Rick Perry Has A Stalker Who Wants To Know If He's Gay... And To Talk About His Herpes

Ever hear of Robert Morrow, the guy who ran the above ad in the Austin Statesman? He's a wealthy Republican backer of Ron Paul from Austin. And he's warning New Hampshire primary voters that Perry isn't what he appears to be: Tea Party fraud Rick Perry is Political Herpes. Let me run a few paragraphs by you:

I urge you to NOT vote for Rick Perry who is one of the biggest frauds and phonies in American politics. I am a 3-time delegate to the Texas Republican convention (2006, 2008, 2010) and I live in Austin, TX. Here why Rick Perry is completely unqualified to be president.

The first thing you need to know about Rick Perry is that he is (or has been) a flagrant adulterer. Nor does Perry understand or appreciate free market capitalism and the importance of low taxes for all; Perry is a crony capitalist and he likes to spend and borrow lots of money. Perry does not respect parental rights (HPV mandate).

The same man who is using a presidential prayer rally for his personal ambitions and who often spouts Christian buzzwords and Bible talk to advance his political career is a flagrant adulterer, having sex with women who are the approximate age of his daughter Sydney, age 24.

I know this because I am a patron of Austin strip clubs. My friends and excellent contacts in the Austin strip club community tell me that Rick Perry, a la Bill Clinton, has an enabling entourage who gets him “young hotties” to have sex with – both here in Austin and especially when he is on the road. I learned about this before the 2010 Texas primary. I had an attractive stripper tell me about her direct dealings with Rick Perry. She said that she was attempting a Monica Lewinsky-type act upon Gov. Rick Perry (oral sex) but that in her words Perry was “too coked up” to perform sexually! When it came time for the stripper to leave, Perry gave her an outrageous amount of money, so large in fact that it probably means that Perry is taking cash bribes or illegal gifts to fund his extracurricular activities. Perry is not a rich man and I doubt he is spending that much of his own money on the women. (Actually sweetheart real estate deals have made the man unusual money.)

Another young woman, who has had direct dealings with Perry’s enabling entourage, told me that Perry is especially flagrantly adulterous when he goes on the road. She said that Perry has sex with the “young hotties" and that Perry and his entourage are literally having orgies in his hotel room. They are either calling escort services or picking up “young hotties” impressed by an arrogant, entitled governor of Texas.

Recently a local Austin reporter was telling me that they had heard about Rick Perry and the strippers in 2006, but they never could nail it down. Well, consider it confirmed. Additionally, there are many people in Austin who are convinced that the man is a homosexual or has had gay affairs in the past. I have never met a man who has had sex with Rick Perry, but I have met women who have had direct dealings with Adulterer Rick Perry and his enabling entourage. Perry has most definitely been living a double life.

That brings up another disqualifying characteristic of Perry: he is arrogant. Rick Perry knows his adultery rap sheet and liability more than anyone else. Perry is fully aware of the tremendous amount of risk this brings to the Republican party, his political career, his personal life and reputation. Yet, Rick Perry, drunk with arrogance and entitlement, presents himself as a legitimate presidential candidate when he is anything but that. Adulterer Rick Perry is sitting on a keg of slut-fueled nitroglycerine that if it ever exploded, would make Anthony Weiner look like a mere pimple popping.

Side note: it is no secret in Austin that for years Rick and Anita Perry have been having marital problems (no wonder); but enabling Anita is wearing her “Hillary Clinton” boots as she supports his presidential run. Anita sure did not support Perry’s 2010 governor’s race, as she rarely went to campaign events and when she did she never smiled, had a robotic look on her face and obviously did not want to be there. At the moments of Rick’s greatest triumphs, Anita would be on stage with a blank look on her face, looking like a lost, unhappy child amidst all the cheering for Adulterer Rick.

...Rick Perry is a religious bigot and he proved it in 2008 when he supported an out of control Child Protective Services when they raided the peaceful, religious FLDS Mormon community in El Dorado based on a hoax phone call from a disturbed woman, Rozita Swinton of  Colorado. If you are a conservative Christian, perhaps a home schooler, you should be extremely concerned about the religious oppression of the FLDS and Rick Perry’s gung ho support for that tragic fiasco.

Out of all the things Rick Perry has done, the attack on the FLDS families-- with all the tears, trauma and family destruction that caused-- this has to be the most disturbing thing Perry has done.

Rick Perry and Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) were targeting the FLDS and looking for an excuse to attack them. Hoaxer Rozita Swinton made a crank phone call, alleging one case of child abuse, on 3/29/08. By April 3, 2008, Rick Perry had ordered the entire FLDS community surrounded by police armed with automatic weapons, SWAT teams with snipers, helicopters and even an M113 armored personnel carrier.

...Imagine a fascist, totalitarian government coming into your household or neighborhood and ripping away YOUR kids based on one crank, hoax phone call. That is exactly what happened to those FLDS families in 2008 and Rick Perry supported that move long after it was revealed that a crank phone call complaint from a crazy woman Rozita Swinton in Colorado was the basis for the invasion. And even if that ONE complaint had been legitimate, what kind of a totalitarian government would come in there and remove FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY EIGHT children from dozens of families? Unacceptable. 

As of now, 438 of the 438 children who were taken are back with their parents, which just shows how weak the CPS case was and proves that the real motive for this raid was governmental religious oppression. The FLDS had been watched and targeted by the government who was just looking for an excuse to move in and destroy their lives.

If you are a home schooler or a conservative Christian or you just believe in freedom and “live and let live” you should be extremely concerned at the state sponsored gross miscarriage of justice that happened to these FLDS families.

Oldie but goodie:

Is Rick Perry A Crook? Well, Absolutely-- But Will Voters Even Care... IF They Find Out?

Tuesday we wondered aloud if Rick Perry is too stupid to win the presidency. Many people confuse "cunning" for intelligence. Perry may be lacking in education and even in intellectual capacity but he's an astute, instinctive and very cunning politician. He also seems to have figured out how to become a millionaire on a civil servant's modest salary... and stay out of prison while doing so. Right-wing polemicist David Frum explains how he did it:

Discharged from the Air Force in 1977 aged 27, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives seven years later, in 1984. At that time, the Perry family reported income of $45,000, largely from Mrs. Perry’s work as a nurse.

Rick Perry served in the legislature until elected Agriculture Commissioner in 1990. He climbed the ladder to Lt. Governor in 1998, then ascended in the governorship after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000.

Now it’s 2011, and Perry reports a net worth of $2.8 million. How’d he do it?

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram tells the story.

Perry made his money in real estate through deals like this:

Back in 1993, there was a piece of ground that computer billionaire Michael Dell needed to connect his new house near Austin to city water mains. Dell neglected to appreciate the land’s importance. But Perry did discern it. He bought the land for less than $120,000-- then sold it to Dell two years later for a $343,000 profit. Uncanny. True, some detractors have wondered whether the sale was entirely on the level:

Texas Democrats have repeatedly questioned the sale over the years, in part because Mike Toomey-- an influential lobbyist who would later become Perry’s chief of staff-- closed the deal for Perry while Perry was out of town. Perry has always maintained he didn’t know that the land would be so valuable to Dell when he purchased the property.

Perry repeated similarly shrewd investments again and again in the years ahead.

Look at this transaction from the 2000s. A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator-- the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land-- back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000. Tidy. And how remarkable that Perry and his state senator friend could see a value proposition that the two professional real estate developers overlooked.

So it goes through investments in stock, load, and energy properties. Perry just kept seeing things that other people apparently didn’t.

Even more impressive: how Perry managed to find the time. There he was, governor of the second biggest state in the country, creating jobs from morning to night. Yet somehow he also was able to scour the vast landscape of Texas for under-appreciated little parcels of land with the potential to triple or quadruple in value in just a few months.

Clearly Rick Perry is a two-bit criminal and he should have been charged with accepting bribery. But he wasn't... and now he's the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination against the weakest and most pathetic Democratic president in our lifetimes. Yesterday Frum followed up on his post by complaining that Republicans are now citing Perry's corrupt practices as "an affirmative credential" in his thin resume. He doesn't personally want to charge Perry with an offense that could land him in prison but writes that "it’s asking a lot of the voters to believe that Gov. Perry scored these successes by acumen alone. The coincidences just pile up too thick... Rick Perry is not the first politician to emerge from public life a lot richer than he started."

There’s more going on here than an issue of appearance of impropriety. There’s also a question about where a politician invests his time and energy. Successful real estate investing is difficult and time-consuming. Rick Perry may claim that his investments did not benefit from insider information and special favors, and as Jim notes, Texas voters have accepted his story sufficiently to elect and re-elect him. But Perry obviously cannot claim to have been 100% focused on Texas business during his many years in office.

