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.
The Texas GOP held its convention in Dallas on Friday and as we suspected, the Party continues to be pathetically bereft of fresh ideas and viable and concrete solutions for the challenges that face the state. Rick Perry beat on the same tiresome, unproductive and worn out drums of anti-Washington everything, anti-tax, anti-immigration and pro-states rights rhetoric. The tea party secessionist faction continued to call for secession. It seems that states rights and secession are the only concepts that Republicans are for. The tea party wing of the GOP showed up in full force with all of its John Birch paraphernalia, too. Lovely. What viable solutions do Birchers have to offer other than burning everyone who does not agree with them at the stake?
The conservative wing of the GOP demands a new era of fiscal responsibility, according to the attendees. Aside from uttering the words "fiscal" "conservative" and "responsibility" no one said how Rick Perry should make up his $18 billion budget shortfall. How will he do it? Apparently no one brought it up and on one asked. What are Perry's plans to make up the shortfall? Does he have one at all? Maybe he intends to rob a few banks to deal with the issue. Perry would likely rather do that instead of increasing taxes, as long as someone else is doing the actual robbing of course.
Maybe Rick Perry's highly paid PR strategists and spin doctors forgot to include a major talking point in his fired up hate talk rhetoric. Like, people need well paying jobs and benefits.
How will Rick Perry create new jobs in Texas? How will Governor Rick Perry cover his $18 billion budget shortfall?
Why do crickets continue to chirp all of the time in Rick Perry's Texas?
I think Rick Perry has spent far too much time palling around with the likes of Sarah Palin and the teabagger folks. After spending much of last summer hanging out with right wing fundamentalists and extremists who want to form their own armed militias and who are known for making stuff up and pulling facts out of their butts, Rick Perry has apparently forgotten how to add and subtract.
As Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle writes, some whoppers are just too huge to ignore, even during the silly season of campaigning.
After all, similar to drinking while driving, speaking while stumping has been associated with any number of side-effects, from impaired judgment to short-term memory loss to feelings of grandiosity.
Campaign rhetoric is usually judged in this context. But, occasionally, the whopper spewed from the candidate's lips, or those of a spokesman, is so big, it can't be ignored. And it might be dangerous to do so.
Such was the case last week with Gov. Rick Perry and his spokesman, who claimed, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, that Texas' dropout problem isn't that big of a deal.
Rick Perry claims that our school's drop out is a mere 10%. Oh were it so.
It seems that we voters need to hold or obtain doctorate degrees in psychology or medical degrees in psychiatry to understand the twisted and dysfunctional behavior emanating from our fearless Republican leaders in Washington and Austin.
Both Senators Cornyn and Hutchison have trashed the stimulus bill (The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act,) railing against its waste and its abysmal failure to deliver cash infusions to our state while they extol the bill's virtues at the very same time. Maybe a little bird told the Senators that the recovery act they've been attacking for all kinds of reasons is actually a success.
To further complicate the Senators' stand on the stimulus package that both hate but love, John Cornyn has begged the EPA to deliver bucks for clean diesel projects in San Antonio and Houston.
Kay Bailey Hutchison praised the Port of Houston for its clean air strategy. Residents of the area may have a different definition of "clean air."
Will the Gentleman from News Corp, the Distinguished Senator from Saudi Arabia please yield to the Gentle Lady from Citigroup, the Senator from Russia? The Gentleman from Goldman Sachs, the Distinguished Senator from the great land of Dubai may have ten minutes.
By the way, Prince Al-Waleed, a grandson of the King of Saudi Arabia and the largest individual shareholder in Citigroup and second biggest shareholder in News Corp (Murdock's FOX "News") doesn't like Obama's tax on the banks. Nor does he think much of health care reform or the movie Avatar. Of course Saudi Arabia, a highly repressive country, is one comprised of the very rich and the very poor. For every Prince Al-Waleed there are thousands of impoverished Saudis. The King may wish to ask himself why terrorism has become a successful means of employment in his country.
