Rain Dances

Rick Perry's now official pray-for-rain policy really marks him as an effective governor.

Texas Burning

Texas Republicans are always coming up big to destroy their state. As you have probably read, Texas is burning. A horrendous drought and very hot temperatures have created ideal fire conditions. In 2011, 1.8 million acres of Texas have burned. The record is 2 million. It is April 26. This is not good.

The Texas Republican response--cutting funding for volunteer firefighting departments (and in rural areas, these are the first responders for many wildfires) from $30 million a year to $7 million.

On the other hand, Rick Perry has a pretty effective program for dealing with the fires: pray.

Answering Rick Perry's Question

A simple answer to Rick Perry's question can be provided:

 “There is still a land of opportunity, friends — it’s called Texas,” Perry said. “We’re creating more jobs than any other state in the nation. … Would you rather live in a state like this, or in a state where a man can marry a man?”

Would I rather live in Texas or live in a state that allows gay marriage? Hmmmm...that is a really tough call there....

Also, what was after the creating more jobs. "We're executing more black people than any other state in the nation." Or perhaps, "We're allowing more chemical plants to give more of our citizens cancer than any other state in the nation." Or one of the many other awesome things about Texas that makes Rick Perry proud.
 

Perry for President!

Oh please, please, please, please, please!!!!

I actually think Rick Perry could win the Republican nomination. He moved far enough right to win the Republican nomination for governor, something that was in question for awhile. So he's probably not going to be out-righted in a national primary. He comes from Texas, which Teabaggers love. He's completely insane, which they also love. Of course, he has the hair. He has the ambition almost for sure. He might even be able to unite the Republican Party more or less.

Of course, he's almost completely unelectable. This would be the greatest campaign ever, maybe even better than Palin. A Perry-Palin ticket would be the greatest gift I've received since the Yankees traded Jay Buhner to the Mariners for Ken Phelps.

And I know I can't wait for Perry's forthcoming book, which I'm real sure he wrote himself!

Acts of God, or, Rick Perry is a Moron

Rick Perry again proves that his well-coiffed hair has grown into his brain.

Or maybe he is just evil.

In fact, it's clearly the latter. Perry has claimed that the oil spill may be an "act of God."

Calling disasters acts of God is a tried and true strategy of industry (especially the insurance industry) and conservative politicians to deflect blame for the aftermath away from people. 

We've seen this in any number of ways. People argued you couldn't blame the Bush Administration for the post-Katrina disaster because the hurricane was an act of God. Of course, not getting those people out of the way or having no plan to save them had nothing to do with Katrina.

As historian Ted Steinberg has pointed out in his excellent book Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, this kind of argument has a lengthy past. In 1993, for instance, the Missouri and Mississippi rivers flooded. In Hannibal, Missouri, local leaders had decided to protect the historical district where Mark Twain grew up. They put up large levees around this part of town. But all those levees did was force the water further south where it exploded upon the poorer area of the city south of the historical district. Local leaders then said they weren't responsible because it was an "act of God."

You see this all the time--when heavy rains fall and cause a poorly built dam to burst, it's an act of God. When a tornado rips through a mobile home and leaves well-built homes standing, thus killing the poor, it's an act of God, never mind that the larger issue is that poverty forces people to live in homes without foundations. When deforested mountains and mountaintop removal cause erosion and clogged riverbeds that leads to flooding in West Virginia, it's an act of God.

But Rick Perry takes this morally bankrupt claim to a nefarious new level. At least when people usually claim something is an act of God, there is some kind of natural process involved--hurricane, tornado, earthquake, fire, etc.

In this case however, nothing remotely "natural"  happened at all. I guess it's the Gulf Coast's fault for having oil underneath!

If this is an act of God, what isn't? I guess mountaintop removal will be an act of God! And the cancer caused by chemical plants in Perry's state of Texas? Also, an act of God!

Utterly revolting.

Pandering Snake-oil Salesman Mendacious Douchebag Politician

Via Burnt Orange Report, Newsweek asks readers to describe Texas Governor Rick Perry in 6 words.

My contribution is the title of this post.

Here's a few others:

I like the "More embarrassing to Texas than Bush"

Media Reading Way Too Much Into Texas Republican Primary

The media wants to read a national narrative into nearly every important state election. They did so when John Thune defeated Tom Daschle in 2004. They did so again when Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy's vacant Senate seat. And they are doing it now in the Republican primary for governor of Texas. In each of these cases, local issues trumped national. But because those local issues don't feed into national narratives, no one talks about them.

Daschle lost primarily because he openly abandoned South Dakota as his home. That's a huge reason why Chris Dodd was going to lose if he ran for re-election (he officially  moved his family to Iowa to run for president). Now the Connecticut seat is safe for the Democrats. Is this because the state's people are glad a generic incumbent is out?  No, it's because Dodd pissed them off.

