Rick Perry

(U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of East Texas accused U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder during testimony of casting “aspersions on my asparagus.” That helps President Obama, says Geoff Rips, but given all the problems the nation and Texas face, this is a sideshow we could do without.)

Molly Ivins used to say Texas was a laboratory for bad government. And she was writing about the good old days when Shrub was a tiny privileged sapling. But Karl Rove swung the door wide on that laboratory, and the demons he’s loosed upon the world cannot be called back.

Look at this mean-spirited Texas lineup. Ty Cobb couldn’t make this hateful team. There’s the governor recruiting gun companies from California to relocate to our trigger-happy shores. While some states pass new gun control laws, the Texas Legislature considers 12 pro-gun bills, including one letting college students carry on campus. Under these rules, the police at Virginia Tech couldn’t apprehend the killer until he shot somebody.  

But Rick Perry’s being overshadowed by the next guy up—the junior senator from Canada, Ted Cruz. Joe McCarthy in cowboy boots wearing a red-baiting sneer, governing by innuendo, cynicism oozing from every pore. A champion of the P.T. Barnum school of political practice. In his oratory, the Seven Deadly Sins become the Seven Virtues: Greed becomes Courage; Wrath becomes Justice.

And let’s not forget the power of Stupidity. Lately even Cruz is ceding important media acreage to the Congressman from Texas’ First Congressional District, Louie Gohmert. Here’s the man who during a Congressional hearing this week accused Attorney General Eric Holder of casting “aspersions on my asparagus.”

The Gohmert litany is pretty well known by now. He told us that Muslim terrorists are sending pregnant women to the U.S. to give birth to “terror babies” in order to destroy our country in future years. He said gun control leads to bestiality. He nominated Newt Gingrich to be House Speaker 13 years after Gingrich left Congress. When Sen. John McCain took issue with Gohmert’s declaration that the Muslim Brotherhood was trying to infiltrate the highest levels of government, he called McCain “Numbnuts.” And he was the only vote in Congress to keep the word “lunatic” in federal law dealing with mental illness, prompting “takes one to know one” comments from his colleagues.

Clearly he’s an embarrassment to those with any brains left in Texas, including some in the GOP, and many of his Congressional colleagues. But he’s adored by the Texas Tea Party. And his sideshow is probably welcomed into the big tent by the Obama administration. How better to make the government confiscation of AP phone records appear to be a trivial matter than to have Louie Gohmert denounce it in front of news cameras in the same way he alerted the press to “terror babies?” He becomes the Administration’s useful fool. But he’s also a useful distraction for those benefiting from increasing income inequality.

Now for those readers fortunate enough to not be held hostage by the current politics in our benighted state, you must wonder how Texas is able to produce these hate-mongers and launch them into the wider political universe. Does Louie Gohmert get elected and re-elected by a Congressional district that never learned to turn on a light switch? Well, he does represent deep East Texas, home to murderous 1950s Night Riders and to chicken plants that depend on undocumented workers while supporting harsh immigration laws so they can turn their workers over to ICE when they ask for fair pay.

But this is also the bedrock of what was once Texas populism. The first district was represented for 47 years (until 1976) by the distinguished progressive Congressman Wright Patman, a New Deal Democrat who railed against the power of banks. Progressive Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough and former House Speaker Sam Rayburn, also a New Deal backer and longest serving Speaker in U.S. history, came from the same East Texas woods.

The populist political momentum nurtured in the New Deal and supported by an electorate who believed in government has been replaced by a politics run by oil and finance industries. That’s who populates Gohmert’s contributor list while the average household income in his district is less than $50,000.

It is the growing class divide experienced across this nation, but in extremis. Racism, including fear of the growing Hispanic plurality, the absence of regulation of major industries—oil, finance, you name it—has created a race to institutionalize privilege in Texas before it’s too late.

At this point, the race isn’t even close.

So we have Gohmert, Cruz and Perry with no one reining them in. The Koch brothers, the finance industry, the fracking oil industry, and the NRA are feeding the frenzy and helping finance their appearance on the larger stage. As former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower has said, “If ignorance is bliss, these people must be ecstatic.”

