Rick Perry Abandons Presidential Run

The GOP clown car - or perhaps we should say bus - has one less occupant.  Rick Perry, who I have always seen as dangerous and delusional has called it quits.   Apparently, outside of Texas, few want was Perry was trying to sell and he has grasp that reality even if on almost every other issue he is out of touch with objective reality. Now we just need to dump the remaining clown car occupants.   Politico looks at Perry's demise.  Here are highlights:  

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Friday announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign, becoming the first Republican to drop out of the race and kicking off the winnowing stage of the crowded GOP contest.

"We have a tremendous field—the best in a generation—so I step aside knowing our party is in good hands," Perry said at a conservative conference in St. Louis.

The longest-serving governor in Texas history, Perry had never lost a race in his home state in his three-decades-long career, making his stumbles in the national spotlight this year, and during his ill-fated 2012 bid, all the more humbling. 

As a titan in the Texas political arena, Perry entered the 2012 GOP primary as the frontrunner, only to watch his campaign implode amid a series of high-profile missteps. In an attempt at political redemption, the former governor spent close to two years traveling and studying up on policy issues in the run-up to 2016, seeking to rehabilitate his tarnished image. But the spectacular nature of his 2012 collapse proved difficult to overcome and he struggled to remain relevant. Fundraising was a challenge, and he failed to gain traction in the polls despite spending significant time in the early states, especially Iowa, and despite the assistance of a well-funded super PAC.

Perry began alerting donors and supporters as early as Thursday that he was planning to drop out, said Doug Deason, son of Texas billionaire Darwin Deason, who gave $5 million to Perry's super PAC. The Deasons received a call from Perry on Thursday alerting them to his move, and they plan to watch the field play out further before committing.

By this week, he was down to one paid staffer in Iowa, one in South Carolina and none in New Hampshire. He was foundering in the polls after failing to qualify for the main stage debate in the first GOP primary contest and his weak polling support had once again relegated him to the second-tier debate next week.

My view?  Good riddance! I have long though Perry a dangerous buffoon.

Anti-Gay Texas Attorney General Faces Possible Felony Indictment

With Texas Republicans there seems to be a contest as to who can be the most anti-gay - - and the most corrupt.  Former Governor Rick Perry is already facing serious allegations and now Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who has encouraged rogue clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same couples is facing possible  felony charges for securities fraud.  Not surprisingly, Paxton is a darling of the lunatic Tea Party and Christofascists who hold sway in the Texas GOP.  The Raw Story looks at yet another possible corrupt Republican in Texas.  Here are highlights:

Special prosecutors will ask a Texas grand jury as early as this month to indict the state’s attorney general on first-degree felony charges for suspected securities laws violations, one of the prosecutors said on Thursday.

A spokesman for Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who came to office earlier this year with strong Tea Party support, was not immediately available for comment.

“There is evidence that needs to be presented to the grand jury about a couple of different violations. One of which that they will have to determine is if securities fraud was present,” said attorney Kent Schaffer, appointed to investigate the suspected violations.

Paxton drew national attention recently when he said county clerks in Texas who object to gay marriage on religious grounds can refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite last week’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring states to allow same-sex marriage.

When Paxton was in the legislature, he was hired to seek clients by an investment firm called Mowery Capital Management, which is facing allegations from the State Securities Board of defrauding investors.

The Texas State Securities Board in May 2014 found that Paxton was not properly registered as an investment advisor in his work with the firm. It reprimanded him and fined him $1,000.

The special prosecutors, appointed earlier this year, have been looking into possible criminal violations stemming from Paxton’s role with the firm and his failure to properly register as an advisor.

A first-degree felony conviction in Texas can result in 5 to 99 years in prison.

