The infighting between Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann has gone up with the recent news that
Rick Perry's stealing away her Tea Party voters. It's a man's world out there in the Republican Party, and Bachmann knows it. There isn't much left for her to do but get these Tea Party voters back by going after Rick Perry if she hopes to stay in the GOP presidential race much longer.
It's why her SuperPAC, the Keep Conservatives United Super PAC, went after Rick Perry on his so-called Tea Party credentials. Here's the attack ad below, which is actually true for once from a Republican PAC:
Ad Script
Rick Perry says he's one tough hombre on spending
( cowboy hat photo )
"Don't spend all the money '
http://www.youtube.com/...
But what's his record? Rick Perry doubled spending in a decade
http://www.window.state.tx.us/...
(Fort Worth headline from Bush embracing )
And this year --Rick Perry is spending more money than the state takes in --covering his deficit with record borrowing
( Wall street Journal 8/23/11,Texas sells state record $9.8 billion in short term notes ) http://www.window.state.tx.us/...
And he's supposed to be the Tea Party guy?
( cowboy hat photo and wall street Journal )
There is an honest conservative
She's not Rick Perry
Paid for and authorized by Keep Conservatives United
There is nothing demonstrably false about this ad, which isn't what you can say about a Republican attack ad very often. Here was the response from Perry's camp in reaction to that ad:
"Gov. Perry is a proven fiscal conservative, having cut taxes, signed six balanced budgets, and led Texas to become America's top job-creating state," Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan told reporters. "Congresswoman Bachmann's front-group ad is patently and provably false. Unlike Washington, the Texas budget is balanced, does not run deficits and limits spending, even as Texas added jobs and population in big numbers."
A proven fiscal conservative? Ha! I wouldn't call it fiscal conservatism in giving away millions of Texan taxpayer dollars to his corporate donors through the two slush funds that Rick Perry set up. And as for the so-called tax cuts, Rick Perry ended up raising taxes on small businesses when he passed property tax reductions:
Mr. Perry’s most ambitious tax reform came in 2006. He appointed a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel, similar to committees in Congress that have suggested tax changes, to help cobble together a new business tax. Ultimately, the reforms adopted by the Legislature raised cigarette taxes by $1 a pack and vastly increased the number of businesses subject to the state franchise tax, all in exchange for billions of dollars in property tax reductions.
Mr. Perry was strongly criticized at the time by antitax conservatives, who said the business tax overhaul, called the margins tax, was an income tax in disguise. Critics also say big refineries and other property-intensive businesses got huge breaks while medium-sized businesses were stuck with higher bills.
As a result of the property tax reduction, Rick Perry created a $27 billion budget deficit. This was a gross imbalance of the budget and we Texans are still reeling from the consequences of the economic disaster that Rick Perry wrecked upon Texas.
Rick Perry was told that his property tax reductions would end up blowing up the state budget deficit, and that severe economic consequences would happen. He ignored those warnings from Republicans and Democrats alike. Here's the lowdown of how this happened from the beginning:
The $27 billion equaled 15 percent of the $182 billion biennial budget the Legislature had passed two years earlier. If not Armageddon, an apocalyptic loss of revenue in a low-tax state that provides bare-bones public services.
Perry's statement was even more remarkable because most of the budget shortfall was a consequence of a business-tax bill he pushed through the Legislature in a special session five years earlier.
We have no state income tax here, and our public education depends on funding from our property taxes. The present education funding crisis was all Rick Perry's fault, no matter how much he tries to deny it. He was warned, and told by the state comptroller that it would dramatically underfund our public schools. All of this present economic crisis in Texas was entirely preventable, but Rick Perry let it happen.
It was evident at the time that the new tax would not deliver what the governor promised. The state comptroller, Carole Strayhorn, had her staff run the numbers on Perry's tax-reform proposal.
"In 2007," she wrote in a letter to Perry, "your plan is $3.4 billion short; in 2009, it is $5.4 billion short; in 2010 it is $4.9 billion short, and in 2011 it is $5 billion short. These are conservative estimates."
The comptroller warned that "no economic miracle will close the gap your plan creates. Even if every dollar of the current [2006] $8.2 billion surplus was poured into the plan, it would not cover the plan's cost for more than two years, 2007 and 2008. The gap is going to continue to grow year by year." The shortfall the bill created could only be closed by tax increases, the comptroller warned, "or massive cuts in essential public services - like public education."
And when the reckoning came, it hit us Texans pretty hard with $4 billion cut from our schools, and with thousands of teachers being laid off as a result:
As the state's comptroller predicted, a surplus covered some of the 2007-2008 budget shortfall. In 2009, Perry used $17 billion of President Obama's federal stimulus money to fill the funding gap for the following two years, and to cover a shortfall in the previous fiscal year's budget. (Perry angrily refused $555 billion in stimulus money designated for the extension of benefits to the unemployed, protesting that the federal dollars came with strings attached.)
When the Legislature convened in January 2011, the federal stimulus money was spent, and the budget shortfall about which the comptroller warned Perry five years earlier had arrived.
Public education took the biggest hit.
Rick Perry is no real fiscal conservative. He's only using the Tea Party like a cheap date, cynically using them for his own ends, and he will discard them once he gets to the White House. He's all about himself and his wealthy donors. He knows where his bread's buttered, and it's certainly not with us working Americans.
This man, if President Obama does not wake up and put up a huge fight, will very likely be our next President. And that's a frightening thought, because the so-called Texas miracle that Perry loves to tout will become our national nightmare. The past eight years of President Bush were bad, the past four years of President Obama disappointing, and a possible next four years with a President Perry will be a nightmarish hell for us to live through.
I am not joking about this as a Texan. It's why I don't support a primary challenge of Obama, and I do hope the President will recapture that sense of fight he had in 2008. The polls on his handling of the economy are not good, and he is not getting the numbers he needs from his constituencies. It's entirely possible that no matter what President Obama does, that he will be sunk in the end by the economy, and that will be out of our control.
Because you know who really controls the economy? Wall Street and major corporations. They have trillions of dollars in cash they're purposefully sitting on. They could be investing in us and hiring thousands of Americans with all that cash, but they're not. They don't want to help President Obama, and neither do the Republicans in Congress. The sooner President Obama realizes who his real enemies are, instead of talking up bipartisanship and caving in to Republicans like Boehner, the better off we all will be, because we'll have a fighter against Wall Street and their Republican Party.
It is good news for now to see the White House engaging in suing the banks over the mortgage crisis. That sort of action is what has been needed all along, and now we need more of a provocative stance against Wall Street, Republicans (say the R word, President Obama!), and the banks.
I will continue to fight against Rick Perry, expose who he is to as many people as I can, and to make sure that he does not get anywhere close to the White House. The dangerous part about Rick Perry is that he's got the snake oil to peddle to desperate Americans right now, an optimistic vision of how jobs were created in Texas, and how that can happen for America.
What's hidden in that snake oil if Americans do consume it, is a nightmare rendition of corporate welfare, peasant slavery, and an increasing downward spiral to the bottom for our country.
Just say no to Rick Perry. Let your friends and family know who this real charlatan is, and what a snake oil peddler he is in talking about the so-called Texas miracle. He's made Texas into a banana republic. Do they want him to make America into a banana republic as well?