Governor Goodhair Is In!

I lifted this from the current Sacramento Bee:

Editor's note: Texas Gov. Rick Perry is expected to announce today that he's running for the Republican presidential nomination. In anticipation, we offer excerpts of columns from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram by the late, great Molly Ivins. Born in Monterey, Ivins covered the Statehouse in Texas for decades and spread her barbs widely. One frequent target was Perry, whom she called "The Coiffure" and "Gov. Goodhair."

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/08/13/3834794/molly-cant-say-that-about-rick.html#ixzz1Uwf6QNhn


Oct. 12, 2006

I sacrificed an hour Friday evening to watch the Texas gubernatorial debate on your behalf, since I knew none of you would do it. … The Coiffure was in his usual form. As one opponent after another attacked his record, Gov. Rick Perry stood there proudly behind that rabid following he has so richly earned – hey, a whole 35 percent of Texans want him re-elected – and simply disagreed. The Coiffure seemed to consider blanket denials a fully sufficient and adequate response.

Jan. 12, 2006

The governor of Texas is despicable. Of all the crass pandering, of all the gross political kowtowing to ignorance, we haven't seen anything this rank from Gov. Goodhair since … gee, last fall.

Then he was trying to draw attention away from his spectacular failure on public schools by convincing Texans that gay marriage was a horrible threat to us all. Now he's trying to disguise the fact that the schools are in free-fall by proposing that we teach creationism in biology classes.

The funding of the whole school system is so unfair that it has been declared unconstitutional by the Texas Supreme Court. All last year, Rick Perry haplessly called special session after special session, trying to fix the problem, and couldn't get anywhere – not an iota, not a scintilla, of leadership.

Instead of facing the grave crisis that might yet result in the schools' being closed, Perry has blithely gone off on creationism – teach the little perishers the Earth is 6,000 or so years old, that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs, and who cares if the school building is falling apart?

Jan. 11, 2004

I have failed to give sufficient recognition to our only governor, Rick "Goodhair" Perry, who is adding to the old je ne sais quoi in truly impressive quantities.

Goodhair gave such an amazing performance at his end-of-the-year news conference that I was forced to call a perfectly reliable reporter for the Dallas Morning News and ask if it was a joke. …

The guv remains convinced that his greatest accomplishment was not raising taxes, even though fees, tuition, fines and everything else that the Leg could find to jack up without calling it a tax was jacked sky-high. …

You may think the guv's had a rough year – three special sessions on top of the regular session just to pass that misbegotten redistricting bill, not counting the two bolts by Democrats and such minor unpleasantness as having to hack $10 billion out of the state budget.

For some, the budget-cutting, aimed mostly at services for desperately needy people, was a painful and even tragic exercise. Especially knocking 250,000 poor children off health insurance.

Fortunately, Gov. Goodhair has a firm grasp on priorities, and when asked his biggest disappointment of the year, he replied: "Aggie football."

Jan. 16, 2003

Gov. Goodhair Perry has already earned himself a new nickname after a stunning interview with the Austin American-Statesman in which he noted that Texas has two very serious problems that he, Rick the Reluctant, plans to do exactly nothing about.

"Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday that Texas is burdened by an outdated, out-of-whack tax system and a public education finance system that has to go," reported the paper. "But the state's top elected leader also said Texans shouldn't expect the upcoming legislature to do anything about either. Perry said tackling the dense issues is too much to ask of new leaders." That's leadership!

June 24, 2001

First, we Texans would like to salute the only governor we've got, Rick "Goodhair" Perry, the Ken Doll, for vetoing the bill to outlaw executing the mentally retarded.

We are Texas Proud.

Such a brilliant decision – not only is Texas now globally recognized for barbaric cruelty, but a strong majority of Texans themselves (73 percent) would prefer not to off the retarded.

Gov. Goodhair's decision – in the face of popular opinion, the Supreme Court and George W. Bush's recent conversion on this subject – is a testament to his strength of character.