At a minimum, the attempt to reinvent Perry’s business career as a rebuttal to negative allegations about Perry’s brainpower is … let’s say … ill-advised. Perry’s real-estate fortune is one of those subjects about which you’d expect Perry supporters to take the view: the less said, the better.

There's virtually no chance the anti-inspiring Obama can win reelection. The only hope he has for another term is for the Republicans to nominate someone patently unelectable. The White House always hoped for Palin and then for Bachmann. Will Perry do the trick? Probably.

[I]f Perry ignores the growing questions about his record, he risks damaging the electability quotient that has helped rocket him ahead of Michele Bachmann by appealing more to Republicans beyond the Tea Party. But if he bows too much to critics, shifting his stances to be more in line with a mainstream electorate, he risks alienating those Tea Partiers who are still the voters Republicans running for president are afraid of.

So far, it seems that Perry is sticking with the Tea Party and letting the attacks fall where they will.

Here's an example: when his campaign attempted to back away from his book Fed Up!-- which contains attacks on Social Security that might make mainstream voters skittish-- Perry publicly rejected it, doubling-down on his claim that the popular program is a Ponzi scheme and maybe unconstitutional.

Democrats certainly seem to think talk like this is playing into their hands.

"For Rick Perry, the way he matches up with [Republican] voters has proven to be at least a short-term political bonanza for him," Bill Burton, the former White House spokesperson and head of Priorities USA Action told reporters in an email over the weekend. "But in the long term, his ideology could have devastating consequences for our country. Especially the middle class."

That's the fight Democrats want. And Perry faces a lot more than questions about his book. As ABC News cataloged Monday, Perry is coming under increasing scrutiny from all fronts. That's not surprising considering he's the frontrunner-- but it means awkward questions. Perry's dodged some and swaggered his way past others.

But will it be enough for Democrats, many of whom are beyond dismayed with what a grotesque disappointment Obama has been, to actually turn out and vote? They sure didn't in 2010... and Obama has just gotten worse and worse and worse. Before then, some think it's to early to recite Kiddish over Romney's political corpse and yesterday Bill Galston showed him a path to rebirth: going for Perry's very exposed jugular:

Perry’s entrance into the race has highlighted your key weakness: People still don’t know who you are and what you stand for. They’re yearning for clear, strong, unapologetic leadership, but they don’t know where your red lines are. And efforts to placate opponents-- such as fudging your long-held views on climate change-- will only make matters worse.

But Perry’s emergence also gives you a unique opportunity to define yourself-- against him. If you take it, you have a fighting chance of prevailing. If you duck it, you’ll lose, just as Tim Pawlenty did when he booted away his chance to take you on.

How should you do it? Well, to the extent that the Republican nominating contest is a rational process, it’s a search for a candidate with three characteristics. The nominee must be competent to serve as president, reliably conservative, and electable. You’re never going to be able to make your party believe that the longest-serving governor in Texas history isn’t fit to serve as chief executive. And despite some facts to the contrary, it won’t be any easier to challenge Perry’s conservative credentials. That narrows it down to one option: You must persuade the decisive portion of your party that Rick Perry is too extreme to be elected president.

Here’s your theme: Rick Perry wants to repeal the 20th century. I don’t. And neither do the American people.

That terrain of battle offers a target-rich environment. Where to begin? With Perry’s stated desire to repeal the 16th amendment? With his opposition to the 17th amendment, based on the odd view that taking the power to elect senators away from state legislators and giving it to the people of each state somehow amounts to a national power-grab? Maybe. But if I were you, I’d begin with Social Security. Here are Governor Perry’s considered views on the subject:

Certain [New Deal]programs massively altered the relationship between Americans and their government with regard to critical aspect[s] of their lives, violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles of federalism and limited government. By the far the best example of this is Social Security … . Social Security is something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now … . By any measure, Social Security is a failure. (Source: Rick Perry, Fed Up!, pp. 48, 50, 62)

So … Perry believes that Social Security is (a) unconstitutional, (b) an undemocratic imposition on an undefined “we,” and (c) a failure, however you look at it.

To be sure, there are real problems with Social Security, and lots of us have spent a good deal of time figuring out how to address them. In the long term, significant adjustments are necessary and unavoidable. But if you can’t figure out how to refute Perry, you don’t have the political intelligence to be an effective candidate. And if you’re not willing to say it, starting in September’s debates, you don’t have the guts to be an effective candidate. And you won’t be your party’s nominee.

No New Texans!

The GOP Establishment-- call it plutocracy or fascism... it's the elites who run the right-wing show-- smells blood in the water... Obama's. They're positive they can beat him in 2012, sweep Congress and roll back what's ever left of the New Deal and maybe even democracy, which they've always detested, itself. The moron zombie base is worked up and ready to consign its future generations to slavery and Democrats are depressed and deflated by Obama's shocking conservatism. But they know-- like Obama knows-- that his best chance for a second term rests with an over the top Republican nominee. And, as the corndog and fried-butter-on-a-stick eaters at this weekend's Ames straw poll proved, that's exactly what the Republican base wants. They picked, overwhelmingly, the craziest, least electable candidates. Romney, the anointed candidate of the Establishment-- who, regardless of what the base (and Obama) want, will be the GOP nominee-- barely made a blip, with a dismal 7th place finish, even below joke candidates Rick Santorum and Herman "the Hermanator" Cain.

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced his intention to run on the sane day as the Ames straw poll. He was drafted by the Republican Establishment. His job is to knock out Bachmann. The Roves and Aileses and their plutocratic/fascist backers don't care if Perry manages to go all the way or if he just winds up as Romney's VP nominee... they just want Bachmann and her crazy eyes and her closet case psychotic husband out of the race as soon as possible.

Less than a month ago we looked at a laundry list of reasons many on the far right fringes-- i.e., the typical GOP activist-- can't embrace Perry. (Yesterday Think Progress had a more all-encompassing laundry list worth taking a look at.) But this seems to be as big a problem for him as Romneycare and the consistent pattern of flip-flopping are for Mitt:

Perhaps the biggest issue people opposed to the nanny state should be concerned about is Perry's issuance of an executive order back in 2007 that would have forced almost every single girl in the state of Texas to receive the Gardasil vaccine before entering the sixth grade. Perry was in the tank with Merck. There were apparent financial connections between Merck and Perry reported by news outlets, such as a $6,000 campaign contribution and Merck’s hiring of former Perry Chief of Staff Mike Toomey to handle its Texas lobbying work.

The Texas legislature put the kibosh on that idea by crafting a bill that overturned the executive order.

Subsequently, very serious safety issues with the vaccine came to light. The biggest problem with regard to the Gardasil issue was that Perry appeared to be condoning premarital sex, or at least assuming that middle school girls were going to be engaging in sexual activity, which is the only way that the cervical cancer that the vaccine prevents can be contracted. Many parents and conservatives were justifiably outraged.

When one takes into account these facts about Rick Perry, the only conclusion that can be reached is that Perry is for the expansion of government and its intrusion into our lives.

The new Texas Monthly is running a major feature on how Perry keeps winning-- 10 elections in a row, some against formidable opponents. He may come off like a pathetic lightweight unfit to run a rural post office but he's managed to beat Jim Hightower, John Sharp, Tony Sanchez, Chris Bell, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Bill White-- all of whom are interviewed in the Monthly story.

Saturday's Wall Street Journal opinion page, though, exposed a weakness in the Perry armor that could be deadly-- in fact, a weakness that could be as disturbing for many on the right as it will certainly be for normal Americans. The scandal has been kept in the public eye partially because of carping by teabaggers who see Perry as a phony baloney hack politician and a willing servant for the Establishment they sometimes vestigially sense is their enemy.

Gov. Rick Perry's presidential pitch goes something like this: During one of the worst recessions in American history, he's kept his state "open for business." In the last two years, Texas created over a quarter of a million jobs, meaning that the state's 8% unemployment rate is substantially lower than the rest of the nation's. The governor credits this exceptional growth to things like low taxes and tort reform.

It's a strong message. But one of the governor's signature economic development initiatives-- the Texas Emerging Technology Fund-- has lately raised serious questions among some conservatives.

The Emerging Technology Fund was created at Mr. Perry's behest in 2005 to act as a kind of public-sector venture capital firm, largely to provide funding for tech start-ups in Texas. Since then, the fund has committed nearly $200 million of taxpayer money to fund 133 companies. Mr. Perry told a group of CEOs in May that the fund's "strategic investments are what's helping us keep groundbreaking innovations in the state." The governor, together with the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the Texas House, enjoys ultimate decision-making power over the fund's investments.

