Good morning, NRA

Nick Anderson, killing it as usual.

Click, view, absorb, repeat.

This is a national story now. Bill Maher also smacks 'em down: "The Axis of Assholes".

Bill Maher coined the perfect term. Rick Perry, Ted Nugent, and Sarah Palin are the axis of a**holes. From bashing charity events because they weren’t invited, to running campaign ads suggesting that Obama isn’t a Christian then cozying up to the president after your lack of regulatory oversight causes one of your towns to blow up, to blaming Obama for veterans’ suicides when you were a coward who refused to serve your country, these three are a**holes. In fact, they are three of the biggest a-holes in American politics. 

At Ground Zero, there were conversations described as civil and spirited.

"How many of your members supported universal background checks?" asked Aaron Black, an activist who flew in from New York to protest. He cited polls showing the number as high as 92%.

"I've told you three times today, I don't believe there's a 92% —" (NRA board member Todd) Rathner said.

"You have not told me three times," Black said.

"It's a bogus number," Rathner said. "If you explain to people that universal background checks require registration, that number would plummet."

"What endgame do you see?" asked Jeff Hunter of Houston. "Is the NRA going to form militias when the government comes to get your guns?"

"If there's no registration, we don't have to worry about it," Rathner said.

Black gave credit to Rathner for engaging the protesters. "This guy thinks he's representing gun owners? He's not representing gun owners. He's representing gun manufacturers."

He tried to confront Rathner with autopsy photos of 16-year-old Brishell Jeffries, one of three teenagers killed in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C., in 2010. "Gun violence is so sterilized, and dumbed down and Disneyfied, that no one cares. It didn't even faze this guy."

Rathner acknowledged a problem with violence in America, but said he doesn't blame the guns. Protesters, he said, have been misinformed by the media.

"I'm comfortable debating it, but I'm not going to change their minds, and they're not going to change mine," said Rathner, a gun lobbyist from Tuscon, Ariz., and self-described "Jewish redneck."

I'm so old that I remember when protests at Houston NRA conventions were all about Tom DeLay.

Thanks for coming, gun nuts, and we hope you spent a lot of money while you were here. Now GTFO and make room for the OTC. (Was it just a year ago that the big story was the Chronicle's un-coverage of the oil and gas confab?)

Update: More pics, and not of the inside of the GRB.

Sunday Funnies (half-cocked edition)

"We weren't sent (to Austin) to govern like California"

The Speaker throws the Teabaggers a bone.

House Speaker Joe Straus suggested in a Thursday interview that a Senate proposal to take $5.7 billion from the rainy day fund for water, transportation and education is too costly and represents an effort to “punt” lawmakers' responsibility by placing the issue on a ballot for voter approval.

“We weren't sent here to govern like California,” said Straus, R-San Antonio.

His comments came days after the House torpedoed an effort to take $2 billion from the rainy day fund for water projects, without resorting to a constitutional amendment.

But that House roadblock didn't make Senate Joint Resolution 1 any more attractive to Straus — although he said he is firmly committed to paying for a water plan, which he said is of prime importance.

“How the members want to fund it is the question. It will be funded,” Straus said. 

When all else fails, play the Cali card. Hey, it's been working great for the governor, right?

This is the same strategy employed by the Speaker with regard to Medicaid expansion and a bushel full of legislation now on the Sine Die countdown: "Something needs to be done, but I haven't a clue what it might be".

This is how you know there will be a special session: when something passes the Senate by unanimous consent but is --apparently -- DOA in the lower chamber.

Senators unanimously backed SJR 1, which would provide $2 billion for water, $2.9 billion for transportation and $800 million for public education.

Dedicating the money through a constitutional amendment would prevent the expenditures from counting against the state spending cap. The cap applies to state tax revenues that aren't constitutionally dedicated to other purposes.

[...]

Straus said, “I would say that SJR 1 is a no-go in the House.”

The Speaker has shown exemplary non-leadership throughout the 83rd Session. The Dems have managed once again, at critical moments, to outmaneuver the majority via parliamentary procedure, and the TP Caucus just says no to everything as usual. Faced with blockage he can't dissolve, Straus has decided to file his nails and coast to the end, content to let his lieutenants do the lifting.

With the Legislature entering its home stretch, key lawmakers are trying to figure out how to direct money from the rainy day fund to help build massive reservoir and pipeline projects.

