H/T to TX Sharon for her tireless efforts and determination to bring drilling reform to Texas and for giving those within and outside of her community a ray of hope in the daunting battle that confronts each and every one of us. The map at the end of TX Sharon's diary over at Daily Kos tells us the very ugly, sickly and heartbreaking stories imposed by hydraulic fracturing across the U.S.
Please head on over to Daily Kos to give TX Sharon a little support.
I betcha that except for GOP minority leaders and Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and FOX Fake News, most members of the Republican tea party wing has no clue that it has major billionaire exploiters, puppeteers and ventriloquists that pull its strings, yank its chains and grows "frogs" called GOP/tea party political candidates. The frogs, according to Koch/BP/FOX/GOP spokesmen are spawned in order to serve and rubber stamp the private agenda of Koch Industries, BP and other corporate power houses.
Many of us have expected as much from the extreme far right given former U.S. House Speaker and lobbyist Dick Armey and his involvement with the rage fests of last summer over health care reform. Richard Scott and his Conservatives for Patients' Rights movement joined forces with Armey, all in a effort to foment fear and uncertainty about health care reform. Fat cats and pimped out shills for the health care industry, Armey and Scott threw the health care needs of the majority of the American people into the pits of denial and poverty.
But Dick Armey and Richard Scott are nano size potato players when compared to the far reaching tentacles of the power, money and influence of the Koch brothers of Koch Industries.
Rick Perry has circled his wagons around avoidance and accountability.
The Governor of Texas is on a 24/7 rampage to avoid questions and he refuses to be held accountable for his policies, agendas and decisions for the past decade.
Rick Perry must be growing rather desperate for the Governor seems to have engaged the services of PR spin doctors to coach him on how to deflect his Enron type of accounting schemes that delivered a $18 billion budget short fall. The Governor is also trying to flee from taking responsibility for his house of cards methodology for measuring the state's K-12 school performance.
The spin doctors' solution for cowardly and frightened career politicians?
Blame the coward's own evil doing on Washington, the federal government and the coward's opponents and critics for cowardly, reckless and irresponsible policies and decisions.
A bunch of debt? Rick Perry should know all about debt, junk science and voodoo math. And it has nothing to do with Washington, D.C. and the federal government.
While Rick Perry slashes social services for children and the elderly, our welfare loathing Governor appears to be incapable of cutting back on his own taxpayer funded living expenses.
While there is a $18 billion budget shortfall, the state's schools rank second to last in the U.S. and Texas has the highest number of uninsured residents, the Neiman Marcus loving millionaire Governor expects taxpayers to pony up for his Gourmet Magazine subscriptions, fine wines, pate de foie gras and thousand dollar drapes.
For BP has messed with Texas. Again. God must be very angry at Governor Rick Perry. Maybe when the Governor blamed God for BP's disaster and then later, after Perry had stolen from Texas school children, he brought the wrath of heaven to Texas.
This past weekend tarballs washed up in Galveston on the Bolivar Peninsula at Crystal Beach.
About a dozen tar balls that washed ashore on Crystal Beach were identified Monday as oil from the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the first evidence that oil from the spill has reached the Texas coastline.
But it was unclear whether the oil from the blowout dropped off a passing ship or drifted nearly 400 miles.
Laboratory tests showed that the tar balls came from the BP Macondo well that blew out April 20, killing 11 crew members on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, said Coast Guard Cpt. Marcus Woodring, commander of the Houston-Galveston sector.
The handful of tar balls came ashore Saturday and a second wave amounting to about 5 gallons of oil was found Sunday scattered along 1½ miles of beach on eastern Galveston Island and Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, Woodring said. Laboratory results on the oil discovered Sunday are expected today, Woodring said.
Will Governor Perry pray for a miracle or will he parrot RNC talking points and blame the spill on the Obama Administration? Will he rail against the feds while gladly stuffing U.S. clean up funds into the state coffer? Will the Governor use federal money to actually clean up the spill or will he try to use fed bucks to cover his $18 billion budget shortfall? As we well know by now, Rick Perry excels at playing games with the evil doing federal government taxpayer dollars that he hates but loves to spend.
I wonder what Rick Perry and his Party of Partisan Misery will do to prevent future oil disasters in the U.S.?