Among the companies that the Emerging Technology Fund has invested in is Convergen LifeSciences, Inc. It received a $4.5 million grant last year-- the second largest grant in the history of the fund. The founder and executive chairman of Convergen is David G. Nance.

In 2009, when Mr. Nance submitted his application for a $4.5 million Emerging Technology Fund grant for Convergen, he and his partners had invested only $1,000 of their own money into their new company, according to documentation prepared by the governor's office in February 2010. But over the years, Mr. Nance managed to invest a lot more than $1,000 in Mr. Perry. Texas Ethics Commission records show that Mr. Nance donated $75,000 to Mr. Perry's campaigns between 2001 and 2006.

The regional panel that reviewed Convergen's application turned down the company's $4.5 million request when it presented its proposal on Oct. 7, 2009. But Mr. Nance appealed that decision directly to a statewide advisory committee (of which Mr. Nance was once a member) appointed by Mr. Perry. Just eight days later, on Oct. 15, a subcommittee unanimously recommended approval by the full statewide committee. On Oct. 29, the full advisory committee unanimously recommended the approval of Convergen's application. When asked why the advisory committee felt comfortable recommending Convergen's grant, Lucy Nashed, a spokesperson for Mr. Perry, said that the committee "thoroughly vetted the company."

Starting in 2008, Mr. Perry also appropriated approximately $2 million in federal taxpayer money through the auspices of the Wagner-Peyser Act-- a federal works program founded during the New Deal and overseen in Texas by Mr. Perry's office-- to a nonprofit launched by Mr. Nance called Innovate Texas. The nonprofit was meant to help entrepreneurs by linking them to investors. It began receiving funding on Dec. 31, 2008, soon after Mr. Nance's previous company, Introgen Therapeutics, declared bankruptcy on Dec. 3. According to state records, Mr. Nance paid himself $250,000 for the two years he ran Innovate Texas. Innovate Texas, whose listed phone number is not a working number, could not be reached for comment. (Two phone calls left for Mr. Nance at Convergen's offices went unreturned.)

ThromboVision, Inc., a medical imaging company, was also the recipient of an award from the Emerging Technology Fund: It received $1.5 million in 2007. Charles Tate, a major Perry contributor, served as the chairman of a state committee that reviewed ThromboVision's application for state funding, and Mr. Tate voted to give ThromboVision the public money. One month after ThromboVision received notification that it would receive a $1.5 million state grant in April 2007, Mr. Tate invested his own money in ThromboVision, according to the Dallas Morning News. The Texas paper later found that by 2010 Mr. Tate owned a total of 200,000 preferred shares in ThromboVision.

According to a Texas state auditor's report, ThromboVision failed to submit required annual reports to the fund from 2008 through 2010, when the company went bankrupt. The report noted the tech fund's managers were "unaware of ThromboVision, Inc.'s bankruptcy until after the bankruptcy had been reported in a newspaper." ThromboVision's bankruptcy filing revealed not only that Mr. Tate had been a preferred shareholder in ThromboVision, but so had prominent Perry supporter Charles Miller, who owned 250,000 preferred shares in the company and has donated $125,000 to the governor's campaigns. Three phone calls and an email seeking Mr. Tate's side of the story went unreturned.

All told, the Dallas Morning News has found that some $16 million from the tech fund has gone to firms in which major Perry contributors were either investors or officers, and $27 million from the fund has gone to companies founded or advised by six advisory board members. The tangle of interests surrounding the fund has raised eyebrows throughout the state, especially among conservatives who think the fund is a misplaced use of taxpayer dollars to start with.

"It is fundamentally immoral and arrogant," says state representative David Simpson, a tea party-backed freshman from Longview, two hours east of Dallas. The fund "opened the door to the appearance of impropriety, if not actual impropriety."

...Michael Quinn Sullivan, the president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, sees in the Emerging Technology Fund a classic example of the perils of government pork. "The problem with these kinds of funds is that even when they're used with the best of intentions, it looks bad," says Mr. Sullivan. "You're taking from the average taxpayer and giving to someone who has a connection with government officials."

I got an e-mail this weekend from Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett. He knows Perry well-- and knows what a disaster he's been for ordinary working families in their state. He was sounding the alarm. Here's Doggett's interview Friday on MSNBC:

Maybe Rick Perry did the right thing last Saturday when he asked for America to join him in prayer. Considering the disaster that has been his governorship in Texas, we need every prayer we can get as we try to sort this mess out.

...There is no more extreme, no more disagreeable candidate than Rick Perry.  Want to know just how right-wing Rick Perry is? As Governor of Texas, he even implied that secession was a possibility. That’s right, the Rick Perry, who wants to be President of the United States of America is the same Rick Perry who provided comfort to those Texans, who have supported disuniting from America and seceding.

    •    This is the same Rick Perry whose answer to Texas being the state with the highest percentage of folks without health insurance is to do even less here, while questioning the very existence of Medicare.  

    •    This is the same Rick Perry who has undermined our future economic competitiveness by slashing budgets for primary and secondary education and undermining our institutions of higher learning. 

    •    This is the same Rick Perry that dangerously disregards the importance of protecting the water we drink and the air we breath. Texas now leads the nation in clean-water permit violations in the nation, hazardous waste spills and toxic emissions.

Doggett is hardly the only Democrat sounding the alarm. Paul Begala, who's known him nearly 3 decades-- back when Perry was a freshman Democratic state legislator (nicknamed "Crotch")-- did a good job at the Daily Beast this weekend. "Perry stood out," Begala remembers, "for his modest intellectual gifts... But lack of brains has never been a hindrance in politics." What Begala claims Perry has-- aside from nice hair-- is the willingness to say or do whatever it takes to win, no matter what the ancillary harm. That's the classic definition of a sociopath.

That's truer than ever in relation to today's Tea Party–dominated Republican Party. You’ve gotta be willing to do anything, say anything, accept anything, propose anything, endorse anything, pledge anything. There is nothing too batshit for these people.

Watch your back, Mitt.

Bill White Is No Nathan Myhrvold

Each day I get up and go through e-mails, looking for stuff I can delete without opening. One batch of easily deletable e-mails, spam, comes from political campaigns I'm not following and don't care about. And one of those campaigns is that of the conservative Democrat running for governor of Texas, Bill White. I suppose I should have asked his campaign to take me off their list but I never got around to asking them and a few dozen other candidates to stop filling my box up with spam. This morning however, just as I was about to click delete on a Bill White e-mail I glanced at the title, FOX: Bill White opposes cap and trade. Now White is running against one of the most reprehensible men in American politics, Rick Perry, a closet case driven insane by a psychosis so dark and ugly that he would be truly a danger were he to ever get any power. Fortunately, as we found out when George Bush held the job, the governor of Texas holds a largely ceremonial position. I hope Rick Perry loses and I doubt it would make anyone's life any better were Bill White to win. The race isn't on my radar. But Global Warming is. So I opened White's spam. He cites Fox as a validater of the fact that he's nearly as reactionary and out-of-touch as Rick Perry on the whole topic of climate change and energy.

On Friday, Houston's FOX 26 News reported on Rick Perry's lies about Bill White's position on cap and trade. Bill White does not support cap and trade, and Rick Perry just can't seem to tell the truth.

Click here to read the article and watch the news segment.

Perry's false claims about Bill White and cap and trade have been rated "Pants on Fire" lies-- twice-- by the independent fact checking website Politifact.com. But Perry keeps citing a letter Bill White wrote that makes the case for four different energy solutions and gives a warning about cap and trade.

Well, four veterans of the energy and political arena reviewed the letter for FOX 26 and none of them agreed with Perry, reinforcing again the fact that Rick Perry is lying about Bill White's record.

Texans want a governor who shoots straight.

Literally. Oh, there are millions of Texans who are normal, clear-headed Americans... even outside of Austin. Houston is filled with them. So are Dallas and Fort Worth. San Antonio as well. But there are more millions who are batshit crazy, resentful of facts, driven mad by fake religions and so angry at their miserable unfulfilled lives that they take it out on everyone else by voting for people like George Bush and Rick Perry. 4,479,328 of them (55% of voters) pulled the lever or touched the screen for John McCain in 2008.

Here's how the article cited by White's campaign contrasts his energy views with the man he is well aware is a dangerous sociopath, Rick Perry:

Texas sits on a third of U.S. domestic oil supply and produces more than 30 percent of the country's natural gas.

These fossil fuels have come under fire from President Obama's administration, which seeks to reduce global warming by placing a governmental cap on total carbon emissions. The government would then issue a limited amount of pollution credits that could be traded between major energy consumers.

Those who produce so called "clean energy" could earn a huge windfall by selling their unused credits while consumers of fossil fuel would pay dearly for the right to pollute.