Rick Perry: Charleston Massacre An 'Accident' Due To Drugs, Manipulated By Obama To Ban Guns

The sickness of the far right continues to be demonstrated by the unbelievable thinks being said by Republicans and others to avoid admitting that the mass murders in Charleston were a racially motivated act of domestic terrorism.   It seems that any and every excuse is more acceptable than admitting reality - and the responsibility of the GOP's dog whistle racism and refusal to pass laws that would lessen the insane number of guns in the hands of those who do not need to have them.  As Barack Obama noted, no other advanced nation has the gun carnage that is the norm in America.  Exemplifying the right's batshitery, Rick Perry (there REALLY must be something in Texas' water) described the murders as an "accident" fueled by drugs that Barack Obama has manipulated.  True to form, Perry later claimed he had "misspoken."  Meanwhile, Charles Cotton, a longtime board member of the National Rifle Association, blamed the deaths on one of the victims for opposing concealed carry laws.  Right Wing Watch looks at Perry's lunatic comments:

In an interview today with Steve Malzberg of Newsmax, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry described the mass shooting at an African American church in Charleston earlier this week as an “accident” that was possibly caused by the over-prescription of medication.   A Perry campaign aide now says that the former governor misspoke in the interview when he used the word “accident.” 

Perry and Malzberg kicked off the discussion of the shooting by attacking President Obama for mentioning the failure to pass gun reform. Perry, a GOP presidential candidate, said that the president is trying to “take the guns out of the hands of everyone in this country.”

“This is the MO of this administration, any time there is an accident like this — the president is clear, he doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message,” Perry said.

Instead of talking about guns, Perry said, we should be talking about prescription drugs.  . . . He added that while the shooting was “a crime of hate,” he didn’t know if it should be called a terrorist attack.

As for Cotton's batshitery,  here are excerpts from Mother Jones:

Gun rights activists have been out in force since the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, once again blaming the slaughter on so-called gun-free zones, and claiming that an armed citizen could have otherwise stopped the attack. It's an argument that the gun lobby has used for many years, but on Thursday afternoon it was marked by a brazen new low with comments from Charles Cotton, a longtime board member of the National Rifle Association. Cotton wrote on a Texas gun-rights forum that slain pastor and South Carolina state Sen. Clementa Pinckney was responsible for the murders of his congregants because of his opposition to looser concealed-carry laws.

"Eight of his church members, who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church, are dead," Cotton said. "Innocent people died because of his political position on the issue."

No one who has watched the horror unfold in Charleston doubts that the killer's motivation was infused with racial hatred. And to suggest that gun restrictions were the root cause of the bloodbath isn't just callous—it's also plain wrong.

As Mother Jones has previously reported, there has never been any evidence that mass shooters picked their targets based on gun regulations; to the contrary, data from scores of cases shows perpetrators had other specific motivations for where they attacked, including racial hatred. The idea that armed citizens stop crimes in the United States has also been wildly exaggerated by the gun lobby, as a new study based on federal data reaffirms.

Cotton's comments have since been deleted from TexasCHLforum.com, where he is listed as a site administrator. He did not reply to a request for further comment. In a statement on Friday to Politico, the NRA distanced itself from Cotton's rhetoric, saying individual board members "do not have the authority to speak for the NRA."

Lone Star Stumble and GOP Voodoo Economics

With Rick Perry announcing that he is insanely joining the GOP presidential nomination contest, the GOP clown car has gained another occupant.  Perry's move makes it timely to look at what GOP voodoo economics have done to Texas and why it is an argument why Perry - actually, any Republican - should be elected to the White House.  It also focuses one on the hypocrisy of the GOP that claims to worship Christian values even as the poor and less fortunate are kicked to the gutter.  A column in the New York Times looks at the reality of what the GOP has wrought in Texas and how idiot white voters continue to be convinced to vote against their own interest by GOP appeals to racism and homophobia.  Here are excerpts:

Remember the Texas economic miracle? In 2012, it was one of the three main arguments from then-Gov. Rick Perry about why he should be president, along with his strong support from the religious right and something else I can’t remember (sorry, couldn’t help myself). More broadly, conservatives have long held Texas up as a supposed demonstration that low taxes on the rich and harsh treatment of the poor are the keys to prosperity.

So it’s interesting to note that Texas is looking a lot less miraculous lately than it used to. . . . . events in Texas and other states — notably Kansas and California — are providing yet another object demonstration that the tax-cut obsession that dominates the modern Republican Party is all wrong.

