While praying to God for rain to put out the Texas forest fires for him, perhaps Rick Perrry should have prayed for the intelligence NOT to cut the firefighting budget by 75%.

Courtesy of Opposing Views:

According to KVUE-TV, the state of Texas, under Gov. Rick Perry, cut state funding for the volunteer fire departments that protect most of the state from wildfires. 

Firefighters have actually been dipping into their own pockets to fight fires.Volunteer departments that were already facing financial strain had their funding cut from $30 million to $7 million. 

There are 879 volunteer fire departments in Texas; 114 are paid fire departments, while 187 departments are a combination of volunteer and paid.

So just to clarify what is taking place in Texas: Rick Perry decides to cut the volunteer firefighting budget by 75% (What could go wrong with that?). The state is soon subjected to one of the worst droughts in American history. This results in perfect conditions to allow numerous devastating fires to ravage the countryside. Having no idea how to solve this crisis Governor Perry pleads with his fellow Texans to pray for rain. Then when THAT does not work (Go figure!), he asks one of the very Federal programs he is always railing against, FEMA, to come to Texas and rescue his state from his huge screw up.

Does THAT about cover it?

And THIS is the guy that the Republicans are seriously considering running for President?

P.S. Hell I did not even mention the number of innocent people that were put to death under his watch.

Rick Perry to skip Freedom Forum in order to tell those damn forest fires to stop burning down Texas!

Courtesy of CNN:

Republican presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry will not attend the Palmetto Freedom Forum of GOP candidates Monday night, sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint, and will instead return to Texas to deal with the wildfires in the state, DeMint and the Perry campaign told CNN. 

The South Carolina senator's office said they learned of Perry's plans not to attend the Columbia, South Carolina event Monday morning. 

"The Governor is in close contact with emergency operations officials regarding fires in Texas, including calls with his emergency management chief this morning," Perry's campaign communications secretary Ray Sullivan told CNN. "Governor Perry is cancelling the remainder of his South Carolina schedule today (including DeMint Fourm) and his California schedule tomorrow in order to return to Texas ASAP."

I'm confused. Can't Rick Perry pray for God to solve the forest fire issue for him from South Carolina? Or does God only hear prayers that originate from Texas?

Or perhaps Perry is going to be more proactive this time and walk right up to them thar forest fires and saturate them with good ole Texas, 200 proof urine until they are drowned plum out of existence? (Of course he may be in direct competition with this guy if he is.)

I don't know about the rest of you but I am getting a flashback to the John McCain campaign and a certain somebody who suspended his campaign, and postpone having to debate Barack Obama, in order to fix the economy."

You know I would hate to suggest that Rick Perry is a coward or anything. I mean don't get me wrong, I WILL suggest it, I just hate to.

By the way, and don't quote me on this, I hear a rumor that Smokey the Bear will be filling in for Perry at the conference. Some sort of job swap thing.

His message will be "Only YOU can prevent moronic Texans from ending up in the White House."

I don't think Rick Perry and his Evangelical friends are praying hard enough.

Courtesy of Collective Vision:

The meanest drought in modern Texas history looks different out here, away from the cities.There are no emerald swaths of St. Augustine lawns, no blooming shrubs, no misters cooling bar patrons as the sun goes down on another cloudless, 105-degree day. 

The disconnect between what rural Texans are experiencing and sheltered urbanites are seeing has never seemed greater.Out here, the brutality of the drought is measured not in annoying water restrictions or water pipes bursting in the dessicated ground — all now commonplace in Texas cities and towns — but threatened livelihoods, and the waning of life itself.

 So tell me again Governor Perry what are your thoughts about global warming?

"There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects."

No serious candidate for President should have so little respect for science, and so little ability to see the evidence that surround him in his very own state.

Rick Perry wants to shrink government until it is so small it can fit into a woman's uterus, and boss it around.

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Apparently in Rick Perry's America women would be relegated to the only job that God ever intended them have, breeding.

And folks, there is a VERY good chance that THIS is the guy that will be facing off against President Obama in 2012.  Still feel like sitting out this next election?

As they say in Texas, Rick Perry is "All hat and no cattle."

Ever since Perry's prayer-a-palooza earlier this month he has been swaggering from photo-op to photo-op, while doing his best George Bush impersonation, and attracting media attention like flies to....well you know what.

And just like George W. Bush, the Texas bullshit he spews is almost as deep as his lack of knowledge about how to run this country.

