► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Rick Perry’

Rick Perry and the “Pro-Sharia Curriculum”; Pam Geller is Wrong.

by huckfunn ( 42 Comments › )
Filed under Education, Elections 2012, Free Speech, Headlines, History, Politics at August 22nd, 2011 - 8:46 pm

David Stein has done further research of Pam Geller’s recent hit piece against Rick Perry and has posted this in response.

Rick Perry and the “Pro Sharia Curriculam”; Pamela Geller is Wrong.

Pamela Geller’s original article can be found here:

Perry/Aga Khan Curriculum: ‘shocking example of Islamic propaganda forced upon unsuspecting students attending Texas public schools’”

Hat tip Weasel Zippers.

Continuing discussion at Zip’s shop can be found here.

Read it all and make up your own mind.

The real reason Republican pundits attack Rick Perry

by Mojambo ( 3 Comments › )
Filed under Elections 2012, Headlines, Republican Party at August 22nd, 2011 - 8:39 am

The reason is that he beats their clients every time. and shuts them out of power

by Erick Erickson

Rick Perry once tried to get out of a speeding ticket.

Rick Perry once owned stock in a chain of video stores competing against Blockbuster, some of which also rented adult movies.

Rick Perry once was a Democrat.

The attacks have come fast and furious against him. But most of the attacks take on a peculiar and very telling strain.

A reporter on television or in print will utter a sentence like this, “Privately many Republican consultants suggest Rick Perry may be too Texas or shoot from the hip too much and might turn off necessary independent voters and women.”

[…….]

Let me sum this all up for you into what Rick Perry’s biggest problem is.

Whether you are talking about Alex (Team Carole Strayhorn 2006) or Karl Rove (Team Kay Bailey Hutchison 2010) or a host of other national Republican consultants, Rick Perry and his Texas team have beaten a significant portion of them.

But they did not just beat them. In many cases, Team Perry then shut the consultants who opposed him out of future business with him.

[…….]

Rick Perry may be the only guy in America to have beaten both Karl Rove and also Obama’s own consultant, David Axelrod.

So there’s a lot of score settling in a lot of the attacks. Next time you hear some Republican consultant say Rick Perry can’t win because he is too much of a cowboy, understand that it is probably a national Republican consultant fearful they will be shut out of work if Perry wins and, more importantly, understand that the same dynamics were in place in 1980 with Reagan’s “boys from California” team of consultants and the national consultants back them said the same about Reagan — he’s too much of a cowboy conservative who will alienate key voting blocks.

That’s not to say Perry is Reagan. It is to say the GOP national consultants have been pulling the same stuff since 1980.

Read the rest –  On the nature of the Perry attacks

Empathy gets tossed under the Obama bus

by Mojambo ( 188 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama at August 21st, 2011 - 5:00 pm

Arthur Schlesinger (the court historian for JFK) once referred to Richard Nixon’s administration as “The Imperial Presidency” and coming from a  guy who worshiped at the feet of the Kennedy’s I always thought  that was the height of political hypocrisy. Nobody however can beat Barack and Mooch for the trappings of royalty. One of the reasons I believe Obama’s numbers are tanking is that he really does not have the common touch and connection with the average American. He seems aloof, distant, arrogant and standoffish to other people’s daily concerns.

by Mark Steyn

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for 20 minutes, but he’s already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign:

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

This will be grand news to Schylar Capo, eleven years old, of Virginia, who made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days, and for her pains, was visited by a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter (with accompanying state troopers) who charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species and issued her a $535 fine. If the federal child-abuser has that much time on his hands, he should have charged the cat, who was illegally transporting the protected species from his gullet to his intestine.

So eleven-year-old Schylar and other middle-schoolers targeted by the micro-regulatory superstate might well appreciate Governor Perry’s pledge. But you never know, it might just catch on with the broader population, too.

Bill Clinton thought otherwise. “I got tickled by watching Governor Perry,” said the former president. “And he’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible — while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.’ I mean, this is crazy.”

This is the best argument the supposedly smartest operator in the Democratic party can muster? If Bill Clinton wants to make the increasingly and revoltingly unrepublican lifestyle of the American president a campaign issue, Governor Perry should call his bluff. If I understand correctly the justification advanced by spokesgropers for the Transport Security Administration, the reason they poke around the genitalia of three-year-old girls and make wheelchair-bound nonagenarians in the final stages of multiple sclerosis remove their diapers in public is that by doing so they have made commercial air travel the most secure environment in the United States. In that case, why can’t the president fly commercial?

[……]

Queen Margrethe of Denmark flies commercial, too. For local trips she has a small Challenger jet. When she’s not zipping around in it, they use it for fishery enforcement off Greenland. Does that detail alone suggest that a thousand-year dynasty dating back to King Gorm the Sleepy (regnant 936–958) travels in rather less luxury than the supposed citizen-executive of a so-called republic of limited government? Undoubtedly King Gorm the Sleepy would have slept a lot better on Air Force One, yet the Danish royal family seems to get by.

Symbols are important. In other circumstances, the Obamas’ vacation on Martha’s Vineyard might not be terribly relevant. But this is a president who blames his dead-parrot economy on “bad luck” — specifically, the Arab Spring and the Japanese tsunami: As Harry S. Truman would have said, the buck stops at that big hole in the ground that’s just opened up over in Japan. Let us take these whiny excuses at face value and accept for the sake of argument that Obama’s Recovery Summer would now be going gangbusters had not the Libyan rebels seized Benghazi and sent the economy into a tailspin. Did no one in the smartest administration in history think this might be the time for the president to share in some of the “bad luck” and forgo an ostentatious vacation in the exclusive playground of the rich? When you’re the presiding genius of the Brokest Nation in History, enjoying the lifestyle of the super-rich while allegedly in “public service” sends a strikingly Latin American message. Underlining the point, the president then decided to pass among his suffering people by touring small town Minnesota in an armored Canadian bus accompanied by a 40-car motorcade. In some of these one-stoplight burgs, the president’s escort had more vehicles than the municipality he was graciously blessing with his presence.