The facts: For many years, economic growth in Texas has consistently outpaced growth in the rest of America. But that long run ended in 2015 . . . .

In most states, this slowdown would be no big deal; occasional underperformance is just a fact of life. But everything is bigger in Texas, including inflated expectations, so the slowdown has come as something of a shock.Now, there’s no mystery about what is happening: It’s all about the hydrocarbons. . . . this extractive-sector windfall accounted for about a third of the difference between growth in Texas and growth in the rest of the country.

Now one of the three big drivers of Texas growth has gone into reverse, as low world oil prices are bringing the fracking boom to a screeching halt. Hey, things like that happen to every state now and then.

But Texas wasn’t supposed to be like other states. It was supposed to be the shining exemplar of the economic payoff to reverse Robin-Hood economics. So its recent disappointments hit the right-wing cause hard — especially coming on the heels of the Kansas debacle.

[M]eanwhile, there’s California, long mocked by the right as an economy doomed by its liberal politics. Not so much, it turns out: The budget is back in surplus in part because the emergence of a Democratic supermajority finally made it possible to enact tax increases, and the state is experiencing a solid recovery.

The states, Louis Brandeis famously declared, are the laboratories of democracy. In fact, Mr. Brownback himself described his plan as an “experiment” that would demonstrate the truth of his economic doctrine. What it actually did, however, was demonstrate the opposite. . . . 

Will anyone on the right take heed? Probably not. Unlike real experimenters, Mr. Brownback wasn’t willing to take no for an answer, whatever happened, and the same is true for just about everyone on his side of the political divide. Or to put it another way, belief that tax cuts are a universal elixir that cures all economic ills is the ultimate zombie idea . . .

Still, the spectacle of the Texas economy coming back to earth, and Kansas sliding over the edge should at the very least make right-wing bombast ring hollow, in the general election if not in the primary. And someday, maybe, even conservatives will once again become willing to look at the facts.

Hillary Slams Republicans on Voter Disenfranchisement

Here in Virginia like many states where the GOP largely controls the state legislature, the principal why in which the Virginia GOP has faced demographic change and a movement from rural to urban voters has been to seek to disenfranchise as many likely Democrat voters as possible rather face the reality that fewer and fewer voters want what the GOP is peddling.  The excuse, of course for ID requirements and other measures to disenfranchise voters is the canard of "voter fraud" even though there is no evidence whatsoever to back up GOP claims that it is a serious problem.  Easier I guess to hide behind the smoke screen of fighting voter fraud that admit that the GOP is increasing one large KKK gathering.  On her campaign swing through Texas, Hillary Clinton made a point of calling out the GOP and four would be GOP presidential nominees on their anti-democratic policies and, if truth be told, racism.  Here are highlights from Politico:

HOUSTON, TX — For the first time since hitting the campaign trail two months ago, Hillary Clinton took on her Republican rivals by name, calling out four presidential contenders as she spoke authoritatively about restoring voting rights and asked rhetorically, “What part of Democracy are they afraid of?”

Dressed in a red jacket on her first swing through the red state of Texas, Clinton called for a universal system that automatically registers voters when they turn 18, which would replace the current opt-in system.

The former secretary of state also called for a new national standard of at least 20 days of early in-person voting in every state, a move she argued would reduce long lines at the polls and expand participation.

“What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another,” Clinton said in a fiery 30-minute speech at Texas Southern University, a historically black college.

But it was the portion of her speech where she uncharacteristically went on a personal attack against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that was the apex of her speech. About two-thirds of the way into her remarks, she blasted the group for “fear-mongering” on a “phantom epidemic of election fraud.”

“Former Governor Rick Perry signed a law that a federal court said was actually written with the purpose of discriminating against minority voters,” she said. “He applauded when the Voting Rights Act was gutted.” She slammed Texas for having laws where student IDs are not accepted as valid identification at the polls but a concealed weapons permit is.

