS.

"They may or may not give more specific directions, but the operators on the ground probably have quite a bit of latitude in terms of picking targets and the timing."

IS has been calling for attacks on the West since its emergence as the preeminent jihadist group. Those calls intensified after a US-led coalition launched air strikes against the group's strongholds in Syria and Iraq in mid-2014.

Berger said it was likely the cell behind the Brussels attacks was also involved in November's massacres that killed 130 people in Paris.

"While it is still too early to draw definite conclusions, the most likely explanation is that this attack was carried out by the same ISIS network that carried out the Paris attacks," he said.

The Brussels bombings came only four days after the arrest in Brussels of the last known surviving suspect in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam.

This week's attack was "too sophisticated just to be a matter of lone wolves," said Aymenn al-Tamimi, a research fellow at the Middle East Forum, a US think-tank.

"This reflects an operational capacity IS has been building to carry out attacks in Europe since at least late 2014/early 2015."

"Of course it's debatable how far IS leader Baghdadi and other senior central figures know of details of operations in advance, but it's not plausible to portray these attacks as independent of IS," he said.

Thousands of European sympathisers have joined IS in Syria and Iraq and many have returned to their home countries, especially to Belgium and France.

Belgium is in fact the European nation with proportionally the highest number of nationals that have fought with IS in Syria or Iraq. At least 494 of its citizens are known to have joined the group.

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Ted Cruz: The Bush Years

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What his time at the FTC suggests about how he’d run the White House.

Long before Ted Cruz was a big-name senator and conservative rock star, wowing the crowd at Liberty University in the early days of his presidential bid, he was just another lawyer toiling away in virtual anonymity under George W. Bush.

While Cruz’s time in the Senate is best known for fiery speeches and high-profile gestures like his 21-hour filibuster, in his earlier time in Washington he demonstrated a wonkish eye for detail and an eagerness to take on powerful industry groups that he saw as stifling competition. Though his efforts ultimately succeeded on a much smaller scale than he’d initially envisioned, they demonstrated a relentless focus on repealing or preventing the passage of laws that he felt needlessly regulated the marketplace. If this early period of Cruz’s career is any guide, a Cruz presidency would feature a sustained push to roll back federal regulations, one where outcomes are measured carefully but where success may be less black-and-white than Cruz’s public comments since his election to the Senate might suggest.

Cruz spent a good portion of his early career working for President George W. Bush — first as a legal policy adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, then as part of the recount team in Florida. He was the Department of Justice coordinator for the Bush-Cheney transition team and then spent six months as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the DOJ. But his longest stretch of work for Bush was at the Federal Trade Commission, before he departed to become the Solicitor General of Texas.

From July 2001 to January 2003, Cruz was the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the FTC. There, he earned a reputation as a passionate boss intent on tracking the success of the office’s efforts in granular detail.

A memo written by Cruz and his deputy, Jerry Ellig, shortly before his departure to Texas included a chart of the office’s projects, his calculation of how successful each project had been, an estimate of the probability that decision-makers listened to the FTC, and an estimate of the probability of the same outcome without any advocacy or action from the FTC. (Cruz and Ellig concluded the FTC had influenced the outcome in eleven of the 14 projects that were not pending.)

Initially, Cruz proposed an ambitious agenda that featured efforts to roll back regulations on teacher certification, hospital accreditation, and local governments’ agreements with cable television.

“Recruiting good teachers could be made easier if the educational system adopted a more market-oriented approach, reducing the number of formal education-school requirements in order to increase the supply of teachers in critical specialties,” Cruz wrote in a July 2001 memo outlining a dozen policy areas for the FTC. He contended that eliminating those requirements would attract more teachers who had recently retired from another profession or the military, or who were interested in making a mid-life career change.

In the same July 2001 memo, Cruz also compared the primary professional organization that accredited U.S. hospitals, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, to a cartel:

The Joint Commission has a structure that would seem to be very worrisome in antitrust terms. The group includes virtually all horizontal competitors in the industry, and it has, in certification standards that are closely interwoven with state licensure requirements, a powerful enforcement mechanism to prevent cheating on cartel conduct.