Or something.

His Perryness announced, anent the veto, that Texas does not execute the retarded. I beg your pardon, Governor. Johnny Paul Penry, now on Death Row for a heart-breaking murder and the subject of two Supreme Court decisions, has an IQ between 51 and 60, believes in Santa Claus and likes coloring books.

And that's not counting the other six we know about for sure since 1990.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/08/13/3834794/molly-cant-say-that-about-rick.html#ixzz1UwW5X62y

I lifted this from The Daily Beast, story by Michael Tomasky:

Rick Perry: Red-State Warrior
Rick Perry and Barack Obama disagree about policy. But as Michael Tomasky argues, a race between them would end up as the biggest battle yet in the culture war.

So in comes Rick Perry. He will surely be an instant co-frontrunner along with Mitt Romney. In fact I would argue, and will one paragraph down, that he’s basically the instant frontrunner. So for the sake of argument, let’s go ahead and think about a Perry-Obama race. Such a race would be about, yes, the economy first and foremost, and deficits and health care and all the rest. But an Obama-Perry race would be something else, too: a war between the two Americas, each side represented by its respective cultural standard-bearer, each side’s foot soldiers absolutely smoldering with contempt for everything the other guy stands for and indeed the way he looks. We’ve never quite had that before, not in this way, so it’s worth thinking about.

First, I think Perry becomes the frontrunner, even ahead of Mitt Romney, for three main reasons. No. 1, he fires up large chunks of the base in a way Romney does not. Romney has “default candidate” written all over him, but evangelicals and other hard-shell conservatives are never going to love a Massachusetts Mormon. They’ll love Perry. No. 2, Perry can quickly become the “establishment” candidate because the establishment of today’s GOP is not based on Wall Street or the heartland but in Texas—Karl Rove, the oilmen, the various billionaires who prime those GOP pumps. No. 3 is speculation rather than fact, but I believe Perry will demonstrate pretty quickly that he’s a better campaigner than Romney. It won’t be hard.

It will take some time, probably, for the polls to reflect all this, but they will. Republicans don’t want a posh, well-spoken Yankee who works at a place with a name like Bain Capital. In their deepest souls, they want a Texas governor. They want a shit-kicker. And here, we circle back to culture.

When my friends and I looked at George W. Bush in 1999, we shuddered like people who’d turned a street corner and stumbled across a dog’s corpse. We knew and had contempt for his beliefs, but it had nothing to do with them, really. It was just the way he presented himself. That puffed-out chest. That self-satisfied smirk. All that Jesus talk—even in the event that it was sincere, which we never quite bought, it was to a liberal deeply inappropriate to haul it into the public square like that. He represented Southern country clubs and Dodge Durangos and Browning bolt-actions and homes with no books in them (putting Laura to the side, since she wasn’t the candidate). He was the kind of man who, if I ran into him at a hospitality tent at a tailgate party, I’d make an effort to avoid. Liberals just couldn’t stand the sight of the guy. And that was before he ruined the country.

Britannia Rules the (Air) Waves

Pip! Pip! Long live Kate and Willie! God save the King and Queen to be! Fish and chips, anyone? Hope all you toffs are happy. (Don't think about the tornado victims.) Does the rain fall on the just and the unjust? I wonder.

Wednesday Night Live, from Cairo

As I write I am watching NBC Foreign Correspondent Richard Engle -- who obviously is exhausted and who I am nominating for a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, if he hasn't already won one, as Richard describes the revolution that is occurring in the capital of Egypt right now. Remember that Egypt is the "cradle of civilization."

It appears that the forces protesting an oppressive government are winning. I hope so. The pro-democracy forces have repelled the goon squads of Muhbarik -- hired muscle -- for a day. It is five in the morning and gunfire, to intimidate, is occurring. Some of it has hit people. It is tense and scary.

I pray for the pro-democracy protesters. They will be the new government of Egypt. I pray they will construct a just and truly democratic government.