"Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?"

[Douglas Caddy]

Posted at 10:50 AM ET, 08/18/2011

Ron Paul supporter takes out full-page ad that asks: ‘Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?’

By Elizabeth Flock

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/have-you-ever-had-sex-with-rick-perry-asks-full-page-ad-by-ron-paul-supporter/2011/08/18/gIQAA65aNJ_blog.html

A Ron Paul supporter in Texas has taken out a full-page ad in a local alternative weekly newspaper seeking women who have slept with the presidential candidate.

“Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?” asks the ad, which runs in this week's Austin Chronicle. The ad was placed by Robert Morrow, who describes himself as a “self-employed investor and political activist” and a three-time delegate to the Texas state Republican convention.

Morrow is also the president and single member of the Committee Against Sexual Hypocrisy, which, he says, can help women publicize their “direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, 'family values' hypocrite and fraud.”

“I think it's only a matter of time until somebody credible comes forward,” Morrow told Salon.

The ad also hints that Perry might be gay.

There is no evidence that Perry has had extramarital affairs or is gay. Previous attempts to prove these rumors to be true have failed. And so this kind of political maneuvering, writes news site Hypervocal, doesn’t do anyone any good.

“An ad like this is simply begging for false information,” Hypervocal writes. “[it] detracts from discussing policy issues.”

Morrow has done the one-man attack campaign before, back in 2008, when he paid for and voiced an anti-Hillary robocall in South Carolina that claimed that “Hillary knew about and helped cover up Bill's rape of Juanita Broderick.” That campaign was, as this one looks to be, a flop.

By Elizabeth Flock | 10:50 AM ET, 08/18/2011

[Douglas Caddy]

Another article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/18/rick-perry-sex-ad_n_930250.html

Some observers find it strange that neither the Washington Post nor the Huffington Post in today's articles mention that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison alluded to Perry's alleged homosexual activities when she challenged him for the Republican nomination in the most recent Texas gubernatorial election

[Douglas Caddy]

I remember listening to famed author Whitley Strieber on one of his Dreamland programs years ago when he quoted in amazement an article that had just been published in a San Antonio daily newspaper. Strieber, a native Texan, at that time lived in San Antonio. The article that he quoted stated that Perry's wife had moved out of the Governor's mansion after she caught him in bed in the mansion with a named male state office holder.

This news story appears to be the source of the Perry's alleged activities. Either the article was published or it was not and either its facts were true or they were not. I trust with the U.S. Presidency at stake the issue will be thoroughly researched and a just conclusion reached.

[Douglas Caddy]

At the time this video was released by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), shortly after it had been recorded, I posted it on www.lucianne.com.

Perry soon thereafter took steps to lessen its impact. Because it was too late to have the DPS video destroyed or withdrawn, he merely added to it his amended version of what had occurred.

The original DPS video speaks for itself.

[Linda Minor]

Posted at 10:50 AM ET, 08/18/2011

Ron Paul supporter takes out full-page ad that asks: 'Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?'

By Elizabeth Flock

Washington Post

http://www.washingto...65aNJ_blog.html

A Ron Paul supporter in Texas has taken out a full-page ad in a local alternative weekly newspaper seeking women who have slept with the presidential candidate.

"Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?" asks the ad, which runs in this week's Austin Chronicle. The ad was placed by Robert Morrow, who describes himself as a "self-employed investor and political activist" and a three-time delegate to the Texas state Republican convention.

Morrow is also the president and single member of the Committee Against Sexual Hypocrisy, which, he says, can help women publicize their "direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, 'family values' hypocrite and fraud."

"I think it's only a matter of time until somebody credible comes forward," Morrow told Salon.

The ad also hints that Perry might be gay.

There is no evidence that Perry has had extramarital affairs or is gay. Previous attempts to prove these rumors to be true have failed. And so this kind of political maneuvering, writes news site Hypervocal, doesn't do anyone any good.

"An ad like this is simply begging for false information," Hypervocal writes. "[it] detracts from discussing policy issues."

Morrow has done the one-man attack campaign before, back in 2008, when he paid for and voiced an anti-Hillary robocall in South Carolina that claimed that "Hillary knew about and helped cover up Bill's rape of Juanita Broderick." That campaign was, as this one looks to be, a flop.