Apparently Senator John Cornyn and Rick Perry have absolutely no problem with the recent SOTUS decision in which corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns. In an interview with FOX "News" yesterday, Senator Cornyn said everyone is making too big a deal about this decision.
WALLACE: And finally - and we've only got about 30 seconds left - what's the practical effect of the Supreme Court ruling this week saying that corporations can now openly support and spend money, openly supporting or opposing candidates? Do you expect a rush of corporate cash into the campaign?
CORNYN: No, I don't. I think it's been overstated, the impact. Frankly, there's been an explosion of money into federal races for public office since - well, in the last 10 years, since campaign finance reform.
It hadn't done anything to stop the flow of money in. What it's done is make it less transparent and less accountable. President Obama spent more money in his campaign in 2008 than Senator Kerry and President Bush did in 2004 combined.
So what we need is transparency. We need contemporaneous reporting on the Internet. I think that's the kind of accountability that we need.
WALLACE: Senator Cornyn, thank you. Thanks for coming in today. And it's always a pleasure to see you, sir.
CORNYN: Thanks, Chris.
Overstated? I guess the Senator forgot that most of our corporations are multi-national now and thereby include hundreds if not thousands of foreign shareholders who have a lot of financial clout. Foreign investors like Prince Al-Waleed could very likely donate unimaginable amounts of cash through the back door, i.e. through the armies of lobbying firms that are already crawling all over Washington D.C. In fact, lobbying firms will very likely now become the biggest employer in the Washington, D.C. area, after the federal government.
Senator Cornyn also needs to be reminded that President Obama's ability to raise extraordinary amounts of cash is in no small part due to an immensely effective and powerful electronic grass roots fund raising tool. Through this mechanism the Obama campaign could easily raise vasts amounts from tiny donations ranging from $5.00 to $50.00. There were no small number of "money bombs" raised over at Daily Kos when progressive bloggers would feel the need to show then candidate Obama support especially through the media circuses of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers. In fact, when progressive grass roots bloggers and activists would get fed up with media bias, John McCain or Sarah Palin we would implement electronic fund raising drives.
Well, I guess those days are over since the SCOTUS threw we little ol' grass roots activists and average Janes and Joes of America into a tank pervaded with with gigantic flesh eating sharks. Big John will tell us this is just fine and we should not worry.
I guess the Senator would love nothing better than to let Goldman-Sachs retaliate against President Obama's efforts to tax the banks, or for health insurance companies to crush the President in 2012 if he should sign the health care reform bill.
Imagine how many congressmen Goldman Sachs could make quake if it quietly let it be known it had decided to divert just 10 percent of the $16.2 billion in employee bonuses it has budgeted this year to retaliate against any of them who supported Obama's proposed reforms.
Gov. Rick Perry must be worried that the citizens of Texas are going to lose their minds and turn state government over to the Democrats.
This week on the campaign stump, he proposed two state constitutional amendments based on the notion that we can't afford democracy.
One is that any state tax increase would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature.
Functionally this is already the case in the Senate, where everything but voter ID bills needs a two-thirds majority, but apparently Perry is concerned because Texas two years ago elected an uncomfortable number of Democrats and tossed autocratic Speaker Tom Craddick in favor of a speaker who will actually work with said Democrats.
Maybe Perry has become a great admirer of California, where a two-thirds requirement for passing a budget led to the state paying its bills with IOUs while the Legislature bickered and showboated.
Casey is spot on where California's woes are concerned. I have family members who have lived there for over 20 years. The state requires a two-thirds majority in order to pass tax increases. Of course since Republicans have an unholy aversion to taxes it is all but impossible to implement tax increases. Consequently schools go without funding and teachers lose their jobs. Class sizes increase and the quality of education thereby decreases. College professors in the University of California system had to take 8% cuts in salaries. Tuition and fees have increased to the point that it is very difficult for working and middle class students to afford a four year college education. There is no money to fix roads and bridges. The state's infrastructure will take a serious nose dive.