An article in the Houston Chronicle reveals that Rick Perry did not use federal stimulus money targeted to schools to augment their budgets, as required.
The federal dollars were intended specially for schools. The funding was to have given Texas a means by which it could enhance and strengthen the educational outcomes for students. The federal government did not hand out the people's money to Texas for the governor to do whatever he wants with it. Of all people the governor should know that federal funding always includes specific requirements and guidelines, compliance is mandatory as is accountability. In this case the federal government made it clear that states could not replace what they normally distribute to schools with federal money.
Rick Perry must think the rules do not apply to him especially when they are made by a big bad federal government that will actually hold him accountable for how the governor spends the people's money.
As we can imagine, the ever arrogant Rick Perry thumbed his nose at Texas school children, their teachers and the U.S. taxpayers while stuffing the U.S. people's money into his state coffer. The Governor of a state in which the schools rank second to the bottom of the pile nationwide cut back on what Texas normally gives to its schools. Instead of receiving extra resources and educational opportunities Texas schools got the same stingy state funding.
Democrats charge that while Perry officially accepted the money from Washington, he simultaneously slashed the state's contributions to the education budget, allowing the state to essentially pocket the federal dollars without increasing school aid.
"Instead of a historic boost in local school support, our schoolchildren were left no better off," Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, said. "Three billion dollars (in federal money) made no difference to our local schools."
Rick Perry has stooped to such a low level that he will actually steal from Texas school children.
After serving 10 years as the state's governor Rick Perry's anti-government, tax loathing, low educational achievement standards, building prisons while gutting schools crusade has yielded an unprecedented number of high school dropouts and an increasing pool of under-educated, unskilled workers. The rate of poverty has also increased over the past decade. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle a demographer at Rice University is truly frightened for the future of Texas.
The demographer who warned a decade ago about Texas' unhappy mix of dismal education achievement and high poverty is more concerned than ever. Actually, he's frightened.
Also getting restless are growing numbers of Texas business executives. Some don't see much leadership from politicians or the private sector in attacking the trend line that demographer Steve Murdock says will result in three of every 10 workers not having a high school education by 2040.
"I don't see business rearing up, and I sure don't see the state Legislature, with an $18 billion problem, saying, 'Man, we really need to muscle this thing up.' I think the thing that's going to change it is going to be another lawsuit," said Jack Lowe, chairman of Dallas-based TDI Industries and a board member of the Texas Business and Education Coalition.
The pattern of an increasing pool of low-income workers and high drop out rates in the high schools has us fast tracked to third world country status. This is what happens when our elected lawmakers believe they are lobbyists that serve corporate interests. The well-being of the people and the best possible educational and economic outcomes for the state never appear on their radar screens.
Rick Perry and the Texas Republican Party will find every opportunity possible in an effort to bash and vilify the big bad federal government whenever opportunity knocks. This imperative becomes especially loud and shrill during an election cycle.
But when no one is paying much attention Rick Perry and the Texas GOP will predictably grovel, beg and crawl all the way to Washington on their knees, if necessary, in a desperate effort to find bucks to cover up Perry Co.'s fiscal incompetence, its aversion to taxes, its tax scheming and history of ignoring the interests and needs of the people of Texas.
The self-serving, pocket stuffing and desperate Texas state officials and politicians, called upon their loathed Big Daddy the Fed to pay for a project that Perry's busted and broke state cannot possibly fund.
The effort to fix a dangerous and congested rail intersection near downtown Fort Worth known as Tower 55 may finally be on track.
Texas Department of Transportation officials said Thursday that they will formally endorse an application for federal funding for the Tower 55 project, a $93.7 million proposal to modernize crossings often used by children on the way to school.
What would the Republican lawmakers do were it not for Big Daddy the Fed? Who would bail them out of their self-imposed messes?
As we continue to watch the horror unfold before our eyes in the Louisiana region of the Gulf of Oil, thanks to decades of the federal government's efforts to deregulate the corporate sector, another form of political terror and racism continues to whisper rather loudly from the extreme right.
Rand Paul (R-KY), the latest rising star of the GOP, asserts it is un-American for the children of undocumented workers, born right here in the U.S. of A. are American citizens.
Rand Paul must have reading the by-laws for the KKK because he sure as hell did not consult the U.S. Constitution before opening his mouth.