By Elizabeth Flock | 10:50 AM ET, 08/18/2011

The man named Robert Morrow is (or was) a member of this forum, having last posted in 2010.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001131639170&ref=ts

[Douglas Caddy]

Posted at 10:50 AM ET, 08/18/2011

Ron Paul supporter takes out full-page ad that asks: 'Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?'

By Elizabeth Flock

Washington Post

http://www.washingto...65aNJ_blog.html

A Ron Paul supporter in Texas has taken out a full-page ad in a local alternative weekly newspaper seeking women who have slept with the presidential candidate.

"Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?" asks the ad, which runs in this week's Austin Chronicle. The ad was placed by Robert Morrow, who describes himself as a "self-employed investor and political activist" and a three-time delegate to the Texas state Republican convention.

Morrow is also the president and single member of the Committee Against Sexual Hypocrisy, which, he says, can help women publicize their "direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, 'family values' hypocrite and fraud."

"I think it's only a matter of time until somebody credible comes forward," Morrow told Salon.

The ad also hints that Perry might be gay.

There is no evidence that Perry has had extramarital affairs or is gay. Previous attempts to prove these rumors to be true have failed. And so this kind of political maneuvering, writes news site Hypervocal, doesn't do anyone any good.

"An ad like this is simply begging for false information," Hypervocal writes. "[it] detracts from discussing policy issues."

Morrow has done the one-man attack campaign before, back in 2008, when he paid for and voiced an anti-Hillary robocall in South Carolina that claimed that "Hillary knew about and helped cover up Bill's rape of Juanita Broderick." That campaign was, as this one looks to be, a flop.

By Elizabeth Flock | 10:50 AM ET, 08/18/2011

The man named Robert Morrow is (or was) a member of this forum, having last posted in 2010.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001131639170&ref=ts

Robert Morrow last posted in the Forum on August 15, 2011, just a few days ago.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=565&st=15

[John Simkin]

I remember listening to famed author Whitley Strieber on one of his Dreamland programs years ago when he quoted in amazement an article that had just been published in a San Antonio daily newspaper. Strieber, a native Texan, at that time lived in San Antonio. The article that he quoted stated that Perry's wife had moved out of the Governor's mansion after she caught him in bed in the mansion with a named male state office holder.

This news story appears to be the source of the Perry's alleged activities. Either the article was published or it was not and either its facts were true or they were not. I trust with the U.S. Presidency at stake the issue will be thoroughly researched and a just conclusion reached.

There is a history of right-wing politicians being anti-gay who turn out to be homosexuals. Probably the most significant of these were Joe McCarthy who had sex with young men he recruited for his campaign against the left. This included Roy Cohn who eventually died of Aids.

In the UK several openly gay politicians have reached high office. Is this possible in the US?

[Len Colby]

In the UK several openly gay politicians have reached high office. Is this possible in the US?

Depends how you define “high office” there are a few mayors, Congressmen/women and lower level officials. John Berry, Obama’s head of the Office of Personnel Management, is “the highest-ranking openly gay official ever”. Houston got a lot of attention for being the largest city to elect an openly gay mayor but to me it’s more surprising that some gays were elected in small towns.

Berry - http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/01/obama-to-appoin.html

Obama transition team and administration- http://www.stoppingthehate.com/News-Article156-Barack-Obama-Openly-Gay-Advisors.htm

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=11969336

Houston - http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1947648,00.html

Articles about gay officials - http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/usa/rhode_island/rinews19.htm

http://www.gaypolitics.com/2010/11/03/record-number-of-lgbt-candidates-elected-to-office/

List of openly gay officials from a gay rights group

http://web.archive.org/web/20071219023324/http://www.actwin.com/eatonohio/gay/ophocounton.html

Edited August 19, 2011 by Len Colby

[Douglas Caddy]

The media attack on Robert Morrow's attempt to expose Rick Perry's alleged sexual activities brings to mind how the same media attempted to dampen speculation about Bill Clinton's sexual activities when he first ran for president in 1992.

It took a New Orleans high school friend of mine to shine the light on that matter. Christopher Bell of Montgomery, Alabama, was a free lance writer for the National Star, which was one of Rupert Murdoch's first media entries into the U.S. It was somewhat akin to the National Enquirer. The publication did not last for many years. But I digress.

