Gov. Good Hair strikes again. Time to get on down the road, Rick!

sadly, in texas, there is very little justice along those lines. hell, in texas the perry campaign can make the claim that kay bailey hutchinson is too liberal to be texas' governor and no one laughs. i might have been an obama delegate to the state democratic convention but the county i live in went 80% for mccain.

Oh boy , is the power of the hair able to extend its reach beyond the ken of mortal men ? Keep your radio sets tuned to these same out of touch and beyond reason personalities for the next mind numbing episode .
Was Perry a step up from Bush , or was this a mere R. E. Lee drag em to the wing until they get tired strategy ?
Whichever one is more suited for the increasingly bizarre public face of the southern party matters little for the humans in Texas .

My God, listening to Perry gives me a creepy deja vu feeling. Where have I heard that same cavalier attitude and dry sense of humor coming via a Texan drawl before.....? Somebody help me, because I can't quit place it.

I also can't quite spell quite, perhaps somebody could help me with that also?

"All together, Houston lost 95,100 jobs between August 2008 and August 2009, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. That represents a 3.6 percent loss of jobs over that one-year period." (Houston Chronical; 9.19.09)

I'd take 3.6% here in Albany in a heartbeat, and so would my Governor who is presently positioned under the Van Jones Memorial Obama Busline.

Neither Benen, nor Burka, nor Dr. Christina Romer have a chance in CEA Hell of substantiating those 70,000 jobs.

And 56% of the $14B to the LoneStars went to Medicaid & PubED; you know, er, for the most part FED mandated.

As they say in Lubbock: That stimulus dog wont hunt, it won't even scratch.

Lee Fang isn't as condescendingly blatant or coy a liar as Corley, Faiz or Yglesias; he's certainly strident but doesn't have the big boy BS pants yet.

It could cost him the race."

oh please. look at who the citizens of texas send to congress election after election after election.

I saw the video clip. As bad as Perry's comments were, what was worse was the reaction of the audience.

"We're in a recession?" (LAUGHTER).

His audience isn't feeling the recession. They're the 1/2 of 1 percent who have done quite well out of the Republican economic policies over the last 30 years, thank you, and can't give a damn about the rest of us.

This is how they talk, and laugh among themselves, when they don't think any cameras are watching.

"This is how they talk, and laugh among themselves, when they don't think any cameras are watching."

Hey, leave Pelosi and Axelrod out of this.

@tao9

I could throw out a bunch of random numbers and newspaper quotes at random and speak a bunch of jibberish too, but I'll just say this:

Texas stimulus money awarded: $ 16.88 billion

Texas stimulus money paid out to date: $4.13 billion

estimated jobs saved or created (2 year estimate): 269,000

health and human services - $2.4 billion
education - $6.9 billion

included in the Texas package is $1.1 billion for the dept. of defense, $2.7 billion for the dept. of transportation, $517 million for the dept. of housing and urban development, and $755 million for the dept. of energy.

Texas, like many western states that are mineral rich, did very well over the energy boom of the past decade. This looks like a repeat of the 70's energy crisis when these states did well while the nation struggled. When oil and energy prices collapsed and the rest of nation recovered many of the these states then fell on hard times.

I guess Perry is just trying to take credit for what God put in the ground. I suppose he'll also gladly except the blame when the Texas economy struggles to recover?

If there's any justice, this will be a tough one for Perry to live down.

Never doubt the moron stupidity of the average rural white Texan (or the average Houston or Dallas or Midland suburban Texan). Perry will campaign at Friday night football games and tell everyone how much fun we're all havin', and the morons who elected Bush twice as governor and twice as President will "do their duty." Remember all those Aggies grads.

"Texas predicted to lead recovery": http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2009/09/14/daily23.html?ana=from_rss

Six of the 20 strongest-performing metro areas are in Texas: http://www.brookings.edu/metro/MetroMonitor/overall_performance/overall.aspx

What Perry says is true, and is significant.

