Tag Archives: Rick Perry

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FEMA shifts gears on West relief

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, once the bogeyman in Texas, has changed its mind and will expedite federal aid to help West, Texas rebuild after the devastating fertilizer plant explosion this past fall.

It interests me that Gov. Rick Perry, who tore FEMA a new one when it first denied the federal disaster declaration, hasnā€™t yet actually thanked the feds publicly for it.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/02/us/texas-fema-plant-blast/index.html

Perry instead praised the state effort in appealing that decision, as reported by CNN. I get that the governor is proud of the stateā€™s effort to persuade the feds to change their mind. It is to the stateā€™s credit that it was able to move the federal bureaucracy.

How much harm would it do, though, for the Republican governor to say a good word about the Democratic administration that enabled FEMA to do the right thing?

I guess it would do a lot of harm, given that Perry well could be positioning himself for another run at the presidency. He canā€™t look too, um, friendly toward those dreaded Democrats.

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Perry in deep hole for 2016

Rick Perry needs to get his act together in a big hurry if he’s entertaining the idea of running for president once more in 2016.

The Republican Texas governor is lagging far behind former first lady/Sen./Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a possible matchup for the next presidential election.

Hillary Clinton trounces Rick Perry in presidential match-up; Perry, Ted Cruz lag behind in GOP primary

Clinton trounces Perry by significant double-digit margins, according to a McClatchy-Marist poll. The closest Republicans are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who trail Clinton by 6 and 8 points, respectively, in the poll.

Perry’s poll standing? He falls 16 points behind Clinton.

I am well aware that this is early in the cycle for the next presidential campaign. Clinton hasn’t even declared her intentions, although the smart money says she’s going to run once she catches her breath from all the globetrotting she did as secretary of state. HRC set some kind of travel record for number of countries visited and miles flown during her four years as the nation’s top diplomat.

Were she to run, my hunch is that she’ll be virtually unstoppable. That is the calculation anyone who challenges her will have to make — especially if they cannot improve on double-digit polling deficits.

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Quit loading up session agenda

Gov. Rick Perry has done the expected thing and called a third special session of the Texas Legislature.

Lawmakers cannot seem to find a solution to funding the state’s crumbling road-bridge-and-highway infrastructure, so the governor kept them in session until they get the job done.

But wait. A conservative Republican lawmaker, state Sen. Brian Birdwell of Granbury, wants the Legislature to approve legislation to allow people to carry concealed handguns on college campuses.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/07/birdwell-asks-perry-to-add-campus-carry-to-session/

This is another case of ideologues clogging up the legislative agenda with non-essential items. They fulfill some ideological need, but in the real world of real Texans, items such as this should fall far down on the pecking order of necessary legislation.

The infrastructure package got stalled in the first two special sessions. In the first one, everything came to a halt as the Legislature argued over whether to ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. In the second session, the Republicans who run both legislative chambers couldn’t come up with a funding formula to pay for road, bridge and highway improvements. So here we are, back for a third time with Perry putting just the highway funding item on the agenda.

That should be enough to occupy our citizen-lawmakers’ time, yes? Apparently not, according to Birdwell, who wants to swallow up more time arguing the merits of concealed handgun carry at, say, West Texas A&M University and Amarillo College.

The men and women who serve in the Legislature are part-timers. They need to get back to their day jobs. I fear a fourth special session if they don’t take care of our highways.

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Let’s debate, GOP contenders

Tom Pauken is pushing Greg Abbott hard for a debate — or a series of debates — leading up to next spring’s Texas Republican gubernatorial primary.

Abbott ought to take up the challenge.

http://blog.chron.com/texaspolitics/2013/07/pauken-presses-for-debate-with-abbott/

The Texas attorney general has been deemed the prohibitive favorite to win the GOP nomination next spring and with that, the election in the fall against whomever the Democratic Party nominates.

Pauken, a Dallas lawyer and the former chairman of the state Republican Party, is having none of it.

He calls Abbott the “$25 million man,” alluding to the massive war chest the AG has accumulated. Pauken said he believes Abbott thinks of himself as having some kind of “divine right of succession” to the governorship being vacated at the end of next year by Rick Perry.

Actually, Pauken is right to press for debates. I like the idea of two serious candidates for governor arguing in public over policy differences. They can be entertaining to be sure. More than that, they can be educational and informative.

Some critics lampooned the 2012 GOP presidential primary for having too many debates. I wasn’t among them. My only concern about that series of joint appearances became the carnival atmosphere that accompanied so many of them. The candidates would prance out onto debate stages to roaring crowds, waving atĀ audience membersĀ like game-show contestants. It detracted from the serious nature of what was at stake.

Abbott and Pauken seem like studious men to me. They both know the issues. They both have positions — I reckon — on all of them.

So let’s hear them articulate their view of where Texas ought to go in the post-Rick Perry era.

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