Rick Perry's not bad, pretty good week

Shoots a coyote, the TeaBaggers scream with glee. Throws a sop to the Tejanos, they all scream in agony.

Arizona's tough new illegal immigration enforcement law would not be right for Texas, Gov. Rick Perry said on Thursday, upholding the state's long-held tradition of rejecting harsh anti-immigrant policies. ...

“I fully recognize and support a state's right and obligation to protect its citizens, but I have concerns with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas,” Perry said in a written statement.

“For example, some aspects of the law turn law enforcement officers into immigration officials by requiring them to determine immigration status during any lawful contact with a suspected alien, taking them away from their existing law enforcement duties, which are critical to keeping citizens safe.”

If the comments at Chron.com ever mean anything in the grand scheme -- certainly a debatable proposition -- then Rick Perry has just lost the election.

Though Texas is ruled by conservative Republicans, top GOP leaders from former Texas Gov. George W. Bush to Perry have rejected harsh and punitive immigration policies.

Both Leo Berman and Debbie Riddle (watch the video here and note that almost a third of the Texas House is Latino, thus any bill like this faces far more difficult odds) plan to introduce Arizona-like legislation when the Texas Lege next convenes in January 2011. The governor is signaling a more moderate direction ... which riles the TeaBaggers to no end.

“We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals,” Bush said in his 2007 State of the Union address. “We need to resolve the status of the immigrants that are already in our country without animosity and without amnesty.”

Perry took heat during this year's Republican primary for backing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, saying in a debate that the students are on a path to citizenship.

“Texas has a rich history with Mexico, our largest trading partner, and we share more than 1,200 miles of border, more than any other state,” Perry said Thursday. “As the debate on immigration reform intensifies, the focus must remain on border security and the federal government's failure to adequately protect our borders.

“Securing our border is a federal responsibility, but it is a Texas problem, and it must be addressed before comprehensive immigration reform is discussed.”

This stance is truly much more about homebuilder Bob Perry's campaign contributions to the governor than anything else. Perry Homes needs a large supply of cheap workers to keep building those crappy suburban tract houses, no matter what he says publicly (note that linked op-ed calling for immigration reform by Dallas business leaders is almost four years old).

Let's begin and end with this: no matter how much they squall, the TeaBaggers will never desert Rick Perry, even if there were a reasonable (by their standards, not mine) Libertarian option on the ballot. And that's why this is such an effective strategy by the governor: he undercuts a much-needed base of support Bill White must have to defeat him, at no actual political risk to himself.

Governor MoFo has had a good week playing his futures options. Meanwhile, has anybody seen a response from the White campaign yet? Me neither. Update: Stace has and blogged his response, with which I completely agree. More updates: I simply missed the White campaign's responses, which the Texas Tribune noted here and here.

Kuffner has more of the angles regarding the coyote affair. And Rachel was deliciously mean in her aggre-posting.

Last update: This is a good one ...

"I go over to Memorial Park and I have seen coyotes," the Democratic nominee for governor said during a campaign stop in Grand Prairie. "As soon as they see me, they run away."

Perry, of course, had a different experience. In February a coyote made the mistake of eyeballing Perry and his dog. The governor sent him to coyote heaven. So should Perry have been afraid of a scrawny little coyote?

"To me, I don't tend to be afraid of coyotes," White said.

Privatize the oil profits, socialize the cleanup

President Barack Obama pledged an all-out response Thursday to the massive oil spill now expected to reach the Gulf Coast within a day and dispatched top officials to the region to help coordinate defenses against the potential environmental disaster.

After exploding last week and killing eleven workers and spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico for a week, Deepwater Horizon's owner BP -- the former British Petroleum Company, known to you perhaps by their lovely green and yellow logo -- begged the federal government to help them clean up their mess.

It's much worse than they have been saying. In fact it's so bad that they are setting fire to oil on the water.