Among the possibilities: Reviving some version of a bill that was killed Monday with a parliamentary maneuver and bringing it back to the House floor, where a spirited debate is likely to ensue; kicking the issue over to voters, as the Senate has proposed; or trying for a hybrid of rainy day fund and general revenue fund money to seed the revolving water fund.

That last option is the most likely, said state Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, who has played a behind-the-scenes role on water issues.

That Statesman piece also makes clear that legislators don't want to come back for a special.

“We are not going to leave the Capitol till we agree on some funding at the state level to facilitate construction called for in the state water plan,” Larson said.

Backers of the water plan are also making an appeal on drought grounds: Owing to Texas’ ongoing drought, legislators from South Texas, West Texas and Central Texas “will be hard pressed to vote against the plan,” Larson said.

Some members from each party are worried they could face a special session to deal with water, if they cannot pass a bill in the regular session, which ends May 27.

State Rep. Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, a member of the speaker’s leadership team, shuddered at the idea of extra days of lawmaking.

“That’s a looming hammer hanging over all of us,” Cook said. “It will create an added incentive to get it done.”

Yeah. We'll see.

Sidestepping the vigorous debate in the House, senators last week unanimously passed a resolution calling for voters to consider a constitutional amendment transferring roughly $6 billion from the rainy day fund for water, roads and public education.

Their leader, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, has at times seemed disengaged on the water issue. On the day the Senate took up the resolution, Dewhurst was in Houston to address a lunch-time gathering of the Pachyderm Club.

Dewhurst is still depressed over losing to Ted Cruz last year.

After the passage of the resolution, Dewhurst’s office issued a press release noting that he started talking to senators about improving the state’s infrastructure last summer. But kicking the decision over to voters, rather than leading senators to make a spending decision that could alienate tea party activists, appeared to be preferable for a man who lost his 2012 U.S. Senate primary to Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite.

The Lege is always full of surprises, especially as the session grinds down and sleep-deprived politicos get testy. But I don't see the Republicans making the hard choices to govern effectively for the state's citizens. Color me skeptimistic, but something -- in the homophobic words they so often use -- is going to have to get shoved down their throats.

Nick Anderson's response to Rick Perry's cartoon pique

WaPo:

Nick Anderson, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist for the Houston Chronicle, rendered his commentary Tuesday, in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry is depicted as getting more outraged over a cartoon — by Sacramento Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman — than the actual oversight and regulation issues involving the West, Tex., fertilizer plant that exploded last month, killing at least 15 and injuring scores more.

Asked to share the thinking behind his cartoon, Anderson tells Comic Riffs: "I just have a question: Why do people seem more offended by a cartoon than they are by the lax regulatory climate that likely contributed to or even caused this tragedy?"

Nick Anderson is all over the governor lately. And his question is just common sense for everyone except the top two elected officials in Texas.

But for a state that has sent Louie Gohmert and Steve Stockman to Washington... and would like to send Ted Cruz to the White House (ain't hap'nin, but Lord, please let 'em nominate him) , it's just par for the course.

Until Battleground Texas get geared up, this tincture of craven and stupid is all on you, Republicans. And with Greg Abbott waiting in the wings, I doubt you're going to manage to do any better in 2014. In the meantime, we'll watch as Houston hosts the NRA's national convention this weekend, with a parade of Cruz, Ted Nugent (who soiled himself rather than go to Vietnam, and now blames military suicides on Obama), Sarah Palin, and Rick Santorum ahead of the very worst America has to offer.

The nation's premier gun-rights organization, with nearly 5 million members, expects more than 70,000 to attend the convention.

[...]

The NRA caps off Saturday night with a "Stand and Fight" rally featuring conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

Apart from the calls to the ramparts, the convention's heart rests in the 400,000 square feet of exhibit hall space where more than 500 firearms companies, hunting outfitters, gun antique collectors and others will display their wares. In addition, seminars feature topics such as "home defense concepts," "methods of concealed carry," and "advanced sausage processing - BBQ & smoke cooking techniques."

A response? Yes.

Outside the convention center, an array of gun-control advocates is expected to demonstrate opposition to the NRA and its lobbying prowess.

"I don't think it's a losing battle at all," said Heather Ross, an organizer for the "Occupy the NRA" group that plans to lead the reading of names of 4,000 gun-violence victims under a #NoMoreNames banner at Discovery Green, across from the convention center. The list will start with the 26 victims of gunman Adam Lamza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last December.