However he has a few talking points which, on the surface, might convince the paint eaters, especially those that have been sniffing Sarah Palin's non-candidate panties so long they have suffered brain damage, to support his campaign.

The one he is most well known for is his "40 percent of the new jobs created in America, were created in Texas" horse-pucky. Think Progress examines that claim:

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), since he launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, has paraded around the stat that “since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.” “Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state,” Perry says. 

This stat leaves out a lot of the story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has promoted the number, but “it acknowledges that the number comes out different depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs.” Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas. 

In fact, “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S. 

How is this possible, since Texas has created over 126,000 jobs since the depths of the recession in February 2009? The fact of the matter is that looking purely at job creation misses a key point, namely that Texas has also experienced incredibly rapid population and labor force growth (due to a series of factors, including that Texas weathered the housing bubble reasonably well due to strict mortgage lending regulations). When this is taken into account, Texas’ job creation looks decidedly less impressive:

Clearly, there is no miracle for Texas here. While over 126,000 net jobs were created in Texas over the last two and a half years, the labor force expanded by over 437,000, meaning that overall Texas has added unemployed workers at a rate much faster than it has created jobs. And although states like Michigan have lost jobs (29,200 since February 2009), the state’s labor force has shrunk by over 185,000 since then. As a result, while there are fewer jobs, there are significantly less workers looking for them.

So much for the "Texas Miracle."

And if that was not enough to convince anybody that Perry is simply lacquering his Texas economic turd to look like a gold nugget, take a look at what they put together over at the Big Picture:

In each case, I ranked the 50 states in a manner where “1″ is the best score achievable and “50″ the worst (e.g., the highest high school graduation rate would garner a “1,” the lowest incidence of STD’s would also garner a “1.” In other words, if you’re a governor — a state’s CEO, as it were — you always want to be #1 and, conversely, nowhere near #50.).That said, let’s have a look at how Governor Perry’s Texas ranks in a dirty dozen metrics (and keep in mind that Perry has held the governorship for 11 years): 

Not quite so impressive when you really examine the facts now is it?

Look I don't want to discriminate against anyone who might want to make a run at the White House, but considering how much damage was caused by George W. Bush to this country, I think this should be the mantra of the American voters for the foreseeable future. 

Top Ten Things that Rick Perry does NOT want you to know about him.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

(1) PERRY ALLOWED THE EXECUTION OF A LIKELY INNOCENT MAN, THEN IMPEDED AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE MATTER 

(2) PERRY WANTS TO REPEAL THE 16th AND 17th AMENDMENTS, ENDING DIRECT ELECTION OF U.S. SENATORS AND THE FEDERAL INCOME TAX 

(3) PERRY PROPOSED LETTING STATES DROP OUT OF SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICAID

(4) TEXAS IS THE COUNTRY’S BIGGEST POLLUTER, BUT PERRY SUED THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR DISAPPROVING OF THE STATE’S AIR QUALITY STANDARDS 

(5) PERRY DESIGNATED AS “EMERGENCY LEGISLATION” A BILL REQUIRING ALL WOMEN SEEKING ABORTIONS TO HAVE SONOGRAMS FIRST 

(6) PERRY GUTTED CHILDCARE SERVICES EVEN AS TEXAS CHILDHOOD POVERTY HIT 25 PERCENT 

(7) PERRY WAS A STRONG SUPPORTER OF TEXAS’S ANTI-SODOMY LAWS 

(8) PERRY IS A STIMULUS HYPOCRITE WHO LOUDLY CRITICIZED FEDERAL RECOVERY MONEY BUT USED IT TO BALANCE HIS STATE’S BUDGET 

(9) PERRY SAID THAT TEXAS MIGHT HAVE TO SECEDE FROM THE UNITED STATES 

(10) DESPITE HAVING THE WORST UNINSURED RATE IN THE COUNTRY, PERRY CLAIMS THAT TEXAS HAS “THE BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE COUNTRY”

I think I would like to add an eleventh one to this list:

(11) PERRY STOLE MONEY SET ASIDE TO HELP THE POOR AND ELDERLY PAY THEIR UTILITY BILLS DURING THE CURRENT HEATWAVE, TO HELP BALANCE THE STATE BUDGET.

I said earlier that Rick Perry is the one GOP candidate that worries me the most, the more I learn the stronger that feeling has grown.

Texas apologizes for Rick Perry. Well I should think so!

(H/T to Politicususa for the video.)


Well I appreciate the thought Texas, but you will have to do better than that! I mean seriously, WTF?

