(A nice bit of snark & satire for your Friday... - promoted by Phillip Martin)
Rick Perry prevailed upon Republicans to withdraw their children from the state's elementary and secondary public schools while giving a keynote address to a group of Texas conservative business leaders at a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Houston.
While reluctantly admitting that Texas faces fiscal challenges the Governor refused to acknowledge a $30 billion deficit. It seems that Texas does not do shortfalls much less deficits. But Mr. Perry did concede that the budget was such that school funding would be deeply cut. The Governor assured those present that the solution to the school budget crunch is the creation of more affordable private Christian elementary and secondary schools.
Now I know most of you present here have already enrolled your children in some of our state's finest private schools. But I want to make private schools more accessible to Republican Christian families that cannot afford to pay high tuition and for those who cannot home school their children. In a city like Houston private school tuition can cost between $10,000 to $25,000 per year per child.
In a Q&A following the Governor's talk a member of the press corps asked how much funding would be cut from school budgets. Mr. Perry's response:
According to Gail Collins of the New York Times (see below) Rick Perry and other Republicans are behaving like gerbils that just bit an electric wire.
I don't think anyone could have said it better. Ms. Collins is absolutely right and she is not the only one who thinks so.
The words "looney talk" "nuts" and "whacko world" are the terms used by Hardball's Chris Matthews when he refers to Rick Perry and Tom Delay's views on secession and state sovereignty.
For the past few days I have been reading about Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick's fall in the Houston Chronicle and here at BOR. The Burnt Orange Report, by the way, has provided excellent moment-by-moment coverage of this fascinating drama. Huge kudos to the outstanding diarists here. The Craddick/Straus issue including BOR's coverage was front page news on Daily Kos on Monday.
Yesterday morning the Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg wrote an excellent and very revealing commentary on how Houston would benefit from a House Speaker who is from a large urban area.
After reading the article this life-long urban dweller and native of NYC who has lived in Houston for over 20 years, finally understands why I have been so frustrated by how our Austin lawmakers operate. Falkenberg's article nailed it for me. Texas has been run by a bunch of country boys who are more concerned about boll weevil eradication and transporting hogs to markets than they are a big city's crammed prisons, crumbling inner city schools, over-extended hospitals, torn up roads and gridlocked freeways.
(This is a synthesis of comments I posted previously on the Burnt Orange Report. It is also cross posted on Texas Kaos. )
We Democrats are going to have to work very hard to win in 2008, despite the promising opinion poll results for our party and the Republican's abysmal record of failure on each and every level the party has touched. Remember how W. has turned to shit everything he touched when he was in the private sector? Well, now W. and his did the same thing to our very way of life.
To briefly summarize, for those who may have forgotten a fact or two about W.'s terrible legacy, let me provide a crash refresher.
Everyone on the planet on knows that W., enabled by rubber stamps such as our Texas Republicans John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, managed to get us into the worst foreign policy debacle, (Iraq, of course), in recent history. We recently learned that it is Pakistan, not Iraq or Iran, that is the most dangerous place in the world and yet we remain mired down in a war that didn't have to be fought in the first place.
77% of Americans believe our country is headed in the wrong direction now and 64% of us believe we should not have gone to war with Iraq. W. Is at 34% approval - worse than Tricky Dick Nixon.