At the White House, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Sally Brice-O'Hara said, "We are being very aggressive and we are prepared for the worst case." Federal officials announced inspections would begin immediately of all oil rigs in the Gulf and subpoena powers would be used in the gathering investigation. But the priority was to support the oil company BP PLC in employing booms, skimmers, chemical dispersants and controlled burns to fight the oil surging from the seabed.

Why is it that corporations always turn to the federal government for help when they screw things up really badly?

Brice-O'Hara said officials expected the leading edge of the spill to reach the Mississippi Delta sometime on Friday. Workers were racing from six staging areas to deploy more booms to try to hold off the slick and protect sea life and fragile wetlands. Winds and sea conditions Thursday prevented another controlled burn of the kind tried successfully a day earlier with a small test section of the slick.

Top Homeland Security, Interior and Environmental Protection Agency officials were going to the region. Officials emphasized at a White House briefing that all costs of the defense and recovery will ultimately fall on the industry, not taxpayers.

That's encouraging to hear, but for some reason I still kinda doubt it. BP has to be one of the unluckiest companies around. Their refineries explode almost regularly, so maybe their offshore rigs are just following suit. Enough about their incompetence, though.

Obama spoke Thursday with five Gulf state governors from Florida to Texas.

The administration declared the spill to be one of national significance, a designation that eases the transfer of personnel and equipment to the region from all parts of the country.

So the president called and spoke with Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour (MS), Bob Riley (AL) and Charlie Crist -- all Republicans; most of them TeaBaggers but one definite TeaBaggee  --and pledged federal assistance in the cleanup.

Do you suppose any of them said, "no thanks, Mr. President"? "We don't need your socialist help"? 

Do you suppose the Texas governor confronted the US president about that target? Or bragged about blasting that coyote? Or reiterated his desire to secede from the Union, maybe?

When summer settles in and the hurricanes start to swirl and the Gulf Coast governors are forced -- like the rest of us -- to dread the annual onslaught from the sea, will they come crying to Uncle Sam for help if one of their cities gets washed away?

One thing they can certainly count on: the president won't just be flying overhead looking out the window.

Update: John Coby with more.

Stop Rick Perry before he kills again

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a message for wily coyotes out there: Don't mess with my dog.

Perry says he needed just one shot from his laser-sighted pistol to take down a coyote that was menacing his dog during an early morning jog in an undeveloped area near Austin.

Perry told The Associated Press he sometimes carries his pistol, loaded with hollow-pointed bullets, when he jogs on trails because he's scared of snakes — and that he'd seen coyotes in that area.

When the coyote came out of the brush toward his daughter's labrador retriever puppy on a February jog, he charged it and shot it with his .380 Ruger pistol.

"Don't attack my dog or you might get shot ... if you're a coyote," Perry said.

Hollow points and a laser sight on a .38 caliber pistol, apparently worn while jogging. To protect himself -- allegedly -- against snakes and his dog from a coyote.

I'm sure this is because his detail of bodyguards (several similarly-heavily-armed Texas Rangers) just don't afford him enough protection from the crazed Austin liberal with a gun, or the adoring throngs of conservatives that might bum-rush him Justin Bieber-style while he's outside the gates of the $9000-a-month mansion we're all paying for him to live in.

And I just thought he was afraid to debate Bill White.

This man is the biggest coward alive.

Updates: And plenty of 'em. Juanita Jean ...

The creepy news is that he carries the Rugar (sic) because ‘he is afraid of snakes.’  Whoa!  Why should he fear his own species?”


“To make matters worse,” she grins, “I am a little old lady.  I admit that I arm myself against snakes when I’m out walking.  With a damn stick.  It’s a dead stick.  And it’s not even loaded.  And I’m a girl.”

“And to make matters even worse than worse, his hollow bullet Rugar (sic) is laser sighted.  What’s he do?  Shoot at PowerPoint presentations he doesn’t like?”

-- Douchebag Robbie had another orgasm dreaming about pulling Rick's trigger.

-- The AP report notes that Governor MoFo (you really have to click on this link and watch the techno mashup) was without his security detail. Still seems overly cautious to carry a .380 on a run, if for nothing else the chafe factor.