Christopher Bell took it upon himself to travel from Montgomery to a town in Arkansas where it was rumored a certain lady lived who "knew" Bill Clinton. Bell spent several days trying to find the lady but had no luck. About to give up he stopped at a diner to have lunch and on a lark asked the waitress if she was acquainted with a "Jennifer Flowers." Without hesitation the waitress replied, "Jennifer is my best friend" and promply telephoned her. Flowers immediately agreed to meet Bell, who then broke the Bill Clinton-Jennifer Flowers scandal in the National Star. From Clinton's camp came no denials but instead a public worry about a "bimbo outbreak," as Flowers was not alone in knowing Bill Clinton.

The mass media then quickly took up the issue, which became presidential campaign history.

So who knows where Robert Morrow's ad may lead us? Already on Facebook Morrow has posted that his ad has brought forth several concrete leads. If so, the mass media may end up having egg on its face for how it treated Morrow and for downplaying Perry's transgressions.

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Rick Perry is a highly compromised man.

Rick Perry, his entourage and I like the SAME women. I don't know how I can be more clear than that. I am not 99% sure that Perry is a rampant and reckless womanizer, I am 100% sure he is. I have 3 excellent sources on that from the strippers, escorts and "young hotties."

By the way "young hotties" is a phrase used by a member of Slick Rick's entourage as he told a woman that I know, that Rick gets the young hotties when he is traveling. He then described orgies and group sex in the hotel to this lady.

By the way, I hope that I am not violating Ed Forum rules here.

Let's just say Rick Perry's sexual habits reminds me a lot of JFK and Lyndon Johnson.

The *gay rumors* on Rick Perry have been voluminous, intense and will NOT go away here in Austin.

For years I did not believe them, especially when I learned about all his womanizing.

But now I firmly believe the man is a rampaging bisexual adulterer. This is based on what I am learning even before I ran this ad. We having trouble getting strippers, escorts and gay men to come forward and on the record (for obvious reasons): hence the ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pry4a353VCE

[Douglas Caddy]

This article traces Rick Perry's career but omits any reference to the current controversy about his sexual activities. Is his run of luck about to end?

-------------------------------------------------------

Weekend Edition

August 19 - 21, 2011

CounterPunch Diary

Rick Perry: One Lucky Son-of-a-Bitch

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

www.counterpunch.org

Let’s get one thing straight from the start. Rick Perry is no blow-dry George Bush clone, even though he owes his political career about 50/50 to Bush and Osama bin Laden. So what is the political profile of the Texas Governor, now officially in the race as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination? A Rasmussen poll this week had him at 29, as against his current rivals, Romney at 18, and Bachmann 13.

Inside Texas he’s one of the most successful politicians in the entire history of the state. George Bush lost his first congressional race. In a lifetime career of ten elections since 1984 Perry has never lost one. He has an acute sense of political timing. His defeated opponents readily attest to Perry’s relentless self-discipline as a campaigner , skills at raising campaign cash. He already has a huge prospective war chest for his first national foray. They all emphasize the fatal consequences of underestimating him. He has a team of campaign advisors, notably, notably Dave Carney, whose skills – ruthless in the crunch - have elicited admiration from professionals across the board. Prior to Perry the Texas governorship were a notoriously weak post, with decisive power wielded by the legislature and State Comptroller and state commissioners, Railroad Commission etc. Perry has changed all that across his three stints as governor, previously contentious posts now inhabited by his compliant appointees.

But above all, Rick Perry is one lucky son of a bitch. Not just once or twice, but at almost every decisive twist fork in the road Fate has given him a benign tap on the shoulder. “Give me lucky generals,” Napoleon once exclaimed. Looking at Perry’s CV he’d have made him Grand Marshall of France on the spot.

Back at the pre-dawn of Perry’s political career Democrats were still the most powerful political party in Texas, and Perry began as a (an extremely conservative) Democrat. Son of tenant farmers (dryland cotton) in Paint Creek, sixty miles north of Abilene, Perry says he never met a Republican till he was 25. He was elected first as a Democratic state legislator and in 1988 was the Texas campaign chairman for (the extremely conservative) Democrat Al Gore who ultimately lost in the primaries to Michael Dukakis. Seeing scant future for Democrats in Texas Perry’s showed his aptitude for timing and shifted to the Republican Party, making straight for its conservative wing.

