Oh snap. So now our Washington D.C. hating Governor wants to move tout de suite to the place that he loves to loathe?
Apparently Rick Perry hates Washington so much that he cannot wait to get there.
But wait.
Apparently Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera believes Rick Perry's comments about secession are so unbelievably treasonous that the Governor of the once great state of Texas should be impeached.
Of course Rick Perry has not been impeached. This is Texas, after all. The esteemed Governor won yet another term in office.
Texas Republicans obviously have a very high threshold for third world statehood in which low taxes, small government and a budget based on smoke and mirrors prevails. The Texas GOP also demonstrates a high tolerance for narcissistic and integrity-free lawmakers who bring more than a tad of hurt and suffering to them, their families and their pocket books. But to be fair Texas has more than its fair share of right wing extremists and crackpots that include white supremacists, secessionists, xenophobes and racists, most of whom voted for Rick Perry. The Governor relied heavily on this base in order to get re-elected.
There is a reason why Rick the Rooster and his Texas GOP want to keep Texas schools at the bottom of the national pile. And there is a rationale for why the Governor supports the anti-intellectual and anti-science Christian Taliban zealots that run the State Board of Education.
Is Rick Perry pandering? Pandering is precisely what crowing roosters like slick Rick do. As Texas progressive writer and friend of the revered late Molly Ivins Harold Cook duly noted, voters outside of the state may recoil from a sinking sense of deja vu when they see the swaggering rooster Rick on the campaign trail.
The problem for Perry, in the blinding light of the national stage, is that he may ultimately be seen as the swaggering rooster who believes the sun came up because of all that crowing.
The Texas Republican Party is on a mean-spirited, heartless and cruel mission of SLASHeconomics that is unnecessary and uncalled for. It is blindly cutting the budgets for schools and social services with absolutely no regard for the devastating long term consequences of such cuts.
Rick Perry and his far right Republicans refuse to touch the Rainy Day money for next year's budget though this is precisely the time in which we should tap into such funds. Instead the Republicans have chosen to stockpile the money and rob children of their futures.
Outside of the box thinking, complex problem solving, the ability to explore creative and unique alternatives and a modicum of compassion are called for during dire and desperate economic times like these.
Are Texas Republican lawmakers made of the right stuff to lead? Is it capable of throwing away its memorized talking point campaign rhetoric, forget about its Obamacare and federal government bashing monologues, dismiss its highly paid message masters, unglue its lips from its sugar daddy donor's backsides and engage its collective brain to do what is right and work on behalf of all Texans?
Let's take a peek at the legislation proposed in Austin so far by the super majority Party.
Readers can decide whether or not Republican lawmakers are made of the right stuff.
Poor pathetic Governor Perry. He will stop at nothing to take the focus off of the $30 billion rotten egg that his self-serving and reckless libertarian leaning policies have dumped on Texas. He will pontificate about stupidity such as emergency sonograms, abortion and culture war insanity. He will run to California (a state that he loves to hate)in order to raise money for himself while telling everyone that his soon to be third world banana republic state is the envy of the world.
Avoid, baby, avoid.
In an article published in the Houston Chronicle Rick Perry is said to have demanded for the U.S. Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to balance its budget.
"It fits into his overall philosophy about government and fiscal responsibility," Perry spokesman Mark Miner said. "In Texas, at the end of the day, the budget will be balanced. It's the Texas way versus the federal way, which is to continue spending without being accountable."
Dewhurst, in an Austin American-Statesman article co-written with state Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, contended that Congress "lacks fiscal responsibility and is spending all of us into serious debt. ... It is time for Texas to lead the way and seek a convention so that the states may propose a national balanced budget amendment."
I wonder how many margaritas these boys consumed before speaking to reporters.
Rick Perry makes no apologies for the misery he will inflict. In fact the Governor refuses to acknowledge his $30 rotten egg.
What about the budget? The truth is that the Texas state government has relied for years on smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of sound finances in the face of a serious "structural" budget deficit - that is, a deficit that persists even when the economy is doing well. When the recession struck, hitting revenue in Texas just as it did everywhere else, that illusion was bound to collapse.