“In Wisconsin, Scott Walker cut back early voting and signed legislation that would make it harder for college students to vote,” she said, and called out Christie for vetoing legislation to extend early voting.

“In Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the 2000 presidential election,” she said. “Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.”

Clinton said the fight to protect voting rights was “for the student who has to wait hours for his or her right to vote, for the grandmother who’s turned away from the polls because her driver’s license expired, for the father whose done his time and paid his debt to society but still hasn’t gotten his rights back.”

Democrats, and particularly minority groups, are energized and angered by what they see as blatant Republican attempts to disenfranchise them. Obama has claimed that the very right to vote is threatened. Democrats have hit the issue hard, not only on the merits but also because it galvanizes the party’s base and helps raise money.

On the GOP side, leaders argue restrictive voting laws they support are necessary to maintain ballot box integrity. But many of those laws disproportionately impact minority communities.

Outside groups supporting Clinton see the overall contrast with the Republican party as a strong play for the former secretary of state.

“Nearly the entire Republican Party has worked to restrict voting, from Republicans like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio who supported limiting opportunities for early and weekend voting, to Rick Perry who signed legislation that disenfranchised up to 600,000.

Kudos to Hillary for calling these assholes out.

Republicans Cranking Up for 2016:Courting Charlatans and Cranks

One of my memories of growing up in a Republican family in upstate New York was seeing photos of my father in the newspaper with then Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller.  My dad was at the time involved in Republican politics and as I recall served on a local GOP committee.  Those days are long gone and my Republican parents and ancestors must be spinning in their graves over what the GOP has become.  As for those of us still living, almost without exception, we have fled the insane asylum that today's GOP has become.  Sane moderates who value knowledge and science are as few in today's GOP as living breathing dinosaurs.  In there place one finds white supremacists, religious fanatics, and those who still cling to supply side economics fueled by tax cuts.  The result is that anyone seeking the GOP presidential nomination must prostitute them self to racists and extremists and continue to pretend in Reagan economics despite decades of tangible proof that the economic model doesn't work.  A column in the New York Times looks at the never ending self-prostitution of GOP candidates.  Here are highlights:

Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is said to be a rising contender for the Republican presidential nomination. So, on Wednesday, he did what, these days, any ambitious Republican must, and pledged allegiance to charlatans and cranks.

For those unfamiliar with the phrase, “charlatans and cranks” is associated with N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor at Harvard who served for a time as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. In the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Mr. Mankiw used those words to ridicule “supply-siders” who promised that tax cuts would have such magic effects on the economy that deficits would go down, not up.

Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, attended a similar event last month. Clearly, to be a Republican contender you have to court the powerful charlatan caucus.

So a doctrine that even Republican economists consider dangerous nonsense has become party orthodoxy. And what makes this political triumph especially remarkable is that it comes just as the doctrine’s high priests have been setting new standards for utter, epic predictive failure.

[T]he people Mr. Walker was courting have spent years warning about the wrong things. “Get ready for inflation and higher interest rates” was the title of a June 2009 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal by Mr. Laffer; what followed were the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history. Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Moore both predicted 1970s-style stagflation.To be fair, Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Laffer eventually admitted that they had been wrong. Neither has, however, given any indication of reconsidering his views . . . 

So what does it say about the current state of the G.O.P. that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

The answer, I’d suggest, runs deeper than economic doctrine. Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there, even if it’s not what your prejudices say should be happening. What are you going to believe, right-wing doctrine or your own lying eyes? These days, the doctrine wins.

Look at another issue, health reform. Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, conservatives predicted disaster: health costs would soar, the deficit would explode, more people would lose insurance than gain it. They were wrong on all counts.

Along with this denial of reality comes an absence of personal accountability. If anything, alleged experts seem to get points by showing that they’re willing to keep saying the same things no matter how embarrassingly wrong they’ve been in the past.

But let’s go back to those economic charlatans and cranks: Clearly, failure has only made them stronger, and now they are political kingmakers. Be very, very afraid.

