From here on out, the Republican primary is a contest between insurgent, extremist Tea Party/Evangelicals and what remains of the party’s pragmatic corporatists. This division was evident in June, when Ralph Reed invited Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to Washington to speak to the Faith & Freedom Coalition convention. In fact, the only “news” to report […]

Read more

Bob Perry, as we and other news outlets reported, had contributed $11.5 million to the RGA, much of which was earmarked to be passed through to Rick Perry. After we went to press with our previous issue, a Bob Perry spokesperson told the Houston Chronicle that Bob Perry had been contributing to the RGA long […]

Read more

Yet it is Perry’s June 17, 2001, record that seems more remarkable. In an assault on the Legislature in which he had served for five years, Perry vetoed 79 bills on the last day he could do so after the session adjourned, ensuring that no veto could be overridden. Perry’s total veto count for the […]

Read more

The $27 billion equaled 15 percent of the $182 billion biennial budget the Legislature had passed two years earlier. If not Armageddon, an apocalyptic loss of revenue in a low-tax state that provides bare-bones public services. Perry’s statement was even more remarkable because most of the budget shortfall was a consequence of a business-tax bill […]

Read more

The landscape that Basic Rights Oregon has set out to change was redefined in 2004, when Republicans and evangelical Christians forced initiatives prohibiting same-sex marriage onto ballots in 11 states. Ohio’s ballot initiative got most of the media coverage, because it was a state that George W. Bush had to win in order to be […]

Read more