[……]

Where was I? Oh, yes. Instead of demonstrating the common touch — that Obama is feeling your pain Clinton-style — the motorcade tour seemed an ingenious parody of what (in Victor Davis Hanson’s words) “a wealthy person would do if he wanted to act ‘real’ for a bit” — in the way that swanky Park Avenue types 80 years ago liked to go slumming up in Harlem. Why exactly does the president need a 40-car escort to drive past his subjects in Dead Moose Junction? It doesn’t communicate strength, but only waste, and decadence. Are these vehicles filled with “aides” working round the clock on his super-secret magic plan to “create” “jobs” that King Barack the Growth-Slayer is planning to lay before Congress in the fall or winter, spring, whatever? If the argument is that the president cannot travel without that level of security, I note that Prince William and his lovely bride did not require a 40-car motorcade on their recent visit to Los Angeles, and there are at least as many people on the planet who want a piece of Wills and Kate as do of Obama. Like the president, the couple made do with Canuck transportation, but in their case they flew in and out on a Royal Canadian Air Force transport described as “no more luxurious than a good motor home”: The shower is the size of a pay phone. It did not seem to diminish Her Royal Highness’s glamour.

I wish Governor Perry well in his stated goal of banishing Washington to the periphery of Americans’ lives. One way he could set the tone is by forgoing much of the waste and excess that attends the imperial presidency. Believe it or not, many presidents and prime ministers manage to get by with only a 14-car or even a four-car motorcade. I know: Hard to imagine, but there it is. A post-prosperity America that has dug itself into a multi-trillion-dollar hole will eventually have to stop digging. When it does so, the government of the United States will have to learn to do more with less. A good place to start would be restoring the lifestyle of the president to something Calvin Coolidge might recognize.

Read the rest – The Imperial Presidency

Progressives like to cloak their policy preferences in the mantle of science

by Mojambo ( 43 Comments › )
Filed under Climate, Evolution, Progressives, Science at August 20th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

Anyone catch that woman using her son to ask Rick Perry questions on how old the Earth is? If you think that  people like her (or Charles Johnson ) really care about science you are mistaken. To them science (including the whole global warming debate) is a tool in order to push their social and political agenda which includes transfer of funds from the wealthier nations to the poorer ones and  more government control and regulations. By nature, most liberals tend to shy away from math and the hard natural sciences in college because in those courses you cannot talk your way out of an answer. The answers in geometry or chemistry are either right or wrong, liberals prefer courses in which they can manipulate words and which are all about “feelings”. Liberals are never the ones who lead the way out onto the ball field, showed you how to take apart the engine on your car or use their fists in the schoolyard on  obnoxious, abusive  bullies, they prefer to write essays on what they felt like when their goldfish dies or what they did on their summer vacation. That is why so many of them go into the arts and journalism.

by Kevin D. Williamson

Gov. Rick Perry, pressed for his views on evolution, characterized it as “a theory” with “some gaps” in it. He went on to say that, in Texas, both conventional evolution and creationism are taught. He told a boy whose mother asked him about the subject: “In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools — because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

This is the sort of thing that drives a certain kind of person nuts. Likewise, Perry’s joking about secession after being asked a question about it — and explaining that “when we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic . . . and one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want” — has caught on as a kind of shorthand for all of the cultural friction that is going to make Perry a tough sell to suburban moderates.

[…….]

The broader question, however, is: Why would anybody ask a politician about his views on a scientific question? Nobody ever asks what Sarah Palin thinks about dark matter, or what John Boehner thinks about quantum entanglement. (For that matter, I’ve never heard Keith Ellison pressed for his views on evolution.) There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists. In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know politicians’ views on evolution are not asking a scientific question; they are asking a religious and political question, demanding a profession of faith in a particular materialist-secularist worldview.

Take the question of global warming: Jon Huntsman was quick to declare his faith in the scientific consensus on global warming, and Rick Perry has been openly skeptical of it. Again keeping in mind that nobody really ought to care what either Huntsman or Perry thinks about the relevant science, both are making an error, and a grave one, in conceding that the question at hand is scientific at all. It is not; it is political. One might be convinced that anthropogenic global warming is a real and problematic phenomenon, and still not be convinced that the policies being pushed by Al Gore et al. are wise and intelligent. (Some more thoughts on that here.)

Progressives like to cloak their policy preferences in the mantle of science, but they do not in fact give a fig about science, which for them is only a vehicle to be ridden to the precise extent that it is convenient. This is why they will ask what makes Rick Perry qualified to disagree with the scientific establishment, but never ask the equally relevant question of what makes Jon Huntsman qualified to agree with it. So long as they are getting the policies they want, they don’t care. If you want to see how dedicated a progressive is to dispassionate science, spend two minutes talking about the heritability of intelligence. You’ll be up to your neck in witchcraft and superstition and evasion in no time at all. (If you want to test a progressive’s faith in rigorous scholarship more broadly, ask him about gains from trade and comparative advantage, realities that are as solid as anything social science has to offer.)

[……]

Read the rest – Rick Perry pushes their buttons