Governor Rick Perry calls this 'cap and trade' proposal economically catastrophic for Texas.

"We know that the 'cap and trade' legislation that they are talking about will cost upwards of 300,000 [jobs] in this state," said Gov. Perry to FOX 26 News.

Bill White, Perry's Democratic opponent who has made millions of dollars in the oil patch, says he is also firmly against 'cap and trade.'

"'Cap and trade' would be an enormous windfall for the lawyers and consultants," said former Houston mayor White... "I was fighting against 'cap and trade' before Governor Perry," said White.

When I woke up today the first thing I saw-- even before White's e-mail-- was Fareed Zacharia interviewing Jeffrey Sachs, the man the NY Times has called "the most important economist in the World," first about how to solve the economic mess Bush left us with and then how to get a grip on climate change. The climate change interview included a global warming scientist and an oil industry shill from Cato spouting the same excuses for inaction you hear from everyone on Big Oil's payroll, from Rick Perry to... Bill White.

Rick Perry, Mike Toomey, Texas 12-Year-Old Girls... And The $55 Million Bribe

CNN has forced YouTube to disable the embed option on all the Bachmann attacks against Rick Perry during the teabagger debate Tuesday. So above you can watch the segment with a crazy, shouting teabagger. At around the 3-minute mark Bachmann went after Perry's M.O. as the nexus of Texas' Republican Culture of Corruption. Even if Perry's STD problem is most damaging to him in the Republican primary, especially among libertarians and Christian Conservatives, it is a pattern of gross crony capitalism and blatant corruption that could hurt him most among normal general-election voters. Unless someone comes up with photos of Perry in bed with Geoff Conner-- or with any of the young male hookers he's been hiring for two decades-- it's his corruption that is most likely to keep him out of the White House.

No fan of Perry's, after the debate Republican polemicist David Frum posited that Perry is too slow on his feet to be the effective messenger of the right-wing revolution. Despite Bachmann's unexpected outburst Tuesday, Republicans generally don't care that much about their politicians taking bribes. Somehow they admire it and chalk it up to entrepreneurial spirit and the free market. It's part of what makes the GOP a dangerous and nihilistic pathology. But Frum mentioned it in his critique of Perry as well.

We learn things from these debates, and one of them is: how does a candidate respond under pressure? What we’ve seen from Perry in two debates is (1) he gets testy and (2) he makes stupid mistakes.

Perry was supposed to carry the message: “I will save our cherished national institution, Social Security.”

Romney pushed him to substitute the message: “I will save this unconstitutional program I hate.” Good luck with that.

It was not only Romney who outmaneuvered Perry. Michele Bachmann(!) pushed Perry to his funniest blooper of the night: his angry insistence that he cannot be bought for $5,000. That’s one of those denials that opens the way to more embarrassing questions: “How about $10,000?”

As a candidate, Perry’s unnimble mental reflexes are a merely personal handicap. Should Perry reach the presidency, his lack of intellectual resource will have consequences for the nation.

But Frum wasn't about to go to the real question. It isn't about $5,000 or $10,000. Let's try $55 million. That's real money even to the GOP fat cats who run the Tea Party. Perry was able to stump and somewhat effectively fend off the simple-minded Bachmann by claiming all he got for his shocking Gardasil executive order was a measly five grand so it couldn't have been a bribe. Really? Had Bachmann been better prepared, she could have asked him about the $55 million bribe from his old pal Mike Toomey (pictured with Perry on the right), the same character who gave him the $5,000 pop! Palin was better prepared than the dull-witted Bachmann.

On Saturday, not-yet-a-presidential-candidate Sarah Palin previewed an enticing line of attack against Texas Governor Rick Perry: "crony capitalism." Although she didn't mention the latest Republican frontrunner by name, Palin warned Iowa tea partiers that when candidates accept million-dollar donations, you should expect a few strings to be attached. On that front, the numbers seemingly speak for themselves. A full 20 percent of Rick Perry's $100 million fundraising tally as governor has come from Perry appointees, and on everything from toll roads to nuclear waste dumps to private prisons to lawsuit reform, Perry's policies have dovetailed neatly with the interests of his biggest donors.

Yet when NBC's Brian Williams gave Perry's rivals for the GOP nomination a chance to nail the governor at Wednesday night's debate, they all took a pass. The question was about Perry's controversial 2007 decision to mandate the HPV vaccine to inoculate adolescent girls against cervical cancer. Williams wanted to know if Perry made the right call. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul both seized on the idea that the executive order was a decidedly Big Government move. Mitt Romney noted that, as Perry himself has said, it was a well-intentioned mistake that Perry would handle differently if he had a do-over.

What went unsaid by his rivals, though, was the full context: Perry's decision came at the end of a massive lobbying effort by the pharmaceutical giant Merck—an effort helmed in Austin by Perry's former chief of staff and longtime friend, Mike Toomey. (Toomey currently chairs a pro-Perry Super PAC with the stated goal of raising $55 million during the primary race to finance a shadow campaign for Perry.) On the day he signed the executive order, Perry received a $5,000 donation from Merck's political action committee, which came on the heels of a $6,000 donation during his reelection campaign. Even his supporters would agree that the HPV decision was an uncharacteristic one for the conservative governor; questions about Perry's motivations are natural.

Why did his opponents take a pass? It could just be that in 2012, GOP candidates-- Palin excepted-- know better than to bite the big business hand that feeds many of them.

Unhappy With The Existing GOP Field... Waiting For Godot-- And Perry Ain't It

The Establishment end of the Republican Party wishes they had a better candidate than Mitt Romney to get behind. Yes, he's their guy but... they're realizing that their guy is a loser. At the same time, the far right of the party-- the racists, teabaggers, religionist bigots, lunatic fringe-- are unhappy with their (latest) standard bearer. Once they-- or at least their big money backers-- accepted that Michele Bachmann is utterly implausible and rallied round Rick Perry... well it's been all downhill from there. Above, we see Rachel Maddow talking about the dilemma. Below Lawrence O'Donnell talks with Alec MacGillis of the New Republic who just wrote the cover story, "The Permanent Candidate: What's Driving Rick Perry?"

MacGillis has managed to get down on paper what so many of us have felt about Perry all along. Keyword: INAUTHENTIC. It's all about Rick Perry-- and if he was supposed to be the guy who was the alternative to a Mitt Romney who doesn't stand for anything other than a career path... bad news. His national image as a "hardened ideologue driven by small-government orthodoxy" is a joke for people in Texas who have followed his pathetic and slimy little career. The real Perry, they say isn't "Perry the ideologue but Perry the tactician-- a politician skilled at picking up on shifts in the electorate and adapting himself to them." In effect, he's the polar opposite of a leader. And as MacGillis makes clear, "Perry often seemed more driven by personal priorities than ideological ones." He comes across more like an old-time, self-serving, Big City ward heeler than an ideological champion of any sort.

Perry, says Bill Allaway of the conservative Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, has a “knack for seeing where stuff is headed and thinking where he could be with respect to that.” The tax-day speech was an example of Perry “getting right in front of the parade,” says Miller. “He saw that this is where I need to be right now. And that’s just having good campaign judgment to do that.” Perry’s political guru, Dave Carney, basically said as much when I met with him in Austin, attributing his client’s prescience to the pleasure that Perry takes in being out among voters. “He listens, he looks you in the eye, and he gets a sense of where people are going,” Carney told me. “He has a very good sense of what’s going on.” Greg Hartman, a former Texas political strategist, marvels at Perry’s transformation since 2009. “The most amazing thing about Perry is that now that he’s jumped out there, people say he’s brash and caustic, but he built his career as lieutenant governor and governor by being pretty quiet. He’s not brash. This is a little bit of a new persona here.”

...Having secured [his first election in 1984, a state legislative] seat, Perry made clear that he did not exactly have a big policy agenda. “I had not one piece of legislation I planned to carry,” he told the Abilene paper after the election.

Once in Austin, Perry made little effort to hide his lack of interest in the finer points of policy. Garry Mauro, then the Texas land commissioner, remembers coming to Perry to sponsor a piece of legislation and Perry cutting him off when he started to explain the bill in detail. “Don’t waste your time,” Perry said. “I wouldn’t understand it anyway. Just make sure you’re there to talk about it.” Recalling the incident today, Mauro says, “You at least have to give the guy credit for candidness.”

In 1988, Perry endorsed Al Gore for president. The decision looks understandable in retrospect, given that Gore was one of the more centrist (and Southern) candidates in that year’s Democratic field. But the veteran state Democrat was struck by how eager Perry was to take a lead role in the Gore effort, which has been downplayed in more recent accounts of the episode. The official co-chairs of the campaign in Texas were two older, prominent state Democrats, Bill Hobby and Jess Hay. But Perry and a few other young House reps got together and, with the elders’ permission, started calling themselves co-chairmen as well-- with Perry flying them around the state on Gore’s behalf.