Texas: Hunkering Down for the Oil Bust

I left Houston and the oil industry just before the oil bust reached its lowest point in the 1980's.  The impact of the oil bust then was profound and wreaked havoc on employment and the housing market.  Now, Texas is facing a possible replay of those bad days given the plunge in oil and gas prices.  Locally, regular gas is below $2.00/gallon - something not seen in years.  And the glut of oil doesn't look to be ending any time soon given OPEC's apparent plan to make competing production uneconomical.  A piece at MSN News looks at the prospect faced by Texas which is ill equipped to face the crisis.  Here are article highlights:

MIDLAND, Tex. — With oil prices plummeting by more than 50 percent since June, the gleeful mood of recent years has turned glum here in West Texas as the frenzy of shale oil drilling has come to a screeching halt.

Every day, oil companies are decommissioning rigs and announcing layoffs. Small firms that lease equipment have fallen behind in their payments.

In response, businesses and workers are getting ready for the worst. A Mexican restaurant has started a Sunday brunch to expand its revenues beyond dinner. A Mercedes dealer, anticipating reduced demand, is prepared to emphasize repairs and sales of used cars. And people are cutting back at home, rethinking their vacation plans and cutting the hours of their housemaids and gardeners.

Dexter Allred, the general manager of a local oil field service company, began farming alfalfa hay on the side some years ago in the event that oil prices declined and work dried up. He was taking a cue from his grandfather, Homer Alf Swinson, an oil field mechanic, who opened a coin-operated carwash in 1968 — just in case.

It’s at times like these that Midland residents recall the wild swings of the 1980s, a decade that began with parties where people drank Dom Pérignon out of their cowboy boots. Rolls-Royce opened a dealership, and the local airport had trouble finding space to park all the private jets. By the end of the decade, the Rolls-Royce dealership was shut and replaced by a tortilla factory, and three banks had failed.

[S]ince the Permian Basin rig count peaked at around 570 last September, it has fallen to below 490 and local oil executives say the count will probably go down to as low as 300 by April unless prices rebound. The last time the rig count declined as rapidly was in late 2008 and early 2009, when the price of oil fell from over $140 to under $40 a barrel because of the financial crisis.

Unlike traditional oil wells, which cannot be turned on and off so easily, shale production can be cut back quickly, and so the field’s output should slow considerably by the end of the year.

The Dallas Federal Reserve recently estimated that the falling oil prices and other factors will reduce job growth in Texas overall from 3.6 percent in 2014 to as low as 2 percent this year, or a reduction of about 149,000 in jobs created.

Over a lavish buffet lunch recently at the Petroleum Club of Midland, the talk was woeful and full of conspiracy theories about how the Saudis were refusing to cut supplies to vanquish the surging American oil industry.

“At $45 a barrel, it shuts down nearly every project,” Steve J. McCoy, Latshaw Drilling’s director of business development, told Mr. Pruett and his guests. “The Saudis understand and they are killing us.”

Under Rick Perry and the Texas GOP's years of misrule low paying jobs were the main thing created.  As noted in posts before, Texas' far right agenda and anti-gay policies have worked to discouraged companies in less volatile industries to relocate to the state.   Now, many Texans may be about to pay the price for such misguided policies.

The GOP's Mug Shot Primary

When investigations of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell in "Giftgate" first began, the GOP pundits all claimed it was a partisan plot - some even in their delusions claimed that Obama was orchestrating the entire affair - but the multi-count conviction of Taliban Bob and his wife made it clear that there was fire where the GOP claimed there was smoke at most.  As the early phases of the 2016 jockeying begins among the would be GOP candidates, it is telling that so many of them are under criminal investigation at present.  Like McDonnell - and the Christofascists who make up so much of the hardcore GOP base - there seems to be a mindset that the rules apply to others.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the legal problems of some of the contenders.  Here are excerpts:

Why is the lineup of prospective GOP presidential candidates beginning to look like, well, a lineup?

Chris Christie went to campaign this week for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, putting the New Jersey governor in the company of a man who is in almost as much legal jeopardy as he is. Between them, the two would-be 2016 presidential nominees are the subjects of six investigations.

But Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another presidential aspirant, is far ahead of them in the mug-shot primary: He’s already under indictment on two felony counts related to abuse of power. And, speaking of felonies, former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, long considered presidential timber, was convicted on 11 corruption counts after his salacious trial this summer that disgraced him and his wife.

Democrats are trying to tie another prospective presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, to a Republican contributor who was convicted this summer of witness tampering in a campaign-finance case; the governor had been subpoenaed to appear in the case but was never called.

Beyond that, the Republican governors of Iowa, Kansas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maine, South Carolina and New Mexico all face varying degrees of legal liability on matters ranging from influence peddling to the firing of whistleblowers. Completing the GOP version of a most-wanted list: John Rowland, the former governor of Connecticut, who was found guilty last month of conspiracy charges in a campaign-finance case. It was the second time he had been convicted on criminal charges.

This doesn’t necessarily mean governors, or other politicians, are more corrupt than they used to be; there has always been some sense of entitlement among elected leaders, a belief that the usual rules don’t apply to them. Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, adds that “unfathomable amounts of money flowing through the system” have increased the opportunity for misconduct, while the proliferation of media and electronic paper trails makes it more likely to get caught.

[T]here’s some rough justice that Republicans, who popularized this criminalization of politics in the 1990s [against Bill Clinton], now find at least three of their top presidential prospects being hoist with the GOP’s own petard. New Jersey’s Christie, of course, has Bridgegate and related troubles. The campaign of Wisconsin’s Walker is being investigated over allegedly illegal campaign finance coordinated with various conservative groups; a federal appeals panel ruled last month that prosecutors could proceed with the long-stalled investigation. Then there’s Perry . . . a grand jury has indicted Perry on charges carrying up to 109 years in prison combined.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry Is Indicted for Abuse of Power

Even as the Bob and Maureen McDonnell corruption trial (some would describe it as a tawdry circus) grinds on yet another Republican governor has been indicted by a grand jury.  This time, it's Texas' Rick Perry - the first Texas governor in nearly 100 years to be indicted on criminal charges.  As I've asked before, why does it seem that the majority of such indictments involve Republicans, especially those espousing "family values" and "Christian principles"?  Is it a form of arrogance seen among Christofascists that makes these folks see themselves above the law?  The New York Times has details on Perry's indictment.  Here are excerpts:

A grand jury indicted Gov. Rick Perry on two felony counts on Friday, charging that he abused his power last year when he tried to pressure the district attorney here, a Democrat, to step down by threatening to cut off state financing to her office. 

The indictment left Mr. Perry, a Republican, the first Texas governor in nearly 100 years to face criminal charges and presented a major roadblock to his presidential ambitions at the very time that he had been showing signs of making a comeback. 

Grand jurors in Travis County charged Mr. Perry with abusing his official capacity and coercing a public servant, according to Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor assigned to the case.

The long-simmering case has centered on Mr. Perry’s veto power as governor. His critics asserted that he used that power as leverage to try to get an elected official — Rosemary Lehmberg, the district attorney in Travis County — to step down after her arrest on a drunken-driving charge last year. Ms. Lehmberg is Austin’s top prosecutor and oversees a powerful public corruption unit that investigates state, local and federal officials; its work led to the 2005 indictment of a former Republican congressman, Tom DeLay, on charges of violating campaign finance laws.

Mr. Perry’s detractors said that his moves crossed the line from hardball politics to criminal acts that violated state laws. His aides denied that he did anything wrong and said that he acted in accordance with the veto power granted to every governor under the Texas Constitution. Ms. Lehmberg did not resign and remains in office.

The criminal indictment of the state’s chief executive shocked the Texas political world. Mr. Perry will be arraigned at a later date at the county criminal courthouse a few blocks from the governor’s mansion. 

Mr. McCrum said it was a matter of procedure that anyone charged with a felony “will have to be booked in,” including the governor. Asked if Mr. Perry would have to have a mug shot taken and be fingerprinted, he added, “I imagine that’s included in that.”

The charge of abuse of official capacity carries a prison sentence of five to 99 years, and the charge of coercion of a public servant a two- to 10-year prison sentence.