Rick Perry, or "Governor Good Hair" as Molly Ivins referred to him, may be perhaps the most dangerous Teabagger in the Republican party at this point in time.

He is George W. Bush with fewer functioning brain cells, Rick Santorum with even more hatred toward women, and Sarah Palin with slightly larger clitoris.

In other words he is all of the bad fixins of the Tea Party, rolled up in a spicy Texas tortilla, and molded to look like George Bush if he had his Id set free after shotgunning Dr. Jeckyl's potion.

But the slack jawed, knuckle dragging, dimwit is more than just a simple minded, anti-government, secessionist, with a chimp like face.

"How come everybody always looks at me like that when I say Evolution's not real?"

 He is an extremely aggressive campaigner, who has a reputation for grinding his opponents under the wheels of his metaphorical monster truck. and whose many failings sound like the masturbatory fantasies of today's Teabagging GOP:

Perry has flaws, huge flaws. Not the least of which is that he presided over the execution of one of his constituents, Cameron Todd Willingham, who was probably innocent. But I’m not sure that's a liability in today's Tea Party–obsessed GOP. There’s a legend in Lone Star politics that one of Perry’s Republican rivals in Texas tested the Willingham issue in a focus group. One Republican man, the story goes, squinted and said, “Well, I like that. Takes a lot of balls to execute an innocent man.” At that moment, folks say, Perry’s rival knew opposing him was fruitless.

However, besides the fact when we close our eyes and listen to him speak he sounds EXACTLY like the guy who fucked this country up in the first place, the thing that might REALLY derail Perry's run at the nomination is his much vaunted, yet completely overblown, ability to create jobs. Which is so important to his campaign that he even had it stenciled, Sarah Palin style, on his rather uninspiring bus.

Here let Paul Krugman explain it to you:

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No. 

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state. 

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem. 

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.

So much for that.

However will Rick Perry most likely overshadow Michele "Watch me eat a corndog" Bachmann?

Yes, he will.

Does he present a REAL challenge to the equally follicly resplendent Mitt Romney?

Yup.

Will he eventually win the GOP nomination?

Hell if I know!

That depends on just how much control the Teabagger-Borg now exerts over the Republican party.

If the rootin' tootin' Yosemite Sam faction of the party now has a death grip on the steering wheel, and is determined to "drive this bitch over a cliff," than Rick Perry is going to be standing on the debate stage next to President Obama, Thesaurus in hand, as he tries to figure out "what in the sam hill" the President just said that made him look like such a fucking imbecile.

However if the Grand Ole Party kicks the frat boys to the curb, and starts thinking with their wallets instead of their dicks, they will certainly choose Mitt Romney, who will actually be able to stand on the stage and sound reasonably competent.

I mean yeah he'll still lose, since the Evangelicals hate his Mormon Tabernacle ass and he puts audiences to sleep faster than warm milk spiked with Ambien, but at least he will not embarrass the entire party before he goes down for the count.

That said, I am still not taking my eyes off of Rick Perry for an instant.  Just like Sarah Palin, I think he could be a very dangerous individual to have running lose across this nation, even if he does NOT get the nomination.

Interesting analysis of the top three GOP frontrunners and Rick Perry's chances of emerging victorious.

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I don't watch Chris Matthews very often anymore, but I caught this one today and I was caught somewhat off guard by Jennifer Donahue's predictions concerning these three GOP hopefuls.

I am not sure if she is right, but she makes a very compelling case.

I am interested in what all of you think.

Perhaps all is not lost for Texas after all.

Courtesy of the National Center for Science Education:

Pop the champagne corks. The Texas Board of Education has unanimously come down on the side of evolution. In an 8-0 vote, the board today approved scientifically accurate high school biology textbook supplements from established mainstream publishers--and did not approve the creationist-backed supplements from International Databases, LLC.

"This is a huge victory for Texas students and teachers," said Josh Rosenau, NCSE programs and policy director, who testified at the hearings this week. In his testimony, Rosenau urged the board to approve the supplements--recommended by a review panel largely composed of scientists and science educators--without amendments, and to reject International Database's creationist submission. The board did just that, and asked for only minimal changes to the approved supplements.

In hearings yesterday, NCSE members and allies showed up in force. At least four times as many people testified in favor of the supplements as written, versus those opposing the supplements or demanding significant changes.

Ultimately, the board approved the Holt supplement, and directed Commissioner of Education Robert Scott to review the list of supposed errors, and to develop amended language for Holt to incorporate. NCSE and Texas education groups are confident Scott's revisions will reflect the current state of evolutionary biology, and not any creationist alternatives.