Martha Coakley lost because she was a horrible candidate and Scott Brown worked his ass off. On the state level, the combination of hard work on your end and incompetent overconfidence from your opponent can still win you elections.

With Rick Perry's victory in the Republican primary this week, the New York Times claims that Texas has sent a giant vote of no-confidence to Washington.

Even the usually astute Nate Silver is joining the act.

The media narrative is that "Washington is broken. Everyone wants to throw incumbents in Washington out of office."

Is this true?  Yes, but that's beside the point. If partisanship is the problem (which it really isn't, it's that one side gets how to game the system and the other side doesn't), the "solution" seems to be to replace the people from one party and replace them with the other. That's not going to fix Washington at all. Moreover, "Washington" is just a spectre in these individual elections. Rick Perry may have defeated Senator Hutchinson and talked about Washington in doing so, but his definition of Washington was specifically geared to Texas Republican primary voters--i.e. Kay Bailey supports abortion rights (sort of) and may not believe in nullification.

Voters may want to throw incumbents out, but they have no problem replacing them with new people who are going to institute the same strategies as the old. The appeal with the Tea Party people are so supposedly so anti-government seems to the gridlock. It's Tom Coburn bragging about holding up bills and Jim Bunning ending people's unemployment benefits. But I think the whole Tea Party movement is more a media narrative than a real changing force in American politics. And that Texas has so many of these people maybe says a lot about Texas but tells us very little about the nation.

Of course, national politics do play a role on the local level. Some of this media narrative is correct. Democratic voters are complacent and somewhat disenchanted right now. Republican activists are doing a good job of getting their voters out.

But the real reason for most of this anti-Washington feeling is the economy. It's always the economy, stupid. With the economy terrible, people are unhappy. Give us solid economic growth and no other changes to the electorate and the results are radically different.

Now, what does Rick Perry's victory tell us?

1. That the Republican Party in Texas is batshit insane.

2. That is all.

So, should anyone be reading national trends into the "who is craziest" vote this week? I don't think so. Texas Republican primary voters are not exactly the typical American. It's entirely possible that Rick Perry will lose to Bill White in November. If that happens, no doubt the media will spin this as part of a larger anti-incumbent narrative, but it'll probably have to do with the fact that a) Rick Perry is a moron and b) he has gone too far to the right for even a lot of Republicans.

Perry won the Republican Party by moving to the right. And that's a great strategy to win the Texas Republican primary. It's always a good strategy for that voting bloc. It doesn't matter what's going on in Washington, what the economy is like, who is president, or anything else. You can always win by going way right in a Republican primary in Texas. Debra Medina's rise only helped Perry because her hedging on whether the government caused the 9/11 attacks made him looked relatively sane.

That's why I can't take any of these larger narratives about the Texas Republican primary having meaning for national politics seriously. It says nothing except about how crazy the most motivated right-wing Texans are.

And even within Texas, that's hardly a majority of the electorate.

What Kay Bailey Hutchinson's supporters do probably determines much about the November election.  But that's local analysis, which no one on the national level wants to hear.

Perry Doubles Down

My question from earlier this week is proven to be true; yes, Rick Perry is currently America's stupidest governor.

Perry wants to nullify Obama's health care plan:

Gov. Rick Perry, raising the specter of a showdown with the Obama administration, suggested Thursday that he would consider invoking states’ rights protections under the 10th Amendment to resist the president’s healthcare plan, which he said would be “disastrous” for Texas. [...]

“I think you’ll hear states and governors standing up and saying ‘no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their healthcare,” Perry said. “So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats.”

As commenters have claimed in previous discussions of Perry's nullifying and secessionist rhetoric, he is pandering to the extreme right to stave off Kay Bailey Hutchinson's primary challenge for the Republican nomination for governor in 2010. He's getting increasingly desperate--Perry was booed at the last Texas teabagger event because he's not crazy enough, showing that there is no limit to what Texas extremists are hoping for. This is probably all bluster. But it's still incredibly irresponsible.

Deep Thought

Now that Sarah Palin is gone, does my governor, Rick Perry, take over the title as America's Stupidest Governor?

21st Century vs. 19th Century

Ed Kilgore has an excellent piece on the rise of states rights rhetoric in the South. Kilgore notes how progressives laughed at Texas Governor Rick Perry when he suggested that Texas could secede from the union, but like myself, Kilgore takes this seriously. He also notes that a resurgence in nullification is rising across the South. Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry recently vetoed a states rights statement that passed his state's legislature. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is said to be moving toward this position. Naturally, Sarah Palin is as well. At least one serious candidate for the governor of Georgia has already endorsed nullification.

Rick Perry:

"I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state. That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm states' rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union."