His first really big race was as Agricultural Commissioner –a powerful post in Texas and one held in 1990 by Jim Hightower, a left populist, detested by Big Texas Money, which sluiced into Perry’s challenge. Some say Hightower was overconfident, and his office burdened with a couple of scandals, not staining Hightower personally; others that Perry, with plenty of cash on hand from Hightower’s plentiful corporate and big ag foes enemies hit him with campaign commercials, linking him to Jesse Jackson and black insurgency. Maybe both are true. At all events Perry squeaked through, and was handily reelected in 1994.

In 1998 Perry ran for Lieutenant Governor. Victory would put the first Republican in the slot since Reconstruction. Bush was already planning his 2000 presidential run, which would mean quitting the gubernatorial chair. But he could not risk the charge from fellow Republicans that presidential ambitions had allowed him to hand over the governor’s mansion to a Democrat, stepping up from the Lieut. Gov’s office, and so Karl Rove took a close strategic and tactical interest in Perry’s bid. The Bush clan ran ads for Perry, though the latter’s refusal to follow Bush’s “big tent, compassionate society” message sowed the seeds for hostility between Perry and the Bush camp that is still flaring, with Rove currently denouncing Perry’s current onslaughts on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. (How the world spins! I can remember in the early 1970s Texas populist Democrat Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking Committee, snarling at then Fed chairman Arthur Burns, before him to give testimony, “Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?”)

Perry was up against John Sharp, a capable Democrat , previously Comptroller. Recently Sharp recalled to Paul Burka of Texas Monthly,

“Running against Perry is like running against God. Everything breaks his way! Either he’s the luckiest guy in the world or the Lord is taking care of him. He’s a relentless campaigner. I was up at five every morning just to match his schedule. Our money was about even, until an extra million dollars miraculously came to him at the last minute. Two weeks before the election, the largest flood of the century hit the Eighteenth District, which I’d represented in the state Senate. The flood inundated towns all along the Guadalupe River, with massive flooding in Gonzales, Cuero, and Victoria, my hometown. No one thinks about voting when their house is flooded. I received 70 percent of the vote there, but, of course, it was a record-low turnout. It’s hard to get out the vote from a boat. I don’t know if God is calling Rick Perry to run for president, but if he runs, the other candidates are going to need a big dose of magic and a lot of shoe leather. He is focused with a capital F, and his political advisers are the best I’ve ever seen. If you run against Rick Perry, you better pack a big lunch.”

In 2000 and in the wake of the big Florida fix Bush moved up to the Oval Office and Perry became governor. Enter fate in the form of Osama. On September 10 2001 Bush was a failing president and Perry far from strong. Amid the embers of the Towers, the Great War on Terror was on, Bush renaissant and manly Republicanism juicing up Perry. With vicious campaign ads race-baiting his 2002 gubernatorial opponent he won his second term against Tony Sanchez and a third run in 2010, another powerful dose of luck when Kay Bailey Hutchison messed up her primary challenge.

And now Perry, an early communicant with the Tea Party has the luck of facing the perennially unconvincing Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

All governors running for the presidency in an economically stable state claims that responsibility for this good fortune is theirs alone. If times are hard Washington DC gets the blame. No Republican is going to credit Big Government with anything but baneful intrusion and failure.

Perry’s no exception. Thanks in part to Texas’ exacting regulation of home mortgages, -- courtesy of progressive campaigns in the last century – the state emerged relatively unscathed in the great housing bust. Perry of course invokes low regulation and the entrepreneurial powers of the untrammeled Market for Texas’ budgetary virtue since the great crash of 2008. All nonsense. As Burka points out,

“Texas has been a low-tax, low-service state for at least half a century, most of that time under conservative Democratic leadership. Then, as now, a good bidness climate was the first objective of state fiscal policy. The Legislature, not the governor, determines the level of spending, and the elected comptroller serves as a watchdog who can refuse to approve spending that exceeds available revenue.”