And they are.

We have some kind of dogged faith in this country that Texas and this nation will come to their senses. Bloviated politicians will meet their Edward R. Murrows. The growing Hispanic majority will overwhelm the power of money in Texas. The Tea Party will be thrown overboard. The welfare of the poor and the struggling middle class will become the primary goal of public policy and budgetary action. Global warming will be reversed. Institutionalized greed will be undone.

But we’re getting the bread and circuses that Roman poet Juvenal decried during the decline of the Roman republic. Only we’re not even getting the bread. With the rapid redistribution of wealth and power to the upper echelons, there is no guarantee that the clowns will pile back into the clown car and drive away.

Geoff Rips, a former editor of the Texas Observer, is a Special Correspondent for The Washington Spectator.

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(Texas Gov. Rick Perry went to Illinois to entice businesses to move to Texas.)

As he proved in the 2012 Presidential debates, Rick Perry has a hard time following a thought to its logical conclusion. He could remember the first two federal departments he wanted to kill but not the third. He can warn his “fellow Texans” about the fiscal and moral damage that would be caused by the federal intrusion of increased Medicaid funding but ignore the $100 billion in federal funding over a decade that Texas might lose as a consequence. His two-day junket this week to Chicago to lure corporate headquarters away from the Land of Lincoln is long on promises but short on the consequences of past corporate enticements.

With the backing of Texas taxpayer money, conveniently supplied by the Texas Legislature, Rick Perry is hollerin’ Sooey Pig to the Hog Butcher of the World in order to see which little piggies come running. He was, after all, yell leader for the Texas Aggies when in college—that’s a male cheerleader to you, proving his college education did prepare him for his current role. An ad in Crain’s Chicago Business, headlined, “Get Out While There’s Still Time,” contained an open letter from Perry, which read, “If you’re a business owner in Illinois, I want to express my admiration for your ability to survive in an environment that…is designed for failure.”

What’s he got in his bag of tricks? The promise of low taxes for corporations, no state taxes on personal income, subsidies for large corporate relocations—even if it brings in oversized competition for home-grown industries—and little or no regulation. Why, you can locate a fertilizer mixer in the middle of town, and no one will make you do much more than self-report every now and then.

The promises may be music to certain corporate chieftains looking for a quick fix for the next five or 10 years, hoping to duck an explosive state pension system and high personal income taxes. In These Times predicted that Perry (and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin before him) wouldn’t lure anyone to pull up stakes but would enable local industries to squeeze a few more tax breaks out of state and local governments in Illinois.

The consequences of throwing around these shiny bangles are like the morning after you find yourself dressed only in beads after losing your shirt at Mardi Gras. As Good Jobs First, a national information source on government and corporate accountability, points out in its “Primer” for journalists covering Perry’s trip to Illinois, taxpayer money spent by Perry in the first seven years of the Texas Enterprise Fund produced a tiny 0.03 percent increase in jobs from corporate migrations. Most of the Texas job growth has been in lower-wage sectors, mostly in the service economy to serve the surging population growth coming both from a relatively high birth rate and immigration from other countries, predominantly Mexico. Many more people migrated to Texas following high-wage job promises than the number of high-wage jobs produced. Local job seekers found themselves facing sudden stiff competition from across the nation. Those waiters in hip new Austin eateries included PhDs from California and Kansas, as well as those that were home-grown.

Many of the high tech firms locating in and around Austin may appreciate the incentives but most cite the synergy of co-location with other such enterprises, the level of education of the potential employee base, the large local markets, and the research capacity of the faculty and students of the University of Texas. Here again, Perry disregards the end-game. Those very low taxes he touts are also sucking dry the University of Texas and other public colleges and universities that helped generate the tech boom in the first place.

There are other factors problematic about these swashbuckling campaigns. Good Jobs First points out that a large number of these corporations also provided sizable campaign contributions for Perry’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. It must have been understood as a show of gratitude or part of the price of admission—crony capitalism at work.

Perry can’t even get cancer research right. He runs a fund set up for that purpose by the legislature, which has become a trough at which friends, supporters and pseudo-researchers have dined; it’s being investigated.