The only thing that let Gov. Rick Perry get away, temporarily, with claims of a surplus was the fact that Texas enacts budgets only once every two years, and the last budget was put in place before the depth of the economic downturn was clear. Now the next budget must be passed - and Texas may have a $25 billion hole to fill. Now what?
Given the complete dominance of conservative ideology in Texas politics, tax increases are out of the question. So it has to be spending cuts.
Yet Mr. Perry wasn't lying about those "tough conservative decisions": Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It's hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts.
I don't know how the mess in Texas will end up being resolved. But the signs don't look good, either for the state or for the nation.
How will the mess in Texas end up? Quite brutally, unfortunately. This is the outcome of economic policies that are business friendly to a fault and one in which average everyday people have few safety nets to fall back on when times are tough.
(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:
President Reagan's former Office of Management and Budget Director, David Stockman, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Mr. Stockman chastises his party for its irresponsible and reckless fiscal policies.
Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
Not only does Mr. Stockman pin the blame for today's economic hardships squarely on Republican policies and ideologies but he also revealed the Republican Party has absolutely no intention of deviating from its present addiction to serial financial bubbles and Wall St. made havoc that have driven us into the present chasm. The Wall St. gambling casino practices, by the way, resulted in the biggest looting of the public purse in U.S. history. Do Republicans embrace the endless looting of U.S. taxpayers to bail out Wall St.?
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt - if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 - will soon reach $18 trillion. That's a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell's stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts - in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance - vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
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.?
Will the Senator from Wal-Mart please yield to the Senator from Halliburton? The Congressman from Black Water has 5 minutes remaining before the Congresswoman from United Health may speak.
Mark your calendars, folks. January 21, 2010 is the day the radical and activist Supreme Court of the United States delivered the U.S. Democracy into the hands of the corporate sector and special interests groups. According to an article in the New York Times corporations, lobbyists and unions can now legally purchase their candidates of choice.
"We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you - whichever one you want,' " a lobbyist can tell lawmakers, said Lawrence M. Noble, a lawyer at Skadden Arps in Washington and former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission.
The decision yesterday will usher in unimaginable numbers of Swift Boat attack ads. Corporate fat cats can now threaten and bully politicians to do their bidding or else.
"It will put on steroids the trend that outside groups are increasingly dominating campaigns," Mr. Ginsberg said. "Candidates lose control of their message. Some of these guys lose control of their whole personalities."
"Parties will sort of shrink in the relative importance of things," he added, "and outside groups will take over more of the functions - advertising support, get out the vote - that parties do now."
In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
Many of those commenting on the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission have focused on the power-grab part. I agree with them. It was unnecessary for the court to go so far when there were several less-radical grounds available. It was audacious to seize the opportunity to overrule precedents when the parties had not pressed this issue and the lower courts had not considered it. It was the height of activism to usurp the judgments of Congress and state legislatures about how best to prevent corruption of the political process.
"If it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more," a wise judge once wrote. That was Chief Justice John G. Roberts -- back when -- and dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens rightly turned that line against him.
Who would have thought? In its true and hypocritical form The Party of No and Obstruction opposes President Obama's proposed fees on banks.
Dick Cheney must be hard at work at that printing press in his undisclosed basement.
Prominent Republicans are coming out in opposition to President Barack Obama's proposal for a $90-billion fee on large banks that took bailout money, a move that political observers say could force the GOP to choose between their traditional anti-tax position and populist anger over the bailout.
On Thursday, GOP Chairman Michael Steele declared that the bank fee -- which would be levied only on banks that took bailout money and have more than $50 billion in assets -- is "another tax on the American public."
The GOP is standing by fat cat the banker in yet another effort to oppose President Obama. Republicans demonstrate time and time again that they are willing to put politics ahead of working on solutions to solve the daunting challenges that we face on local, state and national levels.
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.
