Rick Perry is like a cartoon governor.

A drugstore cowboy, with a gaggle of Mr. Burnses all around him. The fact that these land deals uncovered by the DMN surprise exactly nobody -- ho hum, another 20-year public servant (sic) made a millionaire -- tells you all you need to know about the state of Texas politics these days.

Three years after Gov. Rick Perry's biggest real estate score, questions persist about whether the governor benefited from favoritism, backroom dealing and influence-buying.

The Dallas Morning News found evidence that Perry's investment was enhanced by a series of professional courtesies and personal favors from friends, campaign donors and the head of a Texas family with a rich history of political power-brokering.

Together they may have enriched Perry by almost $500,000, according to an independent real estate appraisal commissioned by The News.

Really, if this were submitted as a screenplay, the studio moguls would reject it for being too "obvious". That's why it would only work as an animation.

The 2007 deal involved a half-acre grassy lot at a Texas Hill Country resort on the shore of Lake Lyndon B. Johnson. The Horseshoe Bay development is owned by Doug Jaffe, whose San Antonio family has long and sometimes controversial ties to Texas politics.

Jaffe's company sold the parcel in 2000 to state Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, a longtime Perry friend and political ally. Shortly after, Fraser sold the lot to Perry for just more than $300,000.

The newspaper's appraiser determined in a report done this month that the land was worth $450,000 when Perry bought it.

In 2007, Alan Moffatt, a British business partner and close associate of Jaffe's, paid Perry $1.15 million for the land. The newspaper's appraiser found that price to be $350,000 above market value.

Moffatt denied anything improper occurred in the transaction. "It just happened that the governor of Texas owned that lot," he said. "It was a good deal for me."

More about Alan Moffatt here.

Documents and interviews portray Moffatt as an international businessman active in aviation, whose company once faced accusations of arms deliveries in connection with a brutal civil war. He also has ties to controversial Third World leaders, The Dallas Morning News found.

Well, that's not quite so cartoonish. What about this Jaffe fellow?

Doug Jaffe and his late father, Morris, have built widely chronicled reputations as big-money backers of Democratic politicians going back to Lyndon Johnson's days as a U.S. senator. But the Jaffe family also has contributed to Republicans when the GOP was in power, and Doug Jaffe gave to Perry's 2004 campaign.

Doug Jaffe found success in the vending machine business and made a fortune selling "hush kits" that allowed older commercial jets to meet government noise restrictions.

The Jaffes were implicated in a federal investigation in the early 1990s of billionaire rancher Clinton Manges, protege of legendary south Texas political boss George Parr. Manges was convicted of using the mail to file false claims with a state land official to retain an oil lease for the Jaffes.

In 1989, a congressional ethics committee investigating U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright subpoenaed both Jaffes to testify about an East Texas oil exploration venture that, despite producing nothing, earned Wright about $150,000. The Jaffes denied assisting Wright in return for help winning a $3 billion military aircraft contract.

The federal Office of Independent Counsel reported that it also investigated the Jaffes as part of a probe of former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, then U.S. housing secretary. The Jaffes acknowledged they had made thousands of dollars in loans to Linda Medlar Jones, a former Cisneros girlfriend.

Ah, so Doug Jaffe works both sides of the aisle. A bipartisan corrupter. And corruption seems to be a family tradition. That's less of a comedy and more Texas lore.

But back to everybody's favorite governor.

"So I would just have folks take a look at the record, and I think the record pretty much speaks for itself," Perry said.

This will be the most truthful thing this man will ever say.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes Lois the corpse flower a restful and well-earned dormant period as it brings you this week's blog highlights.

WhosPlayin posted a document explaining the link between benzene and natural gas drilling and production operations, and examining a few recent air quality studies in the Barnett Shale.

The Texas State Board of Education helps their cronies out and undermines public education with one swift move to support charter schools with our money. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees hedge fund operators racking up the $$$.

Off the Kuff took a look at campaign finance reports for Harris County candidates and State Reps. Along the way, he answered the burning question "What kind of man subscribes to Glamour magazine?"

This week, Hank Gilbert continued to dominate Todd Sleazy Staples. See the latest at McBlogger.

Eagle Ford Shale residents already have water impacts from fracking and now eminent domain is headed your way. TXsharon is trying to warn Eagle Ford Shale residents to learn from mistakes made in the Barnett Shale on Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

Over at TexasKaos, lightseeker brings together evidence on Rick Perry's governing style in Rick Perry: Death before Bad Image ! Do the Dirt With Bureaucracy! [Updated] .

Neil at Texas Liberal spent the week on vacation in Seattle. While there he took a boat cruise that went through the Ballard Locks on the Lake Washington Ship Canal. These free government-built and operated locks are used by all types of commercial and pleasure craft. As they use this free government service, it's doubtful that any boat owners go on about socialism or insist on paying what a private business would charge to use the locks.

The right wing unleashed a frenzy of race-baiting last week, from the continuing assault on Ill Eagles to the New Black Panther Party contrivance to the Andrew Bretbart/Shirley Sherrod dust-up. They struck gold with the last one, but all parties involved -- from the White House to the NAACP to FOX News -- ended the week with egg on their faces. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs summarized the sordid affair.

On July 21st Three Wise Men celebrated six years on the intertubes. Here's Xanthippas with a retrospective, and some thoughts in general about why they do what they do.

Laugh to keep from cryin'

This Week in Rick Perry Lies

-- Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott -- together with other bureaucrats in the TEA -- falsified test scores through a complex scoring system so that failing students and schools would appear to be 'exemplary'. Governor Rick Perry (the guy who appointed Scott to his job) bragged about one Houston school's "success".

The truth is that the dropout rate in Texas is a "rock-hard disaster".

-- Texas Forensic Science Commissioner John Bradley -- the guy Rick Perry appointed  to whitewash the investigation of whether the state of Texas executed an innocent man -- is proving to be nothing but a barrier to the investigation. Gee, I wonder why. Update: The governor has even lost Paul Burka.

--Slightly older than a week: Rick Perry said on FOX News that he "frankly, never had a call" from the Obama administration. False. As in: "you lie".

From decrying stimulus funds even as he accepted them in order to balance the state's budget, to claiming vast success in enforcing the border with Mexico, to his feverish notion that Houston is "approaching bankruptcy" -- the Texas incumbent governor and the facts have a very tenuous relationship.

Sunday Funnies

Goodbye, Middle Class

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. ...

Here are the statistics to prove it:

•    83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
•    61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•    66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•    36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
•    A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
•    24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
•    Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
•    Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
•    In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•    Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
•    In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
•    The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•    In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
•    More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•    This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income. 

But the conservatives in America cry "socialism", unemployed Americans and those on food stamps are "feeeloaders", and it's all Obama's fault.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

This must be the fault of labor unions. If you believe FOX News.

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.

What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.

So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.

What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.

God DAMN that Obama. Where are all the jobs he promised?

Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.

But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.

The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

We've got to get the Republicans back in there so they can fix this. It's their highest priority.

So who got Breitbarted the hardest?

Pretty much all of us. (Not that I'm feeling sorry for FOX ...)