So let’s say he draws a few corporations to Texas. The boards of those corporations fly in for board meetings, eat some barbecue and enchiladas and fly away. They probably like the fact that they’ve moved from the state with the fourth-highest hourly minimum wage to a state tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers earning the absolute minimum rate.

The top executives move into gated communities, attend fundraisers with former football stars and Matthew McConaughy, send their kids to private schools, and oppose increases in property taxes for public schools. Maybe they don’t care about how their employees live or their employees’ employees.

Texas’ impressive rankings among states do not stop with the amount it spends on business tax incentives. Texas is also first in executions, first in the percentage of the people lacking health insurance, and first in five major categories of air pollution.

Unlike the cherished UT Longhorns, who have fallen to the middle of the football pack, Texas holds onto its top ranking for the percentage of people 25 and older who do not have a high school diploma, for the number of non-elderly women not covered by health insurance, for the percentage of women not receiving prenatal care. Texas also boasts the lowest spending per capita on mental health.

These, too, are part of Perry’s Texas Miracle.

Just as Rick Perry’s once proud mane is growing thin, so are his arguments for Texas prosperity. Even some of his old Republican colleagues are having a hard time getting in line to lose $100 billion in Medicaid funding just so Perry can embellish his apparently undying Tea Party-inspired presidential aspirations.

As he asks the immortal question, “Will it play in Peoria?” his act is having a more difficult time entertaining even the Lone Star State.

Geoff Rips, a former editor of the Texas Observer, is a Special Correspondent for The Washington Spectator.

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1970 Poses as a volunteer for a Democratic Senate candidate in Illinois and circulates a letter to homeless people, advertising “free food, beer, girls and a good time for all” at the candidate’s campaign event.

The biggest loser in the 2012 elections, perhaps a bigger loser than Mitt Romney, who does not have a future in politics, was former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, who remarkably still does.

When American politics was engulfed by a furious debate over contraception earlier this year, many onlookers were puzzled. The 2010 election, which saw sweeping conservative victories at both the state and national level, was fought over economic, not social issues. How did the Tea Party’s triumph turn into a war on women?

The national campaign to restrict women’s reproductive rights is being waged on many fronts, but Texas, as always, is the nation’s proving ground for bad public policy.

The same transvaginal-ultrasound bill that an outraged public in Virginia forced Governor Bob McDonnell to veto in February of this year was designated a legislative emergency by Texas Governor Rick Perry in January 2011 and was signed into law within four months.

The Republican primary process has served the purpose of winnowing out the Republican party's sideshow candidates. But not before they succeeded in inflicting real harm on the country — in small ways and in much larger ones, such as convincing a segment of the public that the scientific research on which the future of the planet depends is not valid.

The Republican presidential candidates are laying out their foreign policy positions at a November 15 debate sponsored by CNN, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. (The Manhattan Institute is preoccupied up with a conference on the legacy of Friedrich Hayek.) While foreign-policy positions don't win or lose elections, George W. Bush's two terms are a reminder of how critically important foreign policy is.

Republicans v. Planned Parenthood— House Republicans have twice failed to defund Planned Parenthood this year, but Cliff Stearns won't quit. The Florida Republican, who chairs the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, has ordered all 83 Planned Parenthood state affiliates to deliver internal audit reports covering a 12-year period, state audits covering a 20-year period, and detailed information regarding billing and referral practices. In a letter that might have been ghost-written by right-wing guerrilla "journalist" Andrew Breitbart, Stearns also demands documentation regarding criminal conduct, sexual abuse, and sex-trafficking policies at Planned Parenthood.

Jesus Won't Be Running "Conservatives, religious people, small government people, we are not going to have purity. We are not going to have a perfect candidate. There's been only one perfect person that has ever walked on this earth. And there ain't gonna be another one in this election." —Haley Barbour, June 4, 2011

Where is the Republican presidential race headed, now that Texas Governor Rick Perry has rendered Michele Bachmann inconsequential and Mitt Romney is scrambling to remain competitive with Perry?