The future senator went on to contend that the Joint Commission’s accreditation standards limited “patient choice without any apparent benefits for health or safety,” citing accreditation standards that limited some of the times and terms of family members’ visits to hospital patients.

Cruz also urged his colleagues to “look into possible anti-competitive exclusion of cable television companies.” He cited a report from the FTC’s San Francisco office of possible collusion between municipalities and cable companies. The municipalities would allegedly pass a tax or franchise fee on a cable company that was above the level permitted by federal law, which the incumbent cable company would then happily pay in exchange for local officials’ promise to reject all new entrants into the market, even if they offered better services or lower prices.

The bolder ideas in Cruz’s early memo, however, never came to fruition, as pressing cases and efforts in other policy areas ultimately took precedence. But Cruz’s work in these other policy areas did have an impact, and might prove to be useful experience in deterring what he sees as bad regulations in the future.

Cruz and the other FTC staff successfully defeated changes aimed at allowing competing physicians in Alaska and Washington to engage in collective bargaining with health plans over fees and other contract terms, arguing that the proposals would increase health-care costs and reduce access to care, without ensuring better outcomes for patients.

Cruz also weighed in on proposed New York and Virginia laws that aimed to restrict below-cost gasoline sales. Some state lawmakers contended that retailers selling gas for less than they’d paid for it represented a predatory effort by large corporations to force smaller businesses out of the market, by slashing prices so low that the smaller ones couldn’t compete.

But Cruz and the other FTC staff argued that the laws duplicated existing law and would discourage or even prevent competitive pricing. “New laws to limit price-cutting and prevent refiners from opening new gas stations are especially inappropriate at a time when many Americans are concerned about gasoline prices,” Cruz declared in August 2002. New York governor George Pataki pocket-vetoed the proposed law in February 2003.

A similar bill died in committee in Virginia.

Rolling back regulations has been a perennial promise of GOP presidential candidates for a generation. Every Republican presidential hopeful says he’ll cut red tape; very few make it a top priority once they’re in office. Cruz faces a steep climb to the nomination and the presidency. But if he can defy the odds and claim the White House, he’ll bring a level of hands-on experience with the regulatory state — and a proven zeal for cutting it down to size — that few, if any, of his predecessors could match.

— Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NationalReview.com.

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Cruz embraces Bush's endorsement, says he can defeat Clinton

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ted Cruz embraced Jeb Bush's endorsement on Wednesday and claimed he could build a broad coalition capable of beating Hillary Clinton in the fall - if only he can climb past the surging Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.

Clinton won in Arizona, maintaining a lopsided advantage over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race despite his convincing wins in Utah and Idaho on Tuesday night. Trump and Cruz split the previous night's two GOP contests, the billionaire taking Arizona and the Texas senator winning Utah.

Bush, the former Florida governor once considered a mainstream Republican powerhouse, dropped out of the contest in February after weak showings in early primaries. "Ted is a consistent, principled conservative who has shown he can unite the party," he tweeted. Bush added on his Facebook page that Republicans "must overcome the divisiveness and vulgarity Donald Trump has brought into the political arena" or risk losing to Clinton.

But Cruz has a long climb if he's to catch Trump in the delegate count, and it's even harder with Ohio Gov. John Kasich still in the hunt.

"I think he'd be a tremendous addition to an administration," Cruz said pointedly on CNN, praising the governor's talents while suggesting Kasich should get out of his way. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee and a leading anti-Trump voice, helped Cruz win Utah, a factor cited by the senator in claiming his appeal is growing beyond the very conservative and religious voters who have powered his victories in some primaries and caucuses.

The latest nomination contests unfolded with Belgium reeling from deadly attacks. Contenders in both parties tried to convince voters they can best protect the U.S. from terrorists. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for blasts in Brussels that left dozens dead and many more wounded.

"This is about not only selecting a president, but also selecting a commander in chief," Clinton said in Seattle as she condemned Trump by name and denounced his embrace of torture and hardline rhetoric aimed at Muslims. "The last thing we need is leaders who incite more fear."

Trump, in turn, branded Clinton as "incompetent Hillary" as he discussed her tenure as secretary of state. "Incompetent Hillary doesn't know what she's talking about," he told Fox News. "She doesn't have a clue."