Them again, if you're so afraid of a snake that you have to carry a high caliber handgun with a laser sight and hollow points, then maybe you don't have anything to get chafed.

Sunday Funnies on Monday (your papers, please edition)

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance can't believe that school is finishing up and summer will soon be upon us. Before it gets too hot, here's a look at what's been going on this past week.

This week on Left of College Station, Teddy takes a look at the beginning of the campaign for CD-17 between Chet Edwards and Bill Flores. Also, Teddy covers money in local politics by looking at the campaign finance reports of College Station and Bryan municipal candidates. LoCS also covers the week in headlines.

TXsharon of BLUEDAZE: Drilling Reform for Texas stepped in DoodyGate this week! It appears Range Resources fabricated a toxic spill to cover up their illegal dump. When a toxic spill causes less hassle than doody, you know the Texas Railroad Commission "regulations" need updating. Will the City of Denton exercise their new found powers?

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme urges you to tell the Texas Legislature that legalizing drugs will stop the border violence. No drug profits. No drug war.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the Texas GOP's ploy to raise taxes next year, if they're left in power, and then blame it on Obama. Let's stop them: Dewhurst lets the cat out of the bag.

Help send the Texas Cloverleaf to Netroots Nation by voting on a DFA scholarship.

This week McBlogger would like to send out a massive thank you to Hank Gilbert for standing up and actually calling out Toll Road Todd for beating up, yet again, on Teh Gays.

Just a few weeks after WhosPlayin wrote a blog post pointing out Lewisville ISD's illegal "zero tolerance" policy, the school board unanimously overturned it. But WhosPlayin continues to look for answers.

Off the Kuff took a closer look at that Rasmussen poll from last week.

The same thing that caused the deaths of miners in the Upper Big Branch mine is the cause of the bursting of the housing bubble, the Lehman crash, and the implosion of our financial system. Read more at PDiddie's Brains and Eggs post entitled Consumer regulation as coal mine canary.

There is an old saw which says it is a poor general who blames his soldiers for defeat. With the question of Texas public education still unresolved and hurling toward the latest crisis of funding and quality, lightseeker at TexasKaos takes on a San Antonio Express editorial which proceeds to bash teachers and unions as the overlooked villains in this recurring horror show. Check it out : On Teacher Bashing , or Beating Up the Easy Target in Educational Failures.

Neil at Texas Liberal is pleased to announce that the blog now has a New York City correspondent. Lyuba Halkyn, a daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, will now offer up her views for the blog reading public. This post also has a great picture of a blimp flying over Manhattan in the 1930's.

What if the TeaBaggers were all black?

Or all brown -- Mexican-Americans? Or Arab-Americans?

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters -- the black protesters -- spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters -- these black protesters with guns -- be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Wise has -- as you already know -- plenty more examples of this kind of white privilege, and I urge you to go read the entire essay.

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

Truth this brutal makes this douchebag's head explode, and this asshole grind his nasty yellow teeth right down to the gums.

Sunday Funnies

My Ten Earth Day pledges

1. Go into a field full of methane-emitting cows and/or TeaBaggers and cork them.

2. Turn off my car's ignition after I've parked it in the garage instead of leaving it running in case I need to make a fast getaway.

3. Rent a helicopter (that runs on used cooking oil!) and airdrop thousands of plastic recycle bins over Houston to create awareness of this important issue.

4. Create "teachable moments" throughout the day by pointing at people drinking out of plastic water bottles and yelling into a bullhorn, "Resource-sucking energy whore!!!"

5. Insert Breathe Right nasal strips inside my nostrils so that I actually breathe less.

6. Start a coral reef in the bathtub for eventual relocation to the coast of Australia.

7. Harness solar power by using nothing but the sun and a magnifying glass to light my joint.

8. Combine bicycling and public transportation by attaching a grappling hook to the back of a metro bus and having it tow me and my Schwinn into town.