Yet, even as he was angling for status in his own party, Perry had caught the eye of those building the new GOP in Texas, notably a doughy savant by the name of Karl Rove. The state had been solidly Democratic for generations, but change was afoot, as Democrats became associated with Northern liberals like Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy. In 1983, Texas Congressman Phil Gramm had announced that he was switching parties. In 1989, with the coaxing of Rove, and with Gramm standing at his side, Perry announced he was doing the same in order to take on agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, a darling of liberals and nemesis of Texas farmers. It was a bold move. “What the hell did I just do?” Perry muttered aloud after announcing the change, according to one Republican insider. In Austin, the switch only confirmed the sense that Perry was a striver. “Governor Perry is a really, really good politician,” Hartman, the former strategist, told me. “He understood where the state of Texas was going.”

For the race against Hightower, David Weeks, the TV whiz in Rove’s shop and a friend of Perry’s from West Texas, crafted gauzy spots featuring Perry in chaps and playing piano with his young son. “David is wonderful at capturing him and projecting him,” says Miller, the Austin consultant. “Rick’s his muse.” Weeks also produced an ad that showed images of flag-burners morphing into Hightower’s face. On Election Day, Perry eked out a win, 49 to 47 percent.

As commissioner, Perry set about scrapping Hightower’s regulations on pesticides and played up his bond with farmers, defending them against attacks from “food terrorists and stomach police.” But his anti-government stance only went so far: He sought big increases in his department’s budget and defended a state loan program for farmers against a critical audit.

Meanwhile, the state’s political shift toward the GOP was accelerating. When Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a Democrat, announced he would not seek reelection in 1998, Rove urged Perry to run in the hopes of putting a Republican in place to take over as governor if George W. Bush was elected president two years later. Perry was ready-- even though it meant running against a good friend from A&M, Democrat John Sharp.

Rove couldn’t manage Perry’s race because Bush wanted him to focus on his reelection bid that year. Instead, Perry turned to Carney, an acerbic New Hampshirite who remains his strategist to this day. The two teams clashed over strategy: Rove and Bush demanded that Perry not go too negative, to help maintain the bipartisan aura that they wanted to carry into their upcoming run for president; Perry, already resentful of the Bush scion’s unearned elevation in Texas politics, chafed at the order, according to several people with knowledge of the campaign.

Sharp told me that running against Perry was like nothing he’d ever experienced. “You talk about focus-- the man gets focused. Hell, we were getting up at five a.m. in the morning to go to breakfasts, and this guy was getting up at four a.m. and doing two breakfasts and then a luncheon,” he recalls. “If you run against Perry, you’d better bring your lunch because you’re not going to have much time to eat it.” Perry was distinctly less eager about one element of the campaign-- the televised debate. At his urging, it was held in El Paso on a Friday night at the height of the high school football season. “El Paso on a Friday night during a football game and the time zones are different,” Sharp says. “How many people do you think watched that?”

Polls showed the race as a nail-biter. But, at the last minute, Perry received a $1.1 million loan from several top Republican donors, including Bill McMinn, a chemical executive, and James Leininger, a staunch social conservative and proponent of private-school vouchers who made his money manufacturing hospital beds. “That was the edge,” Sharp says. “Before the last week, our money-raising was just about equal, but in that last week he had twice the airtime. It was a big deal.” On Election Day 1998, Perry won with 50.4 percent, a far narrower margin than the one enjoyed by Bush and other Republicans on the ticket. (In an odd twist, Perry managed to lose his home county, where the shift toward the GOP had not fully taken hold.)

After the election, Perry set about retiring his debt by holding fund-raisers where lobbyists were asked to give $50,000 each, a more aggressive approach than Texas had seen before. He charted his own path in other ways, too. Among Bush’s proudest accomplishments as governor was the friendship he had cultivated with Democrats like Bullock and House Speaker Pete Laney. Every Wednesday during the legislative session, the trio would meet for breakfast. The tradition continued once Perry replaced Bullock-- but the new lieutenant governor seemed to have little interest in the gatherings. Several people with knowledge of the breakfasts told me that, while Laney and Bush would chat, Perry would sit in near-total silence. Sometimes, to fill the time, he would file his nails.

...How could a conservative Republican governor find himself so at odds with a legislature controlled by his own party? It wasn’t for a lack of partisanship-- Perry campaigned far more aggressively for state Republicans than Bush had done. The best explanation was that Perry often seemed more driven by personal priorities than ideological ones. His failed highway and rail plan, the Trans-Texas Corridor Initiative, was derided by legislators of both parties as a boondoggle that would have required a massive land grab. But the project also would have benefited three highway contractors who had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry. The governor’s attempt to mandate that Texas girls receive a vaccine for HPV, so seemingly at odds with Perry’s social conservatism, came at a time when his former chief of staff-- one of five Perry chiefs of staff to also serve as lobbyists-- was lobbying for Merck, the vaccine’s manufacturer. (Merck contributed $5,000 to Perry during the vaccine discussions and nearly $30,000 over the past decade.)

There were plenty of other moments where Perry’s actions seemed to align with the needs of his very successful campaign account. (By the 2006 cycle, Perry had 85 donors giving at least $25,000, double Bush’s total from eight years earlier.) In 1999, Perry’s first year as lieutenant governor, an e-mail from a Dallas insurance executive surfaced claiming that, by offering a $25,000 contribution, a lobbyist had convinced Perry against convening a Senate committee on insurance deregulation; shortly after the e-mail was sent, Perry received $19,000 at an insurance industry fund-raiser. In 2008, Perry requested a waiver from federal ethanol mandates; a month later, an East Texas poultry producer who was pressing for the waiver to keep feed costs lower contributed $25,000 to Perry. Earlier this year, momentum grew for a bill restricting texting while driving, authored by former Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick. Perry vetoed the bill in June, following a surge in contributions from telecom companies-- especially Dallas-based AT&T, whose PAC has given the governor more than $500,000, including $100,000 last year. (“This is a big deal to AT&T. We live in our cars here,” says Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston.) In August, after much debate over whether to turn millions of Medicaid beneficiaries over to managed care companies, Texas awarded a $1 billion Medicaid contract to the HMO Centene-- whose PAC has given Perry $45,000 since 2006.

When it came to appointments to Texas’s 270 boards, commissions, and agencies, the pattern was no different. Texas governors have historically made full use of the power of patronage, but Perry has done so with particular zeal. A report last year by Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group, found that he had received contributions from nearly two-thirds of the 155 state university regents he had appointed—$6 million in all. Leininger, who helped arrange the 1998 loan to Perry’s campaign that may have allowed him to barely defeat Sharp, continued to support Perry, giving him $239,000 over the decade; meanwhile, Perry appointed former top employees of Leininger’s hospital-bed company—in which Perry’s personal investment during the ’90s resulted in a $38,000 gain—to the Texas Board of Health, as chair of the influential Texas Workforce Commission, and as head of the nonprofit that oversees the state’s faith-based grant-making. In another case, Perry created a whole new government body, the Texas Residential Construction Commission, to allow building contractors to self-regulate rather than fight claims in court. Among those pushing hardest for the new board was the homebuilder Bob Perry (no relation), who gave the governor $175,000 in the two years prior to the board’s creation in 2003 and whose own corporate counsel was given one of the seats on it. (Bob Perry’s other priority has been fighting immigration restrictions that could drive up his labor costs-- which some Texans point to as one possible explanation for Rick Perry’s moderate stance on illegal immigration.)

Perry’s seeming emphasis on cultivating allies rather than advancing legislation means he has left an oddly shallow policy imprint-- especially given that he is the longest serving governor in Texas history. He has presided over few major reforms other than a sweeping tort overhaul and a much-praised repair of the state’s juvenile justice system. “What does it say if your governor’s clearest role is in vetoing bills and not passing them, in a legislature that’s Republican dominated?” asks Kirk Watson, a Democratic state senator from Austin. Here, many Texans draw a contrast to Bush, who, despite facing a Democratic legislature, managed to implement more significant reforms, notably in education. “Bush’s focus was on what’s good for Texas,” says one senior state Democrat. “Perry’s was a little more on what’s good for Perry.”

...On the national stage, Perry’s new rivals have just started testing whether questions about his record in Texas will resonate with the GOP electorate. Michele Bachmann has invoked “crony capitalism” in criticizing Perry’s dealings with Merck, and Mitt Romney has attempted to cast Perry as a “career politician.” There is certainly plenty of fodder for these attacks. What no one knows is whether Republican voters are in a mood to care.