So Benen stupidly fixates on some little rhetorical device which Perry used to distract his followers from awkward reality.

it's good to know that all the old-timers remain as stupid as ever. no, am, what perry said isn't true: there is a recession in texas....

Wow. I've lived in Texas throughout Perry's entire governorship and I never noticed before how much he sounds like Bush. My wife said the same thing, and now we're trying to remember if we've ever heard him talk before. I guess I must have seen him in commercials, but I think he sounded different in a more scripted format. He sounded like he could have been Bush's slightly dumber brother in this clip.

What Perry says is true, and is significant.

Uh, am? The first link you posted states repeatedly that Texas is in a recession, which directly refutes Perry's suggestion that we're not in one. So what was "true" about what he said?

And the reason Benen "fixated" on Perry's comment was because it was boneheaded and callous, and the exact sort of "rhetorical device" which can hurt politicians if more people hear about. I fail to understand what the problem is here.

The Houston Chamber of Commerce got a good laugh out of Perry's comment. Heartless bastards.

Damn, how I miss Molly Ivins.

Although a column about Perry actually writes itself in her voice, doesn't it?

8%.
Texas is what? 20million good ol boys?

That's 1.8 million unemployed?

without Obama it would be 1,870,000.

Much higher unemployment?

Not really.

I hate it when you make me fight for their side, but facts have a liberal bias most of the time so we should support facts whenever we can.

"If there's any justice, this will be a tough one for Perry to live down."

In a just world, the rest of us would be spared Texas's special oil-and-fundamentalist-Christian-induced Lone Star brand of crazy.

toowearyforbrainwaveflatline on September 20, 2009 at 5:09 PM:
"Texas is what? 20million good ol boys?"

Texas total pop = 24.6 Mil.

So half are gals, 30-40% or so are kids, and 100% of Austin is metrosexual.

Before the governors mansion in Austin TX burned several years ago, Gov. Rick Perry (or his office) overruled the governors mansion security office recommendation regarding how many security personnel should be left behind to guard the mansion during renovations.

No report has ever been issued saying how many state security people Gov. Perry took with him to guard him and his family at the luxury mansion on the lake ($10,000 rental a month) that he moved to during renovations.

We know from reports only that too few security people (with faulty surveillance equipment, too boot) were on-site at the governors mansion the night that an arsonist hit.

Which raises the question, in my mind, of whether the arsonist would have gotten close enough to torch the governors mansion if Gov. Perry and his office had heeded the recommendations of the governors mansion security office, instead of leaving a skeleton security crew on-site to keep an eye on the governors mansion?

So, Gov. Perry's callous remark is in keeping with his overall elitist attitude. He just doesn't care about working Texas families, or in the case of the arson attack, the governors mansion.

Texas is a donor state, which means the feds confiscate more tax money from Texas than they give back in the form of stimulus or subsidies or anything else. Obama has done jack s#it for Texas.

Touche, Tao9.

Yes, one should factor in those not identified as unemployed due to youth or choice.

While we're at it, 8% of 20million is 1.6 million, not 1.8
Duh.

Texas may be a donor state, but I suspect it is because it has a horrible record for taking care of its poor. There is no welfare here, fought SCHIP tooth and nail, does the minimum requirement for unemployment, etc. It is like 49th in the country for poverty and lack of education. Yet we have one of the highest rates of oil and gas revenue to tax. With those kind of savings in spending, how could we not be in the black and a net contributor to the federal government?

For all those who think they would like to secede, I'd like to see the faces of the mob when they find out that the little disability, SCHIP, WIC, etc. that we have would go away completely along with social security and medicare. We would no doubt stone gays and give women who have abortions the lethal injection. If we become a laboratory of democracy, it would be one that Darwin would be proud of - dog eat dog.

Doesn't Rick Perry know that his primary responsibility is to create fear in his constituency? How else will government grow and become more powerful?