9. Practice water conservation with two everyday objects: a chamber pot and an open window.

10. Finally,  hit myself repeatedly in the face with a two-by-four while blindfolded so I can get a sense of Earth Day from the perspective of a climate-change denier.

Thanks to Bill in Portland Maine.

Consumer protection as coal mine canary

Officials say it's too soon to pinpoint the exact cause of the tragic explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that took the lives of 29 miners, but we certainly know enough to identify the root cause. It's the same cause that led to the 2007 Crandall Canyon mine disaster in Utah that killed six miners and three rescue workers. It's the same cause that led to the 2006 Sago mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 12 miners. And it's also the same cause that led to the Lehman Brothers disaster, the Citigroup disaster, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the implosion of our financial system: a badly broken regulatory system.

The loss of life at Upper Big Branch happened in one horrific instant. The economic collapse has not killed people, but it has gradually destroyed millions of lives. Both calamities occurred because elected officials who should have been creating a regulatory system that protects working families instead created a system that protects the corporations it was meant to watch over.

...

Regulations are "very difficult to comply with," and "so many of the laws" are "nonsensical." Those are the words of Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, the company that owns the Upper Big Branch mine and has a grotesque history of safety violations.

In the case of the financial industry, the reason it can't be regulated adequately is because, as Alan Greenspan put it last week in testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, "the complexity is awesome," and regulators "are reaching far beyond [their] capacities."

That is, of course, exactly the way Wall Street designed it. To the financial world "awesome complexity" is a feature, not a bug.

Something else the mining and financial industries share: the revolving door between regulators and those they're supposed to be regulating.

Congressmen leave Congress to become lobbyists, they lobby their former associates in Congress to weaken the business oversight regulation which helps their corporate clients make more money. Meanwhile the little guy loses his home, loses his job, loses his retirement.  Oh yeah, people also lose their lives (not only in collapsed mines but also because they can't afford healthcare, either with or without insurance). But profits go up.  Bonuses go up. Stock prices go up.

I'm sure there will be new regulations written in response to this latest mining disaster. Just as we're about to get yet another grab-bag of financial regulations. But by the time these regulations make their way through the Congressional sausage grinder, the lobbyists will have added in the loopholes that ensure that the fix is in -- and that the American people get the short end of the stick. Again.

There is no sense of urgency in Washington about making sure these corporations play by the rules. In 2007, after the Utah mining disaster, we got angry, we held hearings, we supposedly fixed things, then we moved on. Three years later, 29 miners die. And the cycle starts again.

In the same way, in 2003, after the Enron and WorldCom disasters, we got angry, we held hearings, we supposedly fixed things, then we moved on. Five years later, we got AIG, Lehman Brothers, Citi, and an economic crisis that devastated -- and continues to devastate -- the lives of millions. Will we just sit back and let the cycle start again?

Disasters -- both mining and financial -- are going to keep happening until we re-evaluate our priorities, and force our elected officials -- and the regulators they pick -- to put the public interest above the special interests and their lobbyists in Washington.

Glenn Smith at Dog Canyon adds ... 

Capitalism has been the engine of our society and America has been its poster child in the world. The power of the market forces that drive capitalism has brought unprecedented wealth and success to our nation and much of its population. However like a growing fire that starts out useful and productive providing light and warmth and heat to cook by, unrestrained capitalism is quickly consuming all the available fuel and is shifting from being productive to becoming destructive. The root of this lies in raw capitalism’s core; its obligation to the bottom line. As a fire requires fuel, capitalism requires profit. When confined behind a glass shade and fed a slow supply of kerosene an oil lamp can light a room and make its inhabitants more productive, but if not controlled, that same flame can destroy the house and kill its inhabitants. Raw capitalism burns with the same power and we are quickly losing control.