Probably not... what they do seem to care about is that someone persuaded him to allow the children of Hispanic immigrants to pay the same tuition as the children of other Texans who go to state universities. That probably cost him the nomination.

Jeffrey Toobin explains "Why Rick Perry May Be Out of Luck"

"[C]ourts give prosecutors virtual carte blanche to bring some cases and ignore others. But, once they do bring them, courts respond to the argument that 'everyone does it' more or less the same way that your mother did. It's no excuse. So if Perry's behavior fits within the technical definition of the two statutes under which he's charged, which it well might, he's probably out of luck."

-- The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, in his post
"Why Rick Perry May Be Out of Luck"

by Ken

It's always frustrating when a pol outside the right-wing orbit behaves in a way that enables the Right-Wing Noise Machine to go into cluck-cluck gloating mode, as a lot of left-of-center commentators seem to think Travis County (Texas) prosecutor Rosemary Lehmberg, who is responsible for the indictment of Texas Gov. Rick Perry for "abuse of official capacity" and "coercion of a public servant," for threatening to veto funding for her Public Integrity Unit (PIU) unless she resigned her office following her very public DUI arrest and guilty plea.

What all the commentators are saying, in accord with Governor Rick himself, is that it's "just politics," and Lehmberg's indictments will boomerang -- have already boomeranged, making a martyr of a popular pol who is seen as the victim of a political witch hunt.

First off, the bland assumption that what Governor Rick did is "just politics" seems to me kind of astonishing. I mean, is there really any question that he used the weight of his office in an attempt to coerce a public servant? Surely not even he would deny that, would he? And what the commentators seem to forget is that the form of the coercion was a threat, not against Lehmberg, but against the PIU.

Here of course Governor Rick can be expected to lie his putrid guts out, but even the daffiest and most dishonest right-wing cluck-cluckers surely understand that the PIU -- as one of the rare levers of power in the state that isn't in the safely corrupt hands of right-wing vandals -- was his actual target. To right-wingers, after all, "integrity" is just a commie-liberal plot to prevent their "we do whatever it takes" heroes from committing the kinds of immoral, indecent, and/or illegal acts that God put those right-wing heroes on His green earth to commit.

I for one am kind of glad to discover that there might actually be laws against what Governor Rick did.

I might also note that pols have been getting away the sort of stuff Lehmberg did since time immemorial. Of course it's harder in the YouTube Age. But it's also worth considering that she's such an odd-person-out in the Texas political ecosphere that we have no idea what she might have been able to get away with if she'd been part of the Lone-Star Old-Boy Network.

However, this would be resorting to the "everyone does it defense," which after all is what Governor Rick is doing as he oozes his slimy outrage at the indictments brought against him while he was just doing his job -- trying to protect Lone-Star Staters from this, well, person. His persecutors are just trying to criminalize politics, the sort of thing everyone does.

And this is where, The New Yorker's legal eagle Jeffrey Toobin is here to tell us in a new newyorker.com post, "Rick Perry May Be Out of Luck." He lays out the circumstances of the case, and acknowledges that Governor Rick "may have a point" when he says what he has done is just hardball politics. "But," says Jeffrey, "he also has a problem."

Prosecutors have wide, almost unlimited, latitude to decide which cases to bring. The reason is obvious: there is simply no way that the government could prosecute every violation of law it sees. Think about tax evasion, marijuana use, speeding, jay-walking—we’d live in a police state if the government went after every one of these cases. (Indeed, virtually all plea bargaining, which is an ubiquitous practice, amounts to an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.) As a result, courts give prosecutors virtual carte blanche to bring some cases and ignore others. But, once they do bring them, courts respond to the argument that “everyone does it” more or less the same way that your mother did. It’s no excuse. So if Perry’s behavior fits within the technical definition of the two statutes under which he’s charged, which it well might, he’s probably out of luck.

THE BOROWITZ REPORT IS ON GOVERNOR RICK'S CASE

THE BOROWITZ REPORT
FIGHTING WORDS FROM RICK PERRY



By ANDY BOROWITZ

AUSTIN (The Borowitz Report)—Lashing out at what he called the “Soviet-style” tactics of the indictments against him, Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Tuesday that the government had “grossly overstepped its traditional role of mandating transvaginal ultrasounds.”

Speaking to supporters in Austin, Perry blasted the indictments and called for a return to an era of limited government that focusses on requiring gynecological procedures.

“We are living in dark days indeed when the state of Texas is spending time and money probing its officials instead of its women,” he said, to thunderous applause.

AFTERTHOUGHT: THE PROSECUTORIAL
DISCRETION OF RICK P. AND BARACK O.

I was perhaps trying too hard to keep things (relatively) simple, and probably shouldn't have failed to mention that despite newyorker.com's title, "Rick Perry May Be Out of Luck," Jeffrey T's post is only partly about Rick Perry. In fact, he's intrigued by the way the same issue -- prosecutorial discretion -- lies as well at the heart of President Obama's past, present, and future decisions about what kinds of immigration violations to prosecute.

"The President," he says, "is relying on the same concept of discretion to push immigration reform, even though Congress has refused to pass a law to do so."

The legislative branch writes the laws, which define the classes of people who are subject to deportation. But it is the executive branch that decides which actual individuals it will pursue and deport. Over the past several years, the Obama Administration has used its discretion to allow more immigrants to stay. During the 2012 campaign, the President announced his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which amounted to a kind of administrative DREAM Act. It limited the number of deportations of people who had been children when they were brought illegally to this country, provided they meet certain other conditions. The legality of DACA has not been successfully challenged.

Prosecutorial discretion is not unlimited. The executive branch can refrain from prosecuting certain individuals, but it cannot, in theory, offer immunity to entire classes of law-breakers. Nor can a prosecutor only charge people of a certain race, or, for that matter, political party. But it’s hard to know who would have standing to challenge a failure to bring a criminal case or a deportation. The rules of standing are usually limited to individuals who have suffered a specific harm, and there’s no harm in not being prosecuted. (The New Republic has a useful primer on the subject. )

That sort of limitation on prosecutorial discretion is unlikely to help Rick Perry. His complaint is that the prosecutor is bringing one case too many, not too few. That claim, almost invariably, is a loser. So, it turns out, may be the soon-to-be-former governor.

#

Right-Wing Closet Case Rick Perry Says He's Being "Called" To Run For President-- But Not All Republicans Are Singing Hosannas

And speaking of callings, Perry went on the record to say, perhaps a tad condescendingly, that "our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business." Staying out of other people's business is so old fashioned and passé for today's Republican Party. They don't roll that way no more-- especially not when it comes to bedrooms and the Bronze Age morals they learn from their millionaire shamen.

I'm not ruling out he could be the Fred Thompson of the 2012 cycle, but there's a lot of right-wing money ready to deploy-- we're told-- for someone as malleable and shallow as George W. Bush. Even if few normal Americans do, that big right-wing money remembers the good old days fondly. While some Republicans suspect that he doesn't stand for anything, the money men urging him to run, don't care see that as a definite positive, the cherry on the cake. Now they just have to sell it to the morons Murdoch's media empire has molded. Right-wing talk show host David Zublick poked around a little for Digital Journal and he's nervous that so "many conservatives and Tea Party activists see [Perry] as a very attractive and viable candidate, one who would liven up a field that seems devoid of exciting prospects."

But before Republicans start salivating too heavily, it is important to examine Perry closely. His conservative bonafides leave much to be desired.

Let's examine his record.

Prior to 1989, Rick Perry was a Democrat, who supported Al Gore for president. Perry was Gore's campaign manager in the state of Texas that year.

As Governor of Texas, Perry would have us believe he is a small government guy. But the facts say other wise.

Total spending in Texas the year he became governor in 2000 was approximately $49 billion. Last year it was approximately $90 billion. That is hardly reducing the size of government over a 10 year period.

The total debt of the state of Texas has more than doubled since he became governor. The debt to GDP ratio in Texas is 22.9% and the debt per citizen is $10,645. That's worse than California.

Perry claims he is for keeping taxes low. Not true. He has raised taxes repeatedly during his tenure as governor. Texans have higher taxes and fees than they had before he was elected.

While everyone lauded Perry's leadership by pointing to the low unemployment rate in the Lone Star State, it should be noted that 23 states have a lower unemployment rate than Texas. And Texas has the highest percentage of workers making minimum wage out of all 50 states. In 2007, 221,000 residents of Texas were making minimum wage or less. By 2010, that number had risen to 550,000.

The education system in Texas is abysmal. Barbara Bush, in an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle, wrote:

• We rank 36th in the nation in high school graduation rates. An estimated 3.8 million Texans do not have a high school diploma.