The indictment could mar the legacy of Mr. Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, as his tenure nears an end.

According to the state comptroller’s website, the governor’s office has paid his lawyer, Mr. Botsford, nearly $80,000 since June. Legal experts said that other state officials who have been accused of crimes relating to their duties have had to pay for their own defense, and this was one of the first times Texas taxpayers were paying the bill.

The last Texas governor to face criminal charges was James E. “Pa” Ferguson, who was indicted in 1917 by a Travis County grand jury on embezzlement and eight other charges. His case also involved a veto that stirred anger: Mr. Ferguson vetoed the entire appropriation to the University of Texas because it had refused to fire certain faculty members. The state Senate voted to impeach him, but he resigned first. 

 Personally, I hope Perry is convicted - along with Bob and Maureen McDonnell.  In both cases, it would be a strike against the GOP's sick version of "family values."

Why the Border Crisis Is a Myth

Anti-immigrant Tea Party fanatics have been protesting along the U.S. - Mexico border outraged, I mean outraged, that non-whites are attempting to cross into the United States to escape violence and hardship in their Central American countries.  The hypocrisy of these "real Americans" is three fold: (i) they are descendants of immigrants themselves, (ii) while they are attacking Barack Obama, the law at the center of the debate was passed on George W. Bush's watch in 2008, and (iii) they falsely claim to be godly Christians even though the reject they Gospel message and seemingly learned nothing from the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Now, an El Paso, Texas judge suggests that the "border crisis" is in some ways a myth.  Here are excerpts from her op-ed in the New York Times:

TO hear the national news media tell the story, you would think my city, El Paso, and others along the Texas-Mexico border were being overrun by children — tens of thousands of them, some with their mothers, arriving from Central America in recent months, exploiting an immigration loophole to avoid deportation and putting a fatal strain on border state resources.

There’s no denying the impact of this latest immigration wave or the need for more resources. But there’s no crisis. Local communities like mine have done an amazing job of assisting these migrants. 

Rather, the myth of a “crisis” is being used by politicians to justify ever-tighter restrictions on immigration, play to anti-immigrant voters in the fall elections and ignore the reasons so many children are coming here in the first place.

Contrary to the heated pronouncements, this is nothing we haven’t seen before. Groups of refugees arrive by plane and are processed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When they are released, Annunciation House takes them to a shelter where they get a shower, a place to sleep, meals and even health care — all provided by volunteers and private donations. 

The families of the refugees also help, often paying for travel costs and taking them into their homes. The refugees then move on, to Florida, Georgia, New York or elsewhere. 

While the numbers of refugees arriving in El Paso are a fraction of the number arriving in McAllen, in southern Texas, the chain of events is generally the same. Like El Paso, South Texas is not the permanent destination for these refugees. And the response from McAllen’s citizens has been generous, too. 

The same can’t be said of our politicians. What we are hearing from Austin and Washington is an almost Pavlovian response to immigration concerns. My governor, Rick Perry, a Republican, announced this week that he was sending 1,000 National Guard soldiers, at a cost of $12 million a month, to bolster the border.

In Texas, state legislators and the Department of Public Safety are planning to spend an additional $30 million over six months to create a “surge” of state law enforcement resources, an expenditure that some in our state’s Capitol would like to see made permanent. 

The costs are significant. Every day we detain an undocumented child immigrant, it costs Immigration and Customs Enforcement — i.e., the taxpayer — $259 per person, significantly more than we spend to educate a child in a middle-class school district.

The irony is that this cash-intensive strategy comes from leaders who consistently underfund health care, transportation and education. And they ignore the crucial fact that children crossing our borders aren’t trying to sneak around law enforcement: They are running to law enforcement.

This effort to take away rights that were granted when there was significantly less anti-immigrant fervor isn’t just shortsighted and expensive, it’s un-American. We can debate the wisdom of providing greater protection to Central American children than to Mexican children, but there can be no doubt that giving safe haven to a child facing violence in a country that cannot protect its most vulnerable citizens is what a civilized country, with the resources we possess, should do.