When federal stimulus money came through Perry used it to mop up red ink in the annual budget. Last week Jared Bernstein, formerly Biden’s economic advisor, pointed out derisively that

“When he announced his candidacy for President the other day, he growled that his goal as president would be to make Washington ‘as inconsequential in your lives as I can.’ Except when it comes to job creation. Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47 per cent of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas. Texas employment wasn’t down much at all in these years, as the state lost only 53,000 jobs. But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs…

“The nation as a whole added 264,000 government jobs, 2007-10, meaning public-sector jobs added in Texas account for almost half of the nation’s public-sector jobs over these years. How did that happen? Well, Gov Perry has a funny way of going about that ‘inconsequential’ thing. According to many news accounts from back in the Recovery Act days:

“Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97 per cent of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”

“Now, I’ve got no problem with a state government using Recovery Act funds to retain or create jobs. In fact, the figure and quote above shows Texas to be following a traditional Keynesian game plan: as the private sector contracts, turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference.”

Perry has a few skeletons in his closet, some of them noisome to the conservatives. In 2007 he tried to force an executive order through requiring that sixth-grade girls in Texas be vaccinated, with the consent of their parents, (withheld consent was to be a tough process) against the human papilloma virus, a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer. Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, was pushing the vaccine and Perry’s former chief of staff was Merck’s lobbyist. Ultimately Perry’s plan was beaten back, and he admits it was a mistake. It’s one of the reasons the some of the right think Perry is a phony conservative, since the whole plan was redolent of nanny-state government and unwarranted intrusion into family business.

Then there was the Perry-initiated Trans-Texas Corridor , a vast network of toll roads and rights of way , crossing Texas, scything its way through land acquired by power of eminent domain carrying cars, trains, pipelines and powerlines, fiber optic cables and so forth, to be built and controlled by Cintra-Zachry, a partnership between Spanish-based toll-road developer/operator Cintra and Texas-based Zachry Construction,. Aside from the fortunes to be made by Perry backers, eminent domain – a “taking”, par excellence -- is anathema to the libertarian right. In 2010, the Federal Highway Administration, formally ended the project. The action eliminated the study area and canceled the agreement between TxDOT and Cintra Zachry. In 2011, the Texas Legislature formally canceled the Trans-Texas Corridor.

Openings for Bachman: Perry said at one point he was “fine” with New York state legalizing marriage between same-sex couples. He based this on his belief that the Tenth Amendment reserves for the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution. The religious right went crazy and Perry hastily backtracked saying that he favored constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage and abortion.

Nor does the libertarian, Tea Party right relish Perry’s support for the children of illegal aliens to attend Texas state colleges and universities. “To punish these young Texans for their parents’ actions is not what America has always been about” he told a New Hampshire paper this summer. In 2010 he criticized Arizona’s immigration law, saying “it would not be the right direction for Texas.” He’s also actually closed a prison in Texas – a first for the state - and boosted diversionary programs to keep convicted people out of them, part of the realization by state governors and legislatures that the gulag is too expensive.

Another source of grave suspicion by the Tea Party right, Perry attended a 2007 Bilderburg conference, thus rendering himself in the eyes of many in the Tea Party, a pawn of secret world government.

For their part the progressives howl about Perry’s gesture towards secession. “We’ve got a great union,” he famously said in response to a reporter’s question. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” Big cheers from the crowd. I don’t see what’s wrong with Perry’s stand. I’m all for the right to self-determination, hence state secession. Aside from anything else, it’s how empires fall apart. Vermont, Alaska, Hawai’i, Texas – the empire crumbling just like the Towers. What’s wrong with that picture?

Perry enters the race, intent on capturing the right-wing base, crushing Romney and Bachmann in South Carolina, which clinched McCain’s path to nomination in 2008. Hence the Perry-hosted “Response” -- a national day of prayer, on August 4 at Reliant Arena that drew 30,000 Christians and that was broadcast on cable Christian channels and the Internet nationwide, including in at least 1,000 churches. "Father, our heart breaks for America," Perry intoned in his 12-minute address. "We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us." Christians should turn to God for answers to the nation's troubles.