Texas is not as uniformly pro-gun as most people believe, Ross insisted.

"The concept that we're all a bunch of gun-toting crazies is inaccurate," she said. "That's largely pushed by people elected to office."

The day is coming when this virulent strain of Republican rabies will come under control, but it won't come soon enough.

"This is why I don't think we have a strong president"

Cenk Uygur, “Edge Show” host Mark Thompson, The Nation’s Lee Fang, and comedian Jimmy Dore criticize President Obama’s inability to deliver on his first-term promise to close Guantanamo Bay. During a White House Press conference, Obama renewed his dedication to closing the prison. “I think it’s one of the great failed promises of this presidency,” Thompson says. “This is why I don’t think we have a strong president,” Cenk says. “This is an executive decision. [Obama] shouldn’t have any conversation with Congress about this.”

It is one of the enduring mysteries to me how closing Gitmo can possibly be so difficult or why it is even controversial. Republicans either are too scared to treat the captives legally, or they simply want to kill them all (as if that would solve anything). Obama's capitulation to the pants-crapping cowardice of the GOP is to say, "well OK; since you have screamed so much about it, we'll let you have your way".

Obama reminds me of one of those parents who refuses to discipline their shrieking, wailing child in the restaurant. You know, just let them cry themselves out.

Bullshit. Take that little urchin out to the car and whip his ass until he understands how to behave. Yeah, it's old school but it's how I was raised. And don't tell me about how people call DHS on parents like that, or that children can sue their parents as part of the analogy.

Republicans -- in addition to being cowards -- are bullies. Stand up to them and they will back down. Don't... and they'll keep up their act. Somebody's got to find their spine once in awhile, and we are way overdue for a discovery among the political class.

You have to hope it happens before Ted Cruz gets elected president, anyway.

It's just amazing to me that it takes a man with a broken back to demonstrate the kind of courage needed to slap Republicans across the face with their hypocrisy.

House Dems block water bill in last stand for schools

While rain slicked the streets of Austin, lawmakers heatedly debated legislation that would use $2 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to pay for the state water plan, an increasingly urgent issue for lawmakers. But, after hours of stop-and-go debate, a procedural error derailed the legislation.

The bill’s author, state Rep. Allan Ritter, a Republican from rainy Southeast Texas, said House Bill 11 was “doorknob dead.”

You know, it's too bad that Ritter couldn't use any of the goodwill he had among Democrats -- you know, from all those years he spent being one -- to save his water bill.

House Democrats, who organized a point of order to kill the bill, said they resorted to that parliamentary tactic only because their demands to put more into Texas’ schools, and fully undo the cuts from 2011, were going unheeded. Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Houston) said they’d like to see the House pass a 2-2-2 plan: $2 billion for roads, $2 billion for water and $2 billion more for public schools, all paid out of the Rainy Day Fund.

Texas Monthly‘s Paul Burka described the Democrats’ dilemma:

This is also the last point in the session when the Democrats will have any leverage. The moment the gavel falls to certify the final passage of HB 11, the Democrats will lose whatever power they have.

But with a reputed 80 votes, and needing 100, it's not just the Dems who stand in the way. (The statehouse is split 95 R and 55 D.) The TP doesn't care much for the bill either, but that's because they don't want to spend anything.

House Bill 11 also faced challenges from the House’s tea party faction, which has been itching for a fight all session. To appease the brawlers, the House GOP caucus chair Rep. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) presented what one lawmaker called a “nuclear bomb”: an amendment stipulating that if the bill didn’t get a vote of two-thirds of the House, then it would be funded out of general revenue by imposing a $2 billion across-the-board cut. In other words, Creighton would force lawmakers to choose between water and everything else in the state budget.

The proposal, said Turner, puts “water first and everything else is second. By definition your amendment has picked a winner and everyone else stands to lose.”

Creighton’s rejoinder was that everyone would suffer from not funding the water plan. “Whoever is impacted by small reductions in the budget will benefit for years from this move,” he said.

But before the amendment came to a vote, the point of order killed the bill.

The bill could get passed if the Republicans with half a functioning brain could reach Sly Turner's common ground on funding education and transportation. But Ritter says it's dead, so I guess we should take him at his word.

It’s unclear how the House gets the water plan funded now. Any transfer from the Rainy Day Fund, as is preferred by Gov. Perry and other top Republicans, would require a two-thirds vote. The Senate passed a proposed constitutional amendment last week pulling a total of $5.7 billion from the Rainy Day Fund, including $2 billion for water. However, Ritter said that legislation “has a snowball’s chance” in the House.