Dr. Eugenie Scott, NCSE's Executive Director is celebrating the decision. "These supplements reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus that evolution is the core of modern biology, and is a central and vital concept in any biology class. That these supplements were adopted unanimously reflects a long overdue change in the board. I commend the board for its refusal to politicize science education."

Well I guess this is a glimmer of sanity in a state which still has Rick Perry as it Governor and whose abstinence only sex education program causes it to have the highest teen birth rate in the nation.


Oh well, at least now that Texans understand that evolution is fact they might soon realize that Rick Perry is somewhat further down that evolutionary trail than one might expect for the Governor of their state.

I mean seriously, is this guy even able to use rudimentary stone tools yet?

Palin propaganda film sells out in Grapevine, Texas. That might be impressive if anybody had ever HEARD of Grapevine, Texas.

Courtesy of Reuters:

"The Undefeated," a glowing look at failed vice-presidential candidate and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has already sold out a show in Grapevine, Texas (population 46,000), according to the distributor Cinedigm.

Grapevine isn't exactly a teeming metropolis but the film is set to roll out across Tea Party country in 10 AMC theaters.

In addition to Grapevine, the documentary by conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon will expand to Indianapolis, Ind.; Independence, Mo.; Kennesaw, Ga.; Houston, Texas; Orlando, Fla.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Highlands Ranch, Colo.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Orange, Calif.

 The film opens tomorrow if anybody is looking for an accidental comedy, an opportunity to be surrounded by assholes, or a cure for insomnia.

Currently the website Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 0%, which means that of the eight people who have seen this cinematic beatification of Sarah Palin, ALL of them gave it a "rotten" rating, but ONLY because that is the lowest rating available on the website.

Below is a screenshot featuring the professional film critics who were subjected to this celluloid abortion because their jobs demanded it of them. I figured their opinion of the movie was worth noting.

I captured this screenshot because, as we all know, the minute this post goes up Rotten Tomatoes will be inundated with positive reviews of this "film" by Palin-bots, the majority of who have not yet even seen the movie.

As revealed in Frank Bailey's book, THAT is how Palin and her supporters handle bad, or negative, press, by hijacking the polls or attacking the critics, or both.

Still I am more than positive that nothing they can do will save this clunker from joining films like "Ishtar," "Battlefield Earth," and "Freddy got Fingered" as one of the worst films of all time.

Since we are on the topic of Palin failings, I should also inform you that all of that talk by her sycophants of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" possibly earning an Emmy turned out to be bullshit as well:


Outstanding Reality Show
The Amazing Race
American Idol
Dancing With the Stars
Project Runway
So You Think You Can Dance
Top Chef

However as kind of a booby prize it looks like Bristol's complete lack of rhythm, poor work ethic, and bizarre weight gain did not keep DWTS from getting nominated. So that should make the Grizzled Mama feel better right?

Ah, who are we kidding? That bitch only cares about one person, and that person is HER!

If you wake up on August sixth wondering where all of the batshit crazy Christian ministers have gone, they will be with Rick Perry in Texas.

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Wow!  I don't think there are nearly enough mental health facilities in the country to contain all of THAT crazy!

Bristol Palin book signing in Fredericksburg, yet another Texas sized tragedy for the family of grifters.

Courtesy of the delightfully named blog, I Tried Being Tasteful:

We didn’t attend the big event which kicked off at 6 pm because we had the grandkids here and because we really didn’t give a hoot. However we did end up at Walmart later in the evening after our weekly pilgrimage to McDonald’s.

When my husband was checking out at Walmart he went to the express checkout that happened to be right next to the area where Ms. Palin had been holding court.

The checker had been there the whole time and said that Bristol had left after only 20 mins. to a half hour of signing. There was even a point where there was no one waiting, so she graciously (to her credit) went around and introduced herself to the employees in the area.

In the grand tradition of her Mama Grizzly, she’d brought little Tripp (have I got the name right? With all the Tripps, Tracks, Trigs, etc., it’s hard to keep up) along for added value. No Sarah, though.

What kind of a country is this, where a hateful, over privileged, young "single mother" cannot attempt to destroy the reputation of her baby's father by essentially accusing him of date rape and then get paid millions of dollars for it?  I thought this was America!

And this happened in TEXAS!  Where else in the WHOLE world could Bristol Palin hope to be more welcomed than in Texas?

(P.S. Please visit the link to the blog that printed this story.  I am sure you agree they deserve some IM love for this awesome post!)