Perry subsequently tried to distance himself a bit from the New Apostolic Movement, the crowd behind The Response. I don’t see why. Their views seem far more engaging than those of Obama’s economic necromancers. The Movement’s high command believe they have a direct line to God who remits specific instructions and warnings, no doubt more credible than those of Standard & Poor. Ignore the warnings at your peril: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, economic collapse. They don’t care for the Freemasons and consider the Democratic Party to be controlled by the Satan-worshipper and all-round slut Jezebel plus three lesser demons.

Sounds like a plausible description of the DNC to me. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. Me too. Of course the progressives raise the usual alarm about Perry being an evangelical Christian, not a wholesome servant of God like Obama, baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Perry on the campaign trail is be taking his whacks at Bernanke, who richly deserves every kick, and regularly receives them right here from the great Mike Whitney, whom CounterPunch strongly recommends to Perry as his prime economic adviser. Of course Perry is slamming AGW and making fun of Al Gore. If Perry can’t make hay with the recent report “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis” by NASA scientists at Penn State, fretting that aliens may exact fearsome retribution for excessive C02 production by earthlings, he doesn’t deserve to be in the race.

Perry’s rhetorical lunges have drawn measured reproof from the New York Times, seeking to push Perry towards the kook exit. But at this stage in the game measured approval in the New York Times is not exactly what Perry is after, any more than is Bachmann or the man closer to the libertarian right’s heart than Perry, namely Ron Paul, scandalously blacked out in the press. No surprises there. Coming out against war and empire really is a no-no.

The obvious question is whether Perry, having won the right, can clamber back along the kook branch towards something vaguely resembling the solid timber of sanity, to capture the necessary independents and disillusioned folk who bet on Obama in 2008. Hard to say. Perry is pretty far out on the limb. Reagan, with the strenuous help of the press, managed the crawl back in 1980, amid widespread disappointment and disgust with Jimmy Carter. Disappointment and disgust with Barack Obama? The president has slithered down in the most recent polls, and now is just above the 50 per cent disapproval rating. There are still around 30 million Americans without work, or enough work. There’s the endlessly cited observation that no president presiding over moe than a 7 per cent jobless rate can hope for a second term.

The progressive sector is already rallying the Obama vote by pounding out the unsurprising message that Perry is a shil and errand boy for corporate America, Amazing! Imagine that a conservative Texas Republican would end up in that corner, arm in arm with Barack Obama, messenger of hope and change, also shil and errand boy for corporate America, starting with the nuclear industry, the arms sector, the ag/pesticide complex and moving on through Wall Street and the Fed, and equipped with truly noxious beliefs about fiscal discipline, the merits of compromise. He’s a far more dangerous man to have in the Oval Office than Perry. We need a polarizer to awake the left from its unending, unbreakable infatuation with our current president, despite all the horrors he has perpetrated and presided over, mostly significantly the impending onslaught on Social Security and Medicare.

Bush and Obama have much in common, starting with no fixed beliefs, and sessions at Ivy League schools. Perry went to Texas A&M back in the 1970s. I remember a speaking trip, in the company of Christopher Hitchens and JoAnn Wypijewski many years back, when CH hadn’t jumped the fence. I think we were in Houston in the company of the late Molly Ivins. I told Molly our next gig was at Texas A&M at College Station and she rang me at the motel later that night, imploring us to cancel the engagement, citing grave personal risk to our persons. In the event we had a fine time, and when Hitchens paused in his seditious diatribes to demand extra fuel in the form of a pint or two of vodka to be brought to the podium, helpful Aggies , some in uniform, dashed forward with restorative beakers of the stuff.

--------------------------

http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-09-01/feature7.php

Edited August 21, 2011 by Douglas Caddy

[Glenn Viklund]

Rick Perry is a highly compromised man.

Rick Perry, his entourage and I like the SAME women. I don't know how I can be more clear than that. I am not 99% sure that Perry is a rampant and reckless womanizer, I am 100% sure he is. I have 3 excellent sources on that from the strippers, escorts and "young hotties."

By the way "young hotties" is a phrase used by a member of Slick Rick's entourage as he told a woman that I know, that Rick gets the young hotties when he is traveling. He then described orgies and group sex in the hotel to this lady.

By the way, I hope that I am not violating Ed Forum rules here.

Let's just say Rick Perry's sexual habits reminds me a lot of JFK and Lyndon Johnson.