Ritter and the Democrats pointed to another bill sitting in committee, House Bill 19, which spreads $3.7 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to water and roads.

Without 100 votes, something will have to give to fund the state water plan.

It's called compromise. It's defined as Republicans giving up something -- their apparent desire NOT to fully fund public schools -- in order to get what they want. Which, though difficult for them to manage, beats the kind of intransigence they have demonstrated on other legislative items (such as Medicaid expansion).

Or they could just postpone the scuffle until a special session.

State Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, commenting after Turner’s point of order won out, voiced determination to see a water bill through. “If we don’t fix this, I think a lot of people’s political careers will be on the line,” he said.

Since Larson is the guy who advanced term limits legislation over the objections of the governor, hopefully it's Rick Perry's political career he's referring to.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance would have gotten rid of the entire sequester, not just the part that inconvenienced the few, as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff notes that we might actually get a worthwhile payday lending bill passed this session... if the House follows the Senate's lead.  

WCNews at Eye on Williamson highlights one example of how our legislators decide that ideology trumps morality.  

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that enablers of racism and fear are planning to build more of that d*mn fence!

Greg Abbott is running for governor in 2014, but is Rick Perry? PDiddie at Brains and Eggs turned over the Magic 8 Ball and it said: "Reply Hazy Try Again".

Over at TexasKaos, Libby Shaw nails Perry on his lethal governing philosophy. Check it out: Texas Recipe for Disaster: Small Government, Lax Regulation, Little Oversight.

==========================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

I Wish Fifth Ward invites you to reimagine one of Houston's historic neighborhoods.

Texans for Public Justice tracks the 12 Republicans who went from the Legislature to the lobby since last session.

Nonsequiteuse advises you on getting the most from your fundraiser.

Clay Robison eulogizes Demetrio Rodriguez, one of the earliest champions in the decades-long fight for equity in public school funding.

Harold Cook muses on lizards, henhouses, and snakes in the grass.

Texas Clean Air Matters asks if lax regulations or insufficient oversight are more to blame for the explosion in West.

Flavia Isabel reads "Lean In" and draws some lessons from it.

Pedestrian Pete demonstrates bad parking lot and traffic signal design.

Texas Leftist explains why Barbara is his favorite Bush.

Texpatriate discusses the latest legislative assault on voting rights.

Sunday Funnies

Rick Perry outraged by cartoon explosions, not real ones

Jack Ohman and I were on the same wavelength last week. And for the first time in a very long time, something published in a newspaper got the governor's attention.

Gov. Rick Perry said Friday he's disgusted a California newspaper ran a cartoon that depicts him boasting about booming business in Texas, then shows an explosion, a week after a fertilizer plant explosion killed 14 people in a Texas town.

Perry said he wants an apology from the Sacramento Bee on behalf of the town.

The cartoon in Thursday's edition shows Perry crowing that "Business is Booming," flanked by signs saying "Low Tax!" and "'Low Regs!" It's a play on the Republican's often-repeated mantra that his state's low-regulation, business-friendly climate has its economy humming.

The next panel reads "Boom!" as a blast engulfs the area behind the governor and his signs.

In a letter to the Bee's editor, Perry said it "was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon."

"While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won't stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans," Perry wrote. "Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster." 

Ohman is, of course, mocking Perry and not the dead of West, and even Perry is smart enough to understand that. Which is why he's crying like a Boehner about it.

The Bee's editorial page editor, Stuart Leavenworth, responded Friday that the artist, Jack Ohman, "made a strong statement about Gov. Rick Perry's disregard for worker safety, and his attempts to market Texas as a place where industries can thrive with few regulations."

"It is unfortunate that Gov. Perry, and some on the blogosphere, have attempted to interpret the cartoon as being disrespectful for the victims of this tragedy," Leavenworth said. "As Ohman has made clear on his blog, he has complete empathy for the victims and people living by the plant.

"What he finds offensive is a governor who would gamble with the lives of families by not pushing for the strongest safety regulations. Perry's letter is an attempt to distract people from that message."

Rick Perry is, as we know, the guy who ignored every Texas newspaper editorial board on his way to re-election in 2010. Rick Perry is the guy who brags about how great the Texas economy is when the state has the most minimum wage jobs in the nation. Rick Perry is the guy who, in his pitch to out-of-state businessmen, makes analogies of burning buildings about to collapse. And he is also the guy who believes that Texans, with their ballots, have endorsed all of his lazy-ass-faire libertarian notions of regulation.

