Ted Cruz pouts; when will he lie again?

Pouting is about the only thing one can say about Ted Cruz's filibuster threat on the debt ceiling bill yesterday.

The lying part? Remember how, a month ago, on CBS' "Face the Nation," Bob Schieffer backed him into a corner over last fall's government shutdown and Cruz kept lying about how he didn't cause it? Well, set your watches for how soon it will take for him to lie or spin this one.

Meanwhile, note that this was the first "clean" increase of the debt ceiling since 2009. And, I think we changed presidents that year, didn't we?

So, this in essence removes one GOP lie, that many in Congress have told about debt ceiling votes for the last half-decade.

Meanwhile, for getting enough GOP votes to overcome Cruz's filibuster threat, GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is now in Cruz's gunsights.

And, even if the Turtle should win his primary, he's by no means out of the election woods.

Beyond the stupidity of debt-ceiling legislation, this is another example of two ingrained American stupidities, and one that's developed more and more over the last few decades.

1. The two-year election cycle, combined with the problem of the body of the US Constitution being considered largely sacrosanct. Britain, without a formal written constitution, and with some eye of flexibility on its unwritten traditional one, had no problem with moving Commons terms to five years (outside of the fall of a government). And, speaking of ...

2. The nonsense in a nuclear-and-computers age of our nonparliamentary government. Now, if you're France, where the president has some powers vis-a-vis its parliament that our president doesn't always have with Congress, that would help a little. Or one could go further down that end, to where a president accumulates Putin-like powers. No thanks.

3. The developed issue? The power of money, and of think-tank type special interests with it, in American politics. This is more an issue of the right than the left, but liberals have been slow and scattershot in adopting public financing of Congressional elections, rather than their own money rush, as the appropriate alternative. This should have been done in the