Unfortunately for Texas, the Pentagon decided to shift an Army truck building contract from here to Wisconsin. Since 1991, BAE Systems in Sealy has been manufacturing trucks for the U.S. Army.
According to the Houston Chronicle Republican lawmakers and BAE officials were completely unaware of the threat posed by our competitors in Wisconsin.
The Pentagon's decision to shift the production of Army trucks from Texas to Wisconsin after 17 years caught Texas' elected officials by surprise, raising questions about overconfidence, a loss of political clout and the impact of economic incentives provided to the winning company by Wisconsin's Democratic governor.
Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry and the 34-member Senate-House delegation are rallying to salvage a deal for BAE Systems that could be worth $2.6 billion and sustain 10,000 direct and indirect jobs around the sprawling truck manufacturing plant in Sealy.
Good luck boys. It's kind of too late to salvage anything, including your humongous egos. If our esteemed Republican lawmakers hadn't been too busy lying to and scaring their constituents at teabagging hate fests this summer and fall, perhaps they would have time to think about the plant in Sealy. And what were those top executives at BAE Systems thinking given the tough times in which we now find ourselves? Companies and academic institutions are engaged in a near dual to the death competition for federal funding.
Of course there is not a civil war brewing in the Republican Party. Someone just made it up. But a leading conservative has recently called the non-civil non-war an impending bloodbath.
After the havoc the Republican Party and its newly formed teabagger faction have wreaked on this country from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush and culminating with the horror of George W. Bush and his neocon policies, a bloodbath sounds just fine by me. Indeed, one is long overdue.
According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle, the teabaggers in Texas are fed up and want to throw all of the bums out. In Texas, the bums happen to be Republicans.
Even Rick Perry is a target of this group because he apparently is not conservative enough.
While it's too early to determine if the Tea Party movement will prove to be a durable political force, its candidates could prove a costly and unwanted distraction for establishment Republicans who would rather be aiming their fire at Democrats. Case in point: the GOP race for governor, where Tea Party ally Debra Medina of Wharton has announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom she dismisses derisively as "get-along-style politicians."
Texas cannot keep up with the demand of those in need of food stamps. According to Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle it is taking months to obtain benefits. Folks are growing more desperate by the day.
Meanwhile, Texas isn't coming close to meeting federal requirements to process food stamp applications within a month. Last month, about 38,000 new applicants were left awaiting approval even though the federal deadline had passed. About one in six applications is processed incorrectly.
Food Stamps are 100% funded by the Federal Government. All Texas has to do is distribute the funds. Unfortunately due to either incompetence, stinginess or cold-hearted contempt for the state's struggling jobless, Texas is not doing its job.
Gee whiz. I sure hope, for their own sorry sakes, right wing Republicans have decent health care coverage. I mean, at the rate at which they are blowing fuses and blood vessels over literally everything proposed by President Obama, good health care coverage sure is necessary for one's survival in avoiding and overcoming strokes and heart attacks.
OK, so the latest hysteria emanating from the right has to do with a speech President Obama will make to school children about staying in school, working hard to achieve good grades and taking personal responsibility for one's actions. This should be music to a parent's ears, especially in Texas where we have the highest number of school dropouts and our schools rank second to last nationwide.
But oh no, au contraire and God forbid, should a child work hard to stay in school, earn top notch grades, graduate with honors and gain acceptance in a top tier university.
It seems that the right has plenty of problems with staying in school, at least according to comments posted by on-line readers of the The Houston Chronicle.
Some object to Obama speech to students
According to the right President Obama will "indoctrinate" and "brain wash" students.
About?
Getting good grades? Taking responsibility?
No one howled when President G.W. Bush read to school children on the day our nation was horribly and ruthlessly attacked.
Nick Anderson, the Houston Chronicle, 9/3/09.
And where were these very same wingnuts when President George H.W. Bush spoke to school children at the eve of his campaign in 1992?
I guess a little ol' indoctrination and spin is harmless when it comes from a really rich white guy.