You cannot make these things up. Rick Perry has exposed himself on a weekly basis for the past two years as the King of All Buffoons, and appears (with an indignant response to a cartoon) to have finally realized that we're onto him. When even the Texas Republicans in the state legislature are tired of your act...

I have to say I am still doubtful, however, that the greater ramifications of Ohman's cartoon will successfully penetrate our governor's dense mind. I just don't think his brain can be fracked. He's been such a national laughingstock for so long that it's hard for me to see anything that occurs outside of his tea bubble will actually influence his actions. That David Dewhurst -- who has a lot of fencing to mend with the extremes in the TXGOP -- would go a step further and demand Ohman's firing is evidence that the Glenn Beck caucus, Texas chapter thinks there is still mileage to be gotten out of strenuously objecting to a cartoon.

Cartoons, as you may recall, were what resulted in the fatwas against both Danish and American cartoonists in the past ten years. And that is essentially the state of play in the Lone Star State today: Texas is right on the verge of becoming the Afghanistan of the western world. That's where the Tea Party has brought us.

Either the people who vote in the GOP primary in Texas will put an end to this bullshit, or they won't. It's up to them.

Hurry up, Battleground Texas.

Bush's Lie-bury opens today

(The media blitz) was part of a carefully choreographed effort surrounding the opening of the Bush library at Southern Methodist University. The rollout includes a series of TV interviews with Bush and his wife, Laura, on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. Fox News, whose conservative viewers represent the Bush library's biggest target audience, will get two interviews.

The resemblance to the start of a national campaign is no accident. For a former president seeking to turn around public opinion about his tenure, "the presidential library is their key to getting a better place in American history," said Benjamin Hufbauer of the University of Louisville, who is a specialist on presidential libraries.

Bush's reemergence comes after several low-profile years. He did not attend last year's Republican convention and played no role in the 2012 campaign. More recently, he became a grandfather for the first time and attracted unexpected attention for his newest hobby: painting.

"People are surprised," he told the Dallas Morning News. "Of course, some people are surprised I can even read." 

Count me out on the rehab tour.

A few things are clear: This campaign is as much about cleaning up the mess he made for his brother Jeb, who clearly wants to claim his rightful place in the White House, as it is about refurbishing his legacy. Last week Bush told Parade magazine he hopes his brother runs. “I would hope that people would judge [him], if Jeb were to run, on his merits and his track record.…So I hope he will run.”

[...]

He is the worst president in modern history, by any measure. Americans don’t like disliking their presidents, so his (polling) recovery was predictable, but Bush’s media tour is likely to provoke a backlash, or at least closer media scrutiny to his record. Or at least it should.

Obama, along with all of the ex-presidents, will be there today. After raising money for Texas Democrats last night, the president will also speak at a memorial for West blast victims in addition to the library dedication.

A partial listing of library exhibits I would like to see, if I ever go...

• The 'Mission Accomplished' banner and the codpiece he wore ten years ago when he declared that major combat operations had ended in Iraq even though they continued for the rest of his presidency.

• The chair in which he sat, frozen, at Booker Elementary School on 9/11 after he was told "America is under attack." Also his dog-eared copy of "The Pet Goat."

• A bag of pretzels, of course.

• On a continuous loop in the lobby: a recording of the push-poll question his campaign used to destroy John McCain in 2000…

"Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

...just to show visiting school kids what a classy guy Bush is.

• A piece of the birthday cake he shared with John McCain in Phoenix as the levees were busting open in New Orleans.

• The golf club he swung immediately after vowing to "stop these terrorist killers."

• The 2005 "Can I go pee?" note he scribbled to Condi Rice at the United Nations.

• The Segway he fell off of in 2003.

• A credit card bill forwarded from the White House to "The People of the United States of America" with a balance of $10 trillion.

• The August 6, 2001 PDB: Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside US.

• Some aluminum tubes.

• The vial of baby powder Colin Powell used to scare us to death at the United Nations.

• The best of FEMA Director Michael Brown's Katrina emails, including "I am a fashion god" and "Can I quit now? Can I go home?"

• A photo collage of the U.S. soldiers who died during the Iraq war underneath a sign that says, "Oops!"

• The shoes that were thrown at him by a journalist during his last visit to Iraq.