• We rank 49th in verbal SAT scores, 47th in literacy and 46th in average math SAT scores.

• We rank 33rd in the nation on teacher salaries.

What does that say about the stewardship of Rick Perry with regard to education?

Rick Perry also claims to have a tough stance on illegal immigration. But the facts indicate otherwise.

He signed the DREAM Act in 2001, giving in-state tuition to undocumented students. Perry said at the time, "We must say to every child learning in a Texas classroom, ‘We don’t care where you come from, but where you are going, and we are going to do everything we can to help you get there". This measure is similar to the one the Democrats are pushing at the federal level, one which conservatives vehemently oppose.

Perhaps the biggest issue people opposed to the nanny state should be concerned about is Perry's issuance of an executive order back in 2007 that would have forced almost every single girl in the state of Texas to receive the Gardasil vaccine before entering the sixth grade. Perry was in the tank with Merck. There were apparent financial connections between Merck and Perry reported by news outlets, such as a $6,000 campaign contribution and Merck’s hiring of former Perry Chief of Staff Mike Toomey to handle its Texas lobbying work.

The Texas legislature put the kibosh on that idea by crafting a bill that overturned the executive order.

Subsequently, very serious safety issues with the vaccine came to light. The biggest problem with regard to the Gardasil issue was that Perry appeared to be condoning premarital sex, or at least assuming that middle school girls were going to be engaging in sexual activity, which is the only way that the cervical cancer that the vaccine prevents can be contracted. Many parents and conservatives were justifiably outraged.

When one takes into account these facts about Rick Perry, the only conclusion that can be reached is that Perry is for the expansion of government and its intrusion into our lives.

On Perry's possible run for the White House? No thanks. I think I'll pass.

God May Hate Rick Perry, But Right Wing Activists Love Him... Despite That Whole Gardasil "Misstep"

Crony capitalism writ large-- America's worst political whore?

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed the anointed Republican Establishment pick, Mitt Romney sinking beneath the waves. Rick Perry-- despite God's clear signal that this guy is not His favorite-- is now trouncing him 38-23% among Republican primary voters. Karl Rove-- one of the Romney anointers-- claimed on ABC TV this morning that Perry's publicly outspoken anti-Social Security position is "toxic." Establishment types are nervous. Over at the Frum Forum, Frum found someone who finds Perry slightly more palatable than he does to write the story of Perry's impending triumph over Romney and Obama:

Although I think Mitt Romney would be a better president I think Perry actually has his finger on the pulse of the conservative primary voter. This is clear when he threatens to treat Ben Bernanke “pretty ugly." Romney also hasn’t written a campaign book which claims that the weak economy can be blamed on FDR, Woodrow Wilson, & Wickard v. Filburn so he is fundamentally out of touch with the current conservative assessment of what ails America.

As for the general election, I believe that if unemployment stays high and the economy fails to improve, that voters who would normally vote for Obama will be less inclined to do so. I think a weaker economy will energize Republican voters and that they build a large enthusiasm lead over Democrats. Yes, Democrats will claim they are running against a crazy theocrat but that didn’t really work in 2004.

A right-wing Super PAC backing Perry has vowed to spend $55 million in the primary to bury Romney. And big money donors have a good reason to be in love with Perry-- he's easily the most corrupt person running for president... and with a record to prove it. Perry's big donors have benefited mightily from favoritism in Texas. As TPM pointed out yesterday "Texans don't like the government interfering with their business, especially campaign donations, where state laws allow contributors to fork over unlimited cash. No one has benefited more from this arrangement than Rick Perry, who has raised $100 million over the last decade, nearly half of which came from just 204 ultra-wealthy donors." And both the L.A. Times and the Washington Post have crunched the numbers and found a clear pattern of big donors getting special concessions from Perry's administration.

The Washington Post looked at Perry’s top 50 donors, who collectively gave more than $21 million, and found that 34 received some benefit from Perry’s administration or the state, including grants, contracts and appointments. The donor list was compiled by the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice.

Twenty-three donors won Perry’s appointment to state boards, often the boards of regents at the University of Texas or Texas A&M.

Roughly one in three of the top Perry donors had business interests that secured grants, tax subsidies or project approvals under his administration, the Post review found. Five donors gained both an appointment and a state boost to their specific company or interests.

[San Antonio Spurs owner Peter] Holt, who owns the nation’s largest Caterpillar dealership, urged Perry to lure a Caterpillar manufacturing plant to Texas, and a company official told reporters in an interview last year that such a plant would help the dealership get equipment. Perry’s office agreed in 2008 to award an $8.5 million incentive grant for a proposed new Caterpillar factory promising 1,714 jobs.

...Perry’s largest single individual donor, who has given more than $2.5 million, is Bob Perry (no relation to the governor), the founder of a large home-building company.

In 2003, Perry Homes helped persuade the governor and Republican lawmakers to create the Texas Residential Construction Commission. One of the commission’s goals was to limit lawsuits by home buyers complaining of shoddy construction.

Bob Perry donated $100,000 to the governor as the commission was being formed. A top official of the firm, John Krugh, the general counsel, was named to the panel by the governor.

Is Perry a crook? Like we said last week: absolutely. And not just on a campaign finance level. He's enriched himself personally-- he's now a millionaire-- since working for the state of Texas. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram explained, he made himself rich with shady insider real estate deals, deals that should have landed him in prison long ago:

Back in 1993, there was a piece of ground that computer billionaire Michael Dell needed to connect his new house near Austin to city water mains. Dell neglected to appreciate the land’s importance. But Perry did discern it. He bought the land for less than $120,000-- then sold it to Dell two years later for a $343,000 profit. Uncanny. True, some detractors have wondered whether the sale was entirely on the level:

Texas Democrats have repeatedly questioned the sale over the years, in part because Mike Toomey-- an influential lobbyist who would later become Perry’s chief of staff-- closed the deal for Perry while Perry was out of town. Perry has always maintained he didn’t know that the land would be so valuable to Dell when he purchased the property.

Perry repeated similarly shrewd investments again and again in the years ahead.

Look at this transaction from the 2000s. A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator-- the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land-- back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000. Tidy. And how remarkable that Perry and his state senator friend could see a value proposition that the two professional real estate developers overlooked.

So it goes through investments in stock, load, and energy properties. Perry just kept seeing things that other people apparently didn’t.

Even more impressive: how Perry managed to find the time. There he was, governor of the second biggest state in the country, creating jobs from morning to night. Yet somehow he also was able to scour the vast landscape of Texas for under-appreciated little parcels of land with the potential to triple or quadruple in value in just a few months.

Can Romney and his Establishment, his Mormon and his corporate backers muster the strength to take Perry on? Or is it too late? Whatever power the White House has in this matter, is working frantically behind the scenes to make sure that Perry is the Republican nominee.

Buy Bull Studies With Rick Perry And Willard Romney

I guess people who are looking for another blustering nincompoop and tool who thinks you can make up for profound ignorance with a Texas-sized swagger, won't have to scratch beneath the surface to look for the "real" Rick Perry. He's making quite the impression in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"I'm looking for who's the toughest and who stands with his values," said Kyle Moeller, a 21-year-old college student who met Perry at the Walcott compound that bills itself as the world's largest truck stop. "Right now, that looks like Rick Perry."

Perry talks with the passion of a preacher but the calculations of a politician. He puts his feet up on bales of hay. There's an ease about him, a comfort no matter the setting, and a larger-than-life style that commands attention.

He often speaks in sound bites that pack a punch, particularly with a tea party-infused GOP that's latching onto anti-establishment candidates.

"I will go to Washington, D.C., to make it as inconsequential to your lives as I can," he promises in every speech, a sure applause line before conservative audiences.

He knows his audience and plays to it.

...Yet for all Perry's appeal before large audiences, Thursday's brush with voters in a New Hampshire coffee shop may have revealed some rough edges in his skills as a retail politician.

Perry appeared unprepared to handle detailed questions from New Hampshire voters, who have come to expect frank discussions with presidential candidates. He largely avoided a question about his position on global warming from Tim Chrysostom, 44, of Canterbury, N.H.

"We teach the facts," Perry told him of Texas schools. "You'll have to go look in the class books."

Chrysostom, a Democrat, wasn't pleased, saying: "That was a pretty direct question and that was a pretty direct dodge."

Another voter later asked for specifics of Perry's plans to improve the economy.

"We have to get America working again," Perry responded, adding a "God bless, brother," before moving to the next voter.

In style and tone, Perry stands in contrast to his GOP rivals.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP front-runner, has long struggled to connect with his audiences, and has come across as forced when he's tried.