Flames ripped through the mine shafts of the Upper Big Branch mine in a massive explosion. Those flames were fed by the explosive gases that were allowed to collect unventilated deep below the surface of the earth. The destructive force of that explosion bent steel rails, collapsed tunnels and shattered lives. Unregulated capitalism has bent our political system, collapsed our financial system and is shattering lives. It must be contained again within a robust and sturdy regulatory system. We need strong, well staffed agencies with the legal powers to manage the mining, the financial and food agencies among others. Additionally we need to douse the influence of lobbyists and industry insiders to ensure that our capitalism remains a source of light in our society and doesn’t consume us all in the name of greater profits.

And Arianna Huffington closes ...

The lives of hardworking Americans have to take precedence over the bottom line at Massey Energy and on Wall Street.

This isn't a matter of right vs. left. It's a matter of right vs. wrong.

Sachs of Shit

If corporations are people now, then why isn't Goldman Sachs already in jail?

We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.

And Goldman isn’t the only financial firm accused of doing this. According to the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalism Web site ProPublica, several banks helped market designed-to-fail investments on behalf of the hedge fund Magnetar, which was betting on that failure.

So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.

As for the alleged creation of investments designed to fail, these may have magnified losses at the banks that were on the losing side of these deals, deepening the banking crisis that turned the burst housing bubble into an economy-wide catastrophe.

The obvious question is whether financial reform of the kind now being contemplated would have prevented some or all of the fraud that now seems to have flourished over the past decade. And the answer is yes.

And yet the Republican Senate contingent once again lines up in lockstep opposition to reforms that would prevent the banksters from ruining us all over again.

What do you suppose it would take for a Republican to vote against Wall Street?  That's probably as far-fetched a proposition as a Catholic pedophile priest converting to Southern Baptist.

Update: Tom Toles nails it.

If 37% of TeaBaggers have a college or post-graduate degree ...

... how come so many of them spell worse than a fifth-grader?

-- If 22% of TeaBaggers are over the age of 65 -- thus receiving Medicare health benefits and Social Security income from the federal government -- why are they opposed to "government-run healthcare"?

-- If TeaBaggers are paying lower taxes under Obama -- and indeed, 52% say their own taxes are 'fair' -- why do 82% of them think their taxes are going up?

-- Finally, how can it be that 40% of them support their own Congressional representative when only 1% of them approve of the job Congress is doing?

These are among the many imponderables associated with this overexposed, over-hyped, too noisy, too obnoxious faction of the electorate.

This monumental ignorance cannot all be attributable to the FOX News intelligence quotient (even though 47% cite that as their sole or primary source of information -- compared with 19% of the general public).

It's equally imponderable that all of this screaming and whining like babies that's been going for nearly a year now -- since last summer's townhalls on healthcare reform -- continues to attract so much media attention.

Update: RepublicanDirtyTricks.com, via jobsanger, with another good question.

What this country needs is another conservative network

Thanks, Dr. Crane.

Kelsey Grammer, one of Hollywood's most outspoken conservative actors, is now promoting a new television network: RightNetwork, aimed at his political brethren. ...

"On television, through partners including Comcast, RightNetwork delivers programming on demand that enables our audience to watch what they want, when they want," it reads, noting that the lineup will focus on "entertainment with Pro-America, Pro-Business, Pro-Military sensibilities."

Praise the Lawd and pass the ammunition.

There's no question that the new network has taken a confident approach to its own online promotional campaign. "There's wrong, and there's right," Grammer says in a clip featured on the RightNetwork website. "RightNetwork: All that's right with the world."

In addition to the Grammer promo clip, the RightNetwork site features trailers for three programs: "Poker and Politics," where entertainers and pundits talk politics around the table; "Running," a reality show about six congressional candidates; and "Right to Laugh," a comedy show that will probably have no shortage of jokes at President Obama's expense.

One of the six (Republican -- does that even need to be said?) candidates featured on "Running" will be Dr. Donna Campbell, Lloyd Doggett's doomed opponent in Texas' CD-10. Looney-toon Andrew Breitbart will similarly be a bloviator on the "P&P" offering, noting:

"My entire business model is built upon how horrible a president Barack Obama is," he says, chuckling.

First truth to come out of his mouth that I have ever discovered.

Do you think FOX is worried?