I am glad to see that Governor Rick Perry pretty much has said that the gay marriage issue in New York is New York’ s problem and not his. In this he is affirming the 10th amendment (what the 10th Amendment means is that powers not temporarily granted to the federal government by the Constitution and/or the Bill of Rights, are still the property of individual States within the union, or, in the case of those powers that were prohibited by the Constitution to the States, those powers were still the property of the people at large.). To me this shows that while he is a conservative, he has an appeal to Independents and Suburbanites (the very people that Bush father and son turned off) and is not going to emulate the Bush strategy of throwing meaningless red meat rhetoric. “Vote with your feet” is his motto – if you are not happy with liberal policies move to Texas, and people and companies are doing so in droves. I like the combination of conservatism mixed with libertarianism that he is espousing. This election should be won on jobs, debt and ObamaCare as that is what makes Obama vulnerable.
by Doyle McManus
For a man who hasn’t formally decided whether to run for president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry sure sounds a lot like a candidate.
“I’m not ready to tell you that I’m ready to announce that I’m in,” Perry told the Des Moines Register, the biggest newspaper in Iowa, where the first big test in the Republican nomination race is held. “But I’m getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do. This is what America needs.”
And Perry isn’t just being called; he says he’s being actively pushed to run by his wife, Anita, a former nurse.
“Get out of your comfort zone!” he says his wife told him. “Yeah, being governor of Texas is a great job, but sometimes you’re called to step into the fray.”
[…]
And that’s been enough to touch off a boomlet of Perrymania, at least in some parts of the Republican Party. Perry says he may not decide whether to run until Labor Day, but the mere possibility was enough to vault him into second place in two polls released last week, close behind the dogged but unloved frontrunner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. (Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who unlike Perry is actually running, came in third.)
[…]
The point is that most Republican voters haven’t found their dream candidate yet. There’s a big hole in the Republican field, and it’s made to order for a Southern governor who’s conservative on social issues but not censorious, and who’d rather talk about cutting government spending and holding down taxes.
Perry’s favorite claim is that in recent years Texas has created almost as many jobs as the other 49 states combined, and that his low-tax, low-regulation policies are the reason. Economists debate how much credit Perry deserves; the fact that Texas produces oil and we’re in an oil boom helped too. But Texas has done better at job creation than most states, and it’s hard to think of a more potent talking point in a campaign that will be fought largely over economic issues.
Perry’s conservatism goes beyond low taxes, though.
His pre-campaign book, “Fed Up,” is mostly an essay about the evils of federal power and an appeal to move decision-making back to the states as laboratories of democracy.
“We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own [and] what kind of prayers we are allowed to say,” he writes in his list of complaints against the federal government (which doesn’t actually tell people any of those things, unless you count Agriculture Department brochures about salt).
Last month, he sponsored a bill in the Texas Legislature that would have made it a criminal offense for a federal airport security screener to perform an “intrusive” pat-down on a passenger in Texas. (The bill failed.)
And he proclaims himself a good notch more conservative than his predecessor, George W. Bush, whom he blames for launching a “big-government binge” by expanding federal programs in education and healthcare.
But in the spirit of states’ rights, Perry is cheerfully tolerant of diversity in social policy. He’s a vigorous opponent of gay marriage, but if the voters of other states want it, he seems to think that’s their problem. “Vote with your feet,” he advises. “If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas. If you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.”
[…]
Shawn Steel, former chairman of the California Republican Party — who met with Perry in Newport Beach last month — isn’t sure that Perry can pull off a Reagan-style victory. The former California governor, he noted, could “take controversial positions and make them sound like ice cream. Can Perry do that?”
Right now, Perry’s rawboned conservatism doesn’t sound much like ice cream. It’s more like strong tea, with no sweetener. But even his toughest critics in Texas say he’s a formidable campaigner, so if he runs, we’ll see an epic battle for the heart of the Republican Party.
Read the rest: A boomlet of Perrymania
Barack Obama – knowing how successful Texas has been despite his loathsome economic record, is doing all he can to bring Texas done to the level of the rest of the nation. In this he will (try at least) to knock some of the sails out of the candidate that he is most afraid of the Texas governor. As the photo says “President Obama seems determined to use suffocating bureaucracy to bring Texas down with the rest of the country.”
Editorial
New unemployment claims rose this past week and total unemployment across the nation edged upward to 9.2 percent. The national economy simply isn’t growing anywhere near as fast as President Obama claimed it would when he and the Democratic 110th Congress pumped $859 billion worth of stimulus into it. Job creation has all but ground to a halt in recent months. If the country is not at the precipice of the second dip in a double-dip recession, it clearly is in a jobless recovery.
The one bright spot in the national economic picture is Texas, which has an economy busting out all over with new jobs. Nearly half of the estimated quarter-million new jobs that have been created since February 2009 were created in Texas. But Obama seems determined to use suffocating bureaucracy to bring Texas down with the rest of the country.
Consider the excessive delays imposed on the energy industry in the Gulf of Mexico by Obama’s Department of the Interior in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Other states border the Gulf, of course, but the Gulf region’s energy industry is centered in Texas, so when the federal government stops issuing drilling permits and promulgates costly new regulations on drilling in the Gulf, Texas suffers most. An econometric study released Friday by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., describes the magnitude of the Obama administration’s regulatory strangulation of the Gulf energy economy:
[…]
And elsewhere in today’s edition of The Washington Examiner, Bryan Shaw, chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, notes that EPA’s own computer modeling showed his state does not contribute significantly to the emissions the rule seeks to reduce. But EPA officials refuse to explain why they insist on applying the new rule to Texas. At this rate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry may have to run for president as a matter of self-defense.
Read the rest: What’s Obama got against the Lone Star State?