Cruz said authorities should be empowered to "patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized," drawing a sharp rebuke from Muslim Americans and civil rights groups.

The victories for Sanders and Cruz kept the front-runners from dominating another election night, but both Clinton and Trump maintained a comfortable lead in the race for delegates who decide the presidential nominations.

In London, a senior British counter-terrorism police officer condemned Trump's assertion on the "Good Morning Britain" TV show that that British Muslims are not reporting extremists in their communities to police. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu told BBC Radio on Wednesday that Trump's comments are wrong and could raise tensions.

"If we demonize one section of the community, that is the worst thing we can do," he said. "We are absolutely playing into the terrorists' hands of making people feel hate."

Trump's brash tone appeared to turn off some Republican voters in Utah, where Cruz claimed more than half of the caucus vote - and with it, all 40 of Utah's delegates.

Yet that wouldn't make up for Trump's haul in Arizona, where he earned the state's entire trove of 58 delegates.

The win in Arizona gave Trump a little less than half of the Republican delegates allocated so far. That's still short of the majority needed to clinch the nomination before the party's national convention this summer.

However, Trump has a path to the nomination if he continues to win states that award all or most of their delegates to the winner.

Overall, Trump has accumulated 739 delegates, Cruz has 465 and Kasich 143. It takes 1,237 delegates to win the GOP nomination.

On the Democratic side, Clinton's delegate advantage is even greater than Trump's.

---

Associated Press writer Gregory Katz contributed to this story from London.

---

Follow Steve Peoples on Twitter at:http://twitter.com/sppeoples

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Cruz pushed for doubling of immigrants, including Muslims, to 1.67M PER YEAR

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Plans pushed by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz under the immigration reform debate in 2013 would have jumped the number of immigrants, including those from Muslim nations, by doubling green card caps and boosting temporary worker visas five-fold.

Under the Cruz plan, yearly legal immigration would have gone from 740,000 to 1,675,000.

Well before Donald Trump drew a line on Muslim immigrants following a wave of terror attacks, highlighted by Tuesday's deadly blasts in Belgium, Cruz's suggested changes to the so-called Gang of Eight legislation would have also created a family green card category and lifted the per-country caps on immigrants.

A lifting of those caps would have opened the doors to more Muslim immigrants from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations known for harboring terrorists.

Secrets recently reported that the administration has approved more immigrants from Muslim nations over the next five years than the entire population of Washington, D.C.

Figures from the Department of Homeland Security show that the president has already issued 680,000 green cards to immigrants from Muslim nations over the past five years. Unless Congress changes his policy, that number will be repeated in the next five years.

Under the Cruz amendments, shown in full below, the yearly cap on green cards would have increased from 675,000 to 1.35 million, not including refugees and asylees.

A second amendment would have boosted the H-1B visa cap for high-tech workers from 65,000 to 325,000.

The legislation never passed and Cruz has been critical of Obama's open borders. He has since called for a halt to increases in legal immigration and offered a bill to tighten restrictions on H-1B visas.

On Tuesday, he hit Trump for suggesting that the U.S. reconsider how much it spends overseas and he lashed out against Islamic terrorism.

"Radical Islam is at war with us. For over seven years we have had a president who refuses to acknowledge this reality. And the truth is, we can never hope to defeat this evil so long as we refuse to even name it," Cruz said. "That ends on January 20, 2017, when I am sworn in as president. We will name our enemy — radical Islamic terrorism. And we will defeat it."

Two Cruz immigration amendments from his Senate webpage:

Cruz 1324: Green Card (LPR) reform to modernize, streamline and expand legal immigration

This amendment would streamline and simplify our legal immigration system by consolidating segmented visas, creating real and transparent caps, eliminating the diversity visa lottery, and treating all immigrants equally by eliminating the per-country caps.

Provisions of his amendment include:

Doubling the overall worldwide green card caps from 675,000 visas per year to 1.35 million per year (not including refugees and asylees):

Employment-based green cards: Consolidates the 5 existing employment-based visas into a single high-skilled employment-based visa.

Family-based green cards: Creates a single family-based visa category that treats all immigrant families equally by redefining "immediate relatives" as "spouses, minor children, and parents of citizens or LPRs."