Nullification based upon a perverse reading of the 10th amendment reached its apogee under John C. Calhoun and South Carolina in the 1820s. But it began with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. While Thomas Jefferson and James Madison claimed that nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts was constitutional, they were wrong. As horrid as those laws were, the federal government clearly had the constitutional right to preempt the states. And if that wasn't clear in 1798, the many decisions of the Marshall court should have made it that way.

Modern-day nullifiers and secessionists are able to gain significant traction from their connections to Jefferson and Madison. To me, this shows that we need to reexamine how appropriate it is to base modern-day decisions on what people were thinking over 200 years ago. Moreover, if Jefferson and Madison thought one thing on this issue, Washington, Hamilton, and Adams thought quite differently. Nonetheless, when political movements can make connections to the Founding Fathers, it gains them real political capital.

Andrew Jackson put the smackdown on Calhoun during nullification. First, he threatened to hang him. But from a legalistic perspective, Jackson said that nullification was "incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."

In Kilgore's comments, a reader also offered John Harlan Stone's opinion on the 10th amendment, given in United States v. Darby, 1941. This puts the lie to the idea to nullifiers ideas about the amendment and provides clear precedent for the federal government's right to see its laws enforced.

"Our conclusion is unaffected by the Tenth Amendment which provides: 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people'. The amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay fears that the new national government might seek to exercise powers not granted, and that the states might not be able to exercise fully their reserved powers.

From the beginning and for many years the amendment has been construed as not depriving the national government of authority to resort to all means for the exercise of a granted power which are appropriate and plainly adapted to the permitted end."

Rick Perry, Hypocrite

Rick Perry, avowed secessionist governor of Texas, has asked the CDC for help in fighting swine flu, which has spread to one town here. 

What? I thought Texas could be its own independent country! Texas doesn't need those big government disease control programs. The unregulated market will totally handle swine flu. 

Shorter Rick Perry: Reconstruction Never Happened

Rick Perry continues to stand behind his secessionist comments, saying that Texas is the only state with the right to secede because of some obscure bit in the 1845 agreement to annex the place to the United States. Perry claims that Texas can split into 5 states. While it's slightly unclear from that treaty that such a move would require congressional approval, of course Congress would never actually allow it. He also forgets about something called Reconstruction. Given that Texas already committed treason to defend slavery, they lost those rights in 1861. They didn't just rejoin the union in 1865. They had to come to new terms to reenter the union, and in fact were one of the last 3 states to do so. I would think that from any legal standpoint, the agreement to reenter the union in the 1869 would supercede that previous treaty. No one seems to be talking about this. I know Texas and the rest of the South would prefer to forget Reconstruction, but it's kind of important and it those reannexation agreements should provide strong legal standing to repressing secessionist Texans.

It's not only Perry of course who is tossing around the idea of leaving the union. Here's Hot Tub Tom DeLay saying the same thing:



Perhaps the reason no one is mentioning the Reconstruction agreements is that everyone really wants Texas to leave the nation. Perhaps the U.S. and Mexico could become closer as nations by acting together in a two front invasion of Texas, burning everything to the ground. Would anyone actually oppose this?

On the other hand, I'm not super thrilled with becoming a refugee, straggling to the Oklahoma line, and avoiding the guns of crazy Texans determined to massacre those who defend the union and don't subscribe to their treasonous cause. It's not as if they haven't done this before.

Treason In Defense of a Low Capital Gains Tax Rate

I apologize for not covering Rick Perry's secessionist threats; I've been hording supplies and buying guns for the future war on pinko college professors that is sure to come in the days after the second Texas Revolution; like the first, brown people are screwed.

Rick Perry has Sarah Palin to thank for allowing him to not win the stupidest governor award. I know it's tight competition among the Republicans, but Perry is doing his best to retake the title.

If Texas were to secede, would anyone care? Nate Silver points out that Democrats should be rooting for this. I agree, or I would if I wouldn't be part of the persecuted opposition. I look imagine we'll see the return of the Texas Rangers as a law enforcement agency, if by "law enforcement," you mean "lynch dark people and attack radicals."

I'm also really impressed Perry is standing up for such high principles. From the state that holds the unique honor of committing treason in defense of slavery twice, we now have treason in defense of a low capital gains tax rate and lawlessness in defense of limited unemployment insurance. What higher principles could there be?

Rick Perry is a Bloody Moron

I'm really happy to be living in Texas now but I am not happy by having the execrable Rick Perry as my governor. The European Union asked Texas to consider a moratorium on the death penalty. Perry's response:

“230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.”

Of course, Perry fails to leave out how his Texas forefathers fought a war against Mexico 161 years ago to protect their slaves and another war against those American forefathers he claims to respect so much 146 years ago to do the same thing.

But hey, Perry's argument is so stupid just on the face of it to not even be worth mentioning. In fact, I dearly wish I had never seen it.