• The shirt Bill Clinton was wearing in Haiti when Bush used it as a rag to wipe a commoner's cooties off his hand in 2010.

The free market levels the playing field

And also the apartments, and the nursing home, and several homes in the adjacent neighborhood. Along with the people living in them, and the first responders.

Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that spending more state money on inspections would not have prevented the deadly explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. plant that was last investigated by Texas environmental regulators in 2006.

Perry told The Associated Press that he remains comfortable with the state's level of oversight following last week's massive blast in the rural farming town of West that killed 14 people and injured 200. Federal and state investigators say they have yet to identify the cause of the explosion.

Perry suggested that the majority of Texas residents agree with him.

"(People) through their elected officials clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight," Perry said Monday. 

So there you have it: the governor believes he has a mandate for inaction. Whether he actually does or not depends on whether Texas Republicans are willing to extend his political career as governor in 2014... or in a rerun for the presidency in 2016.

In the meantime it would be great if the invisible hand of the free market whips Rick Perry's ass.

Greg Abbott is running for governor of Texas in 2014, but is Rick Perry?

The incumbent keeps head-faking.

"Why would you want to change?"

The challenger, meanwhile, beat him out to West.

The day after the horrific blast last week, Gov. Rick Perry held a press conference at the Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin. He wore casual clothes with an open collar, and flanked by the lieutenant governor and other officials, talked about making sure the state sent whatever was needed to the tiny town best known as a Kolaches stop on Interstate-35.

A few hours later, Abbott was the first elected, statewide official on the scene wearing a fleece and a serious expression, taking an aerial tour of the damage and returning to brief journalists. In past disasters, that was Perry's job. The governor didn't make it to West until the next day.

Many may ask what role does an attorney general play in responding to an industrial accident. Not much really, though Abbott did take the opportunity to warn local businesses against price gouging for food and shelter. But his appearance makes a little more sense if you consider that Abbott is widely seen as Perry's chosen successor to the governor's mansion.

It was a quick return trip to the Waco area for Abbott. He was there just the day before the explosion telling people that Battleground Texas was a "far greater threat" than Kim Jong-un.

The troublesome thing for the attorney general is that the governor might not be ready to move on. Ross Ramsey lays out the case for both directions, in or out.

Rick Perry is being so cagey that even I won't speculate -- yet -- on what he might do. I do know that the guy who will know first is Eric Bearse.

Abbott's campaign consultant, Eric Bearse, responded mildly saying that he isn't privy to Perry and Abbott's conversations. But Bearse also happens to be a Perry campaign consultant who helped write Perry's book on scouting, "On My Honor." He also worked on Perry's presidential campaign.

Bearse declined to comment to The Associated Press on Perry's plans, or if Abbott is preparing a run for governor. But going into his 11th year in office, Abbott is known to be restless for something bigger and an attorney general candidate doesn't need an $18 million war chest to run virtually unchallenged for re-election.

Well, it is certainly true that Abbott is bored being the state attorney general.

Earlier this year he was asked what his job entailed. “I go into the office in the morning,” he replied. “I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” 

I guess that beats stuffing your boot in your mouth on a weekly basis. Here's the governor, just days before West.

If you’re a business owner in Illinois, I want to express my admiration for your ability to survive in an environment that, intentionally or not, is designed for you to fail.

With rising taxes and government interference on the upswing, your situation is not unlike a burning building on the verge of collapse. If you’re thinking of “just riding it out” you might want to reconsider.

Yeah, a burning building about to collapse. Or it might be just like living next to a fertilizer plant with 1,350 times the legal limit of ammonium nitrate and no inspections by OSHA since 1985. Anyway, Eric Bearse.

Perry-watchers can find evidence for either case. His failure to declare any emergency items this legislative session — a first since he took office — shows that his mind is elsewhere, as does his travel to California and an upcoming trip to Illinois, Democratic states with big Republican donors.

On the other hand, Perry talks about how much he loves his job and how the Texas economy is thriving due to the state's leadership current leadership.

So it is from this fog of uncertainty about Perry's plans that Abbott emerges alone in West, meeting with first responders, comforting the grief-stricken and acting very much like a governor.

If the speculation is true, and Bearse is charged with managing an orderly transition from Perry to Abbott, then Texans may have already witnessed the first act.

I can't stand the thought of either of these two as governor of Texas in 2014. C'mon, Republicans: can't you do any better than this?