Treating immigrants from all countries equally by eliminating the diversity visa program and the per-country visa caps: Currently, immigrants of identical skill may experience drastically different wait times and burdens based merely on their country of origin. Not only is this inequitable, it hurts our ability to attract the best and brightest.

Reducing bureaucracy: Creates a user-friendly online portal where visa applicants can apply and obtain updates on their application.

Cruz 1325: Increase high-skilled temporary worker visas (H-1B visas) five-fold

This amendment would improve our nation's legal immigration system by increasing the H-1B cap from 65,000 to 325,000. It would also help America retain the people it educates by authorizing dual-intent student visas and address the need for high-skilled labor by creating a block grant to promote domestic high-skilled workers.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted atpbedard@washingtonexaminer.com

COMMENTS

Trump’s Five Most Important Declarations At AIPAC Speech

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by AARON KLEIN21 Mar 2016695

TEL AVIV – Here are the five most important aspects of Donald Trump’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, on Monday.

1 – Trump said he will “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making and let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic – for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East.

However, he stopped short of pledging to immediately nix the international nuclear accord signed in Vienna last year. He stated at AIPAC that “at the very least, we must hold Iran accountable by restructuring the terms of the previous deal.”

Channelling the sentiments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said Iran should suffer immediate consequences for likely violating U.N. Security Council resolution 2231 by conducting a series of ballistic missile tests in recent days. Netanyahu last week called for Western powers to take “immediate punitive steps” against Iran for the missile tests.

Trump stated:

The deal is silent on test missiles but those tests DO violate UN Security Council Resolutions. The problem is, no one has done anything about it. Which brings me to my next point – the utter weakness and incompetence of the United Nations.

2 – Trump declared he will check Iran’s growing regional dominance.

The GOP frontrunner affirmed that as president he will “stand up to Iran’s aggressive push to destabilize and dominate the region.”

He outlined Iran’s support for terrorism worldwide, from Syria to the Gaza Strip to Lebanon and beyond. “They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the western hemisphere very close to home,” he said. “Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world and we will work to dismantle that reach.”

This policy of countering Iran’s regional influence stands in stark contrast to President Obama’s own coddling of Iran, and the president’s orientation away from America’s traditional Sunni Arab allies.

3 – Trump said he opposes the United Nations unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state.

An agreement imposed by the UN would be a total and complete disaster. The United States must oppose this resolution and use the power of our veto. Why? Because that’s not how you make a deal.

Deals are made when parties come to the table and negotiate. Each side must give up something it values in exchange for something it requires. A deal that imposes conditions on Israel and the Palestinian Authority will do nothing to bring peace. It will only further delegitimize Israel and it would reward Palestinian terrorism, because every day they are stabbing Israelis – and even Americans.

He further threatened to veto “any attempt by the UN to impose its will on the Jewish state.”

4 – Trump vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem – and we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel.

5 – Trump will treat Israel like an ally and not a “second-class citizen.”

When I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately. I have known him for many years and we will be able to work closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the entire region.

While this declaration may sound simplistic, it comes after seven years of Obama espousing policies some have argued are hostile to the Jewish state. And it comes on the heels of a turbulent relationship between Obama and Netanyahu, including a notorious May 2010 White House meeting in which Obama reportedly snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle and his daughters.  Also, the Obama administration faced accusations it encouraged the activism of nongovernmental organizations working to defeat Netanyahu in the 2015 elections in Israel.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

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Obama Welcomes Castro's Criticism of America: 'I Personally Would Not Disagree'

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President Obama said that he "personally would not disagree" with some of Cuban President Raul Castro\'s criticisms of America:

"President Castro, I think, has pointed out that in his view making sure that everybody is getting a decent education or health care, has basic security and old age, that those things are human rights as well. I personally would not disagree with him," Obama said.

"But it doesn\'t detract from some of these other concerns. And the goal of the human rights dialogue is not for the United States to dictate to Cuba how they should govern themselves, but to make sure that we are having a frank and candid conversation around this issue. And hopefully that we can learn from each other."

Obama made the comment at a joint press conference with the Cuban Communist dictator.

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