And not just forced-- phony, insincere, weird and completely inauthentic are all terms that are effortlessly applied to Willard Romney. Even his name is fake. Republican primary voters and the party's far right activist base are perfectly happy with Rick Perry's dog whistles about every crackpot assertion they've been listening to from Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and the rest of their teachers. When he claims Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional, global warming is a conspiracy, and that creationism is just as valid as evolution, he's singing their tune. Romney, on the other hand, still wants to be accepted as a serious and mainstream politician rather than a buffoonish thug like Perry. But the right-wing base wants bufoonish thugs who think feel the same way they do. What do you think GOP primary voters would think of this 2007 New York Times article in which Romney reiterates his belief in evolution?

Mitt Romney expanded on his belief in evolution in an interview earlier this week, staking out a position that could put him at odds with some conservative Christians, a key voting bloc he is courting.

Mr. Romney, a devout Mormon, surprised some observers when he was not among those Republican candidates who raised their hands last week when asked at the Republican presidential debate if they did not believe in evolution. (Senator Sam Brownback, former Gov. Mike Huckabee and Representative Tom Tancredo said they did not.)

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

While governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney opposed the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.

“In my opinion, the science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed,” he said. “If we’re going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that’s for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class... They teach evolution at B.Y.U."

Somehow I suspect the snakehandlers and Know Nothings who are the core constituency Rick Perry appeals to, aren't going to be comforted by Romney's once again inauthentic and barely articulate attempt to come down on both sides of every issue. I know I ran this clip from Thursday night yesterday-- in regard to how backward Rick Perry is-- but watch how effortlessly, albeit clumsily, Willard has been pushed along the same slippery slope by Fox's nasty children:

Is it any wonder Chris Christie doesn't want to get mixed up in that crapfest? Plus Larry McMurtry on Rick Perry

I don't know what exactly you'll see in this clip; unless I'm imagining things, it seems to play differently every time I start it up. But it's all from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's press conference today announcing that he's definitively (he says) not seeking the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

by Ken

It's not exactly a surprise that Chris Christie decided to stay the hell out of the GOP presidential crapfest. While I dislike the guy as much as anybody I'm aware of, one thing I would never suggest is that he's stupid, and there really wouldn't have been much upside.

I could swear I just wrote about this here, but I'll be damned if I can find it. (Maybe it was in a draft that never became a post?) But the thing is that once upon a time someone in Christie's place, hearing those ego-stroking pleas of sideline GOP-ers to please please be their savior and get in the race, might have done so on the premise that (a) there was always the possibility that everything might fall his way and he could snatch the prize, and (b) if not, it would be a good showcase to position himself for the next opportunity. he just might be able to copy the nomination and even if not would be establishing himself on the national scene.

Nowadays, though, especially among Republicans -- Saint Ronald's 11th Commandment be damned! -- the "competition" has become bloodsport. Or haven't you noticed that the inauguration of President Rick "Dumber'n Doody" Perry, as of several weeks ago scheduled for January 2013, has been put on indefinite hold?

I'm not going to say that I would have predicted the collapse of the Perry hot-gas balloon. I think it's foolhardy to underestimate the depths of crapitatiousness to which large numbers of Republicans are willing, or even eager, to sink. But then, I wasn't all that confident in 2008 that the Sarah Palin bubble would burst, despite the rapidly evident obviousness of her total lack of competence and her personal vileness. Among Today's Wacko Right, the only variety in which Rightness apparently comes these days, incompetence and vileness are the flavors du jour. Nevertheless, there are limits.

There's irony, as Howie and other commentators have been pointing out, that what has probably doomed the Perry candidacy are his only acts of even minimal decency. But don't think all he's done to establish his Wacko Right credentials has gone unnoticed by even slightly less crazy Republicans, who quickly enough grasped that this clown, even if nominatable, is almost certainly unelectable, which kind of defeats the purpose of nominating him.

Which is the cruelest irony from the Wacko Right perspective: because this nomination, unlike the ones that usually devolve into such nattering hair-pullers, is really worth something. Given the effort President Obama and the team of rodeo clowns who make up his "brain trust" have put into assuring his unreelectability, any halfway decent GOP candidate should be able to walk into the White House without breaking a sweat. That's the trouble. The Republicans don't have any halfway decent candidates. They've got this band of life forms only slightly smarter than the average amoeba, and unfortunately also slightly less personable. A lunk of dismal mediocrity like Rick Perry can't easily hide the emptiness permanently. Even "Chimpy" George Bush was found out eventually.

Given the value of the prize, I don't blame Chris Christie for taking the time for one last good, hard look before renouncing the contest. If he got the nomination, hateful though he is in his way, I think the president would be lucky to salvage a few states. But given the current temper of his party, he surely understands that his only reward for getting into the fray would be to be battered and bloodied.


SPEAKING OF "DUMB-ASS" RICK,
IT TAKES A TEXAN . . .

"There is, by now, a good deal of evidence that what Rick Perry has really done, from childhood on, is hustle."

-- Larry McMurtry, in a NYRB blogpost, "The Rick Perry Hustle"

Nobody sees through Texans like other Texans, and we've had no shortage of "good" Texans (and the people I consider good Texans are some of the best people, politically, I know -- owing in good part, I would think, to what they've had to endure all their political lives in their home state) telling us stuff we need to know about the Rickster, even if none of those voices quite replaces the one we really want to hear, that of the late Molly Ivins.

Maybe the best stand-in I can think of is that singular Lone Star sage Larry McMurtry, who's got a fine post up on the New York Review of Books website, "The Rick Perry Hustle."

Here's a sample:

Clearly the GOP has a problem. Except for those aging sinners Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, all its candidates seem synthetic. It's become the party of stale air; and now who should come bounding in but another slicked up trashmouth, Governor Perry of Texas, a man whose only salient principle seems to be that all attention is good. Pop off a few times outrageously: the Fed is "almost treasonous"; Social Security is "a Ponzi scheme"; Texas might "leave" the Union "if Washington continues to thumb their nose" at us; climate change is a fraud: this even as the climate changing smoke from some of the most-destructive wildfires in Texas's history wafts through the statehouse in Austin, a place like many not defended by very many firefighters since the Governor pared them down for budgetary reasons.

What Perry has brought to the Republican muddle thus far is his abundant, if unfocused, energy. He rushes from debate to debate, gives many interviews, gets his picture on the cover of Time; yet all his politicking is curiously affectless. He makes sounds, but where's the personality? Hillary Clinton has a personality; so does Sarah Palin. Either of those women could cut Governor Perry off at the knees, and will if given the chance.

It's not been said so I'll say it: as a politician Rick Perry is fundamentally lazy, so far as actual governing is concerned, content to run things mainly by sound-bite. He makes lots of decisions but lingers on no issue very long; there's little follow-through. . . .

Perry's political life, McMurtry, suggests, "has always been dogged, never flamboyant." He points out that "Perry often plays the hick, but he has actually seen more of the world than most hicks ever do," in the Air Force after college, and via the 23 trade missions abroad he's attended as governor ("although that doesn’t mean that he’s particularly well informed about the world"). In his two terms as state commissioner of agriculture, McMurtry writes, "he soon got comfortable with Big Agro, Big Oil, Big Pharm and whatever Bigs may be."

What really touches Rick Perry I don’t know, but rumors of scandal don’t interest him at all. In 2005 The Austin American-Statesman did a long investigative piece about Perry’s libido-life. Austin, a fishbowl of a town, was agog with rumors of Perry’s gayness, or, failing that, at least some garden-variety infidelities. Anita Perry’s departure was several times predicted; but Anita is still there and the newspaper drew a complete blank. The Perrys, apparently, just laughed it all off.

And as he looks at Perry's sorry record as governor, and the booming energy industry for which he likes to take credit, McMurtry notes that Texas in fact has a large quantity of jobs it can't fill because of the difficulty of finding "Texans who are willing to work" -- certainly not for the two million jobs reported to be developable in South Texas oil shale.

What was largely been unreported is that the Western work ethic is not what it used to be. My brother-in-law is a small oil producer; he has four rigs but can rarely find roustabouts to keep even two of them in operation. Meanwhile, in other industries, just this August the state lost 1,300 jobs.

And there's another problem, McMurtry says, "never mentioned in talk about huge prosperity in the oil patch": crystal meth.

Speed in one form or another has always been the drug of the oil business: workers who find themselves doing twenty- or thirty-hour shifts need a boost. But meth is virulent in its force, and hundreds of hamlets and small oil-patch towns bear its scars and will forever. Rid the oil patch of that drug and you’ll find a lot more takers for those two million jobs.

Drugs, meth particularly, cast a long shadow over the Texas workplace today, a fact that, to my knowledge, is never mentioned by Governor Perry, though it’s at its most devastating in rural places, where he comes from.

#