Oh, he still thinks he can be President.
AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry plans to mark the 50th anniversary of the speech that launched Ronald Reagan’s political career with his own lecture Monday night declaring the United States has reached another “time for choosing.”
“We are experiencing a crisis in competence in America, and the people know it,” Perry will say at the Reagan presidential library, according to prepared remarks. “What is needed at this moment in time is leadership that can usher in a new era of reform and renewal to restore trust in government.”
I don't know where to start with this. We are experiencing a crisis in competence in America? What is needed at this moment in time is leadership that can usher in a new era of reform and renewal to restore trust in government?
The hilarious part is not that Rick Perry believes this, because this is a pretty common line of thought among the racist right. No, the hilarious part is that Rick thinks he's the person to do that.
But Rick is correct that this is a "time for choosing." Follow me below the fold to see what Rick Perry's idea of "good government" that will restore the trust of the people looks like.
Texas’ first foreign-owned toll road financed through a controversial public private partnership just got downgraded to junk bond status by Moody’s Investors Service. The Spain-based firm, Cintra (65% ownership), and San Antonio-based Zachry (35% ownership), known as SH 130 Concession Company opened the southern leg of State Highway 130 last November.
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The failure of Texas’ first public-private venture demonstrates the folly of utilizing P3s for public infrastructure. Taxpayer money is always involved and therefore the potential for taxpayer bailouts is always looming. Throw in the fact that they contain non-compete clauses that limit or prohibit the expansion of free roads surrounding the private tollways, and P3s directly threaten one’s freedom of mobility.
At the end of the day, P3s represent public money for private profits and do little to solve urban congestion. Texas is building underutilized tollways using a scurrilous financing mechanism that erodes state sovereignty and impedes freedom to travel. Lawmakers and whoever the new governor will be need to dump P3s and get back to a freely accessible, affordable pay-as-you-go freeway system that serves all Texans equitably.
First foreign-owned toll road in Texas downgraded to junk-bond status (San Antonio Express-News)
Examine the opinions of regular Texans (Dems, Repubs and Indies, alike) versus the bills filed by those men in the black hats, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, and Jason Isaac. The Texas GOTP is NOT governing the will of their constituents. The chasm between what Texans want and the bills filed by the GOTP are wider than the Colorado River. Texans want adequate funding of public schools, TSC ruled that the present method of educational funding is unconstitutional, but the Texas GOP merely wants to open the door for privatization of education.
Education is the final moneymaking frontier that corporateurs haven’t strip-mined and Senator Dan Patrick, in collusion with Rick Perry and his pay-to-play padrones, is hell-bent on taking orders from their corporate contributors and ALEC. To them, it doesn’t matter whether Texans want it or not.
To use one of my daddy’s old sayings, that should make you madder than a calf with a barbed wire tail.
Just look at what $5.4 billion in educational cuts bought us:
Texas now ranks 49th in spending on public schools, and spends $3,000 less per student than the national average. Mississippi spends more per student than Texas.
Texas now spends about $66,000 less per elementary school classroom than the national average.
Statewide, the number of elementary classes exceeding the 22-student class size cap set in law soared from 2,238 to 8,479.
Overall, 25,000 school district employees lost their jobs, 11,000 of them teachers.
Texas teachers now earn $8,200 less than those in other states, dropping Texas from 31st to 38th in average teacher pay.
The Educational Rewards of Rick Perry's Texas (Lubbock Avalanche-Journal)
News reports indicate the best formula for winning a grant from CPRIT involves having a political connection to either the governor or lieutenant governor of Texas. One significant campaign donor to Rick Perry didn't even go into the cancer cure business until after CPRIT was founded, and then he got the millions he needed from the taxpayer fund. An $18 million dollar grant was awarded to a Houston cancer project after pressure from a politically connected venture capitalist that had given $360,000 to the campaigns of Dewhurst. The proposal had undergone only a cursory review, which originally resulted in rejection.
Cancer Cronyism (Huffington Post)
The TEF is an under-scrutinized program that Texas’ mainstream media routinely ignores. Worse, the fund’s “successes” are often celebrated blindly.
Perry advertises the TEF as a carrot to lure jobs to Texas. But critics have long maintained that it’s more a Perry slush fund designed to help political patrons. The TEF has drawn the attention of Mother Jones, which did a takedown last year. And critics on the left and the right have called it one of the biggest examples of corporate welfare in America. For example: In 2012, Apple, Inc. got $21 million from the TEF (despite having more cash in its coffers than the United Kingdom has in its treasury) to help open a new Austin campus, and last year Chevron ($240 billion in 2012 revenue) picked up $12 million in TEF money for an office expansion in Houston (see “Oiling the Skids for Chevron in Houston,” July 29, 2013).
The problem is that there’s little evidence the TEF money does what Perry says it’s supposed to. And since the money is appropriated by the Legislature out of the state’s general fund, it’s effectively taken out of the hands of desperately necessary and chronically underfunded programs throughout the state: children’s health insurance, environmental remediation, mental health services, anti-poverty programs, and on and on. But in the recent breathless media coverage about Toyota, precious few Texas reporters have explored Perry’s largesse, and whether the Toyota money—one of TEF’s biggest gifts ever—could be put to better use.
To Each According to Greed: Rick Perry, Toyota, and the Texas Enterprise Fund (Texas Observer)
I have to say, Rick Perry is actually correct about one thing. It is a time for choosing. But it's not the choice that Perry thinks.
The choice is between a government that works for the people and a government that works for millionaires and billionaires, corporations, and the politically well-connected. Rick Perry represents the latter.
In fact, so did Ronald Reagan, and that's the supreme irony of Rick Perry's invocation of Reagan. In spite of conservatives' beliefs to the contrary, ever since Reagan came along in 1980, Republicans and even some Democrats have been doing their best to screw the American people, in favor of those with money.
Perry is set to echo many of the themes found in Reagan’s speech, decrying the “constant expansion of federal power at the expense of individual liberty.” In making the argument, Perry plans to cite what he sees as Washington’s inaction on the border crisis, the “routine arrogance” and “chronic incompetence” of some federal agencies and a government too involved in the economy.
Perry’s speech is the latest to firmly place the governor among White House-minded Republicans trumpeting American exceptionalism at a time when some of their colleagues are urging more restraint abroad. The lecture at the Reagan library follows a speech Perry gave earlier this month in London that laid out a muscular foreign policy, urging Western countries not to retreat from the threat of Islamist extremism.
Although, Rick IS like Ronald Reagan in one important way. He knows how to hoodwink the gullible. Forget that corporations are raiding your retirement fund and moving your job to China, all the while getting tax breaks to do so; what you really need to be concerned about are scary brown people. Throw in a few platitudes about "liberty" and there's your Republican platform.
But we should know better. For everything Rick Perry claims, we have all the evidence we need -- on toll roads, on education, on CPRIT and the Texas Enterprise Fund -- that Rick Perry is all about rewarding his campaign donors with taxpayer dollars, even when that's nothing like what the people want or need.
And while that's just Rick Perry, we all know that this isn't very far out of line with what most Republican politicians do. And what they have been doing since Reagan. The choice is clear; Rick just doesn't realize that he's the wrong one.