The *gay rumors* on Rick Perry have been voluminous, intense and will NOT go away here in Austin.

For years I did not believe them, especially when I learned about all his womanizing.

But now I firmly believe the man is a rampaging bisexual adulterer. This is based on what I am learning even before I ran this ad. We having trouble getting strippers, escorts and gay men to come forward and on the record (for obvious reasons): hence the ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pry4a353VCE

I don't know what Perry's sexual preferences are - neither do I care.

But I do know this: You, Mr Morrow, are sexually obsessed. Based on what you've written in this forum over the past year, not only are you not to be taken serious about anything; to bring forward unsubstantiated claims (about anyone) the way you do into the public arena, is despicable. It amounts to nothing beyond slander what you are doing - again and again.

Attention seeking at it's worst.

[Douglas Caddy]

Perry Mines Texas System to Raise Cash for Campaigns

The New York Times

August 21, 2011

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL LUO

Two years ago, John McHale, an entrepreneur from Austin, Tex., who has given millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and causes, did something very unusual for him: he wrote a $50,000 check to a Republican candidate, Rick Perry, then seeking a third full term as governor of Texas. In September 2010, he did it again, catapulting himself into the top ranks of Mr. Perrys donors.

Mr. McHale, a Perry spokesman said after the initial donation, understands Governor Perrys leadership has made Texas a good place to do business.

Including, it turned out, for Mr. McHales business interests and partners. In May 2010 an economic development fund administered by the governors office handed $3 million to G-Con, a pharmaceutical start-up that Mr. McHale helped get off the ground. At least two other executives with connections to the firm had also given Mr. Perry tens of thousands of dollars.

Mr. Perry leapt into the Republican presidential primary this month preceded by his reputation as a thoroughbred fund-raiser. But a review of Mr. Perrys years in office reveals that one of his most potent fund-raising tools is the very government he heads.

Over three terms in office, Mr. Perrys administration has doled out grants, tax breaks, contracts and appointments to hundreds of his most generous supporters and their businesses. And they have helped Mr. Perry raise more money than any politician in Texas history, donations that have periodically raised eyebrows but, thanks to loose campaign finance laws and a business-friendly political culture dominated in recent years by Republicans, have only fueled Mr. Perrys ascent.

Texas politics does have this amazing pay-to-play culture, said Harold Cook, a Democratic political consultant.

Mark Miner, a spokesman for Mr. Perry, said there was no connection between Mr. McHales contributions and the grant to G-Con. He said that the purpose of the state money was to create jobs and that it was appropriate for Mr. Perry to appoint people who support his vision and policies to state oversight posts.

These issues have been brought up in previous elections to no avail, Mr. Miner said.

Mr. Perry is not the first governor to have taken contributions from contractors or appointees to state commissions and boards, which oversee many of the agencies that in other states are controlled directly by the governor.

But because he has been in office more than a decade, he has had greater opportunity than any of his predecessors to stock the government with loyalists he has appointed roughly 4,000 people to state posts while enacting policies that have benefited allies and contributors.

And Mr. Perry has been much more aggressive than any past governor in soliciting money from them. According to a study last year by Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog organization, Mr. Perry has raised at least $17 million from more than 900 appointees or their spouses, roughly one dollar out of every five that he has raised as governor.

Among the state boards that have generated the most campaign contributions for Mr. Perry, the study found, were the State Parks and Wildlife Commission and the board of regents of Texas A&M, Mr. Perrys alma mater. Those appointees have donated more than $4 million to his campaigns for governor.

I know that at least some of the people who were initially approached to be regents have been later turned down because they didnt pass what I would call a loyalty test, said Jon L. Hagler, a prominent A&M alumnus and a major donor to the university.

Mr. Perry has also drawn scrutiny for two of his signature economic development efforts, the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. The enterprise fund, which is intended to be a deal-closing tool for the state as it competes for jobs, has dispensed $435 million in grants to businesses since 2003. The technology fund, which has doled out nearly $200 million to companies since 2005, has a similar job creation mandate.

More than a quarter of the companies that have received grants from the enterprise fund in the most recent fiscal year, or their chief executives, made contributions to either Mr. Perrys campaign dating back to 2001 or to the Republican Governors Association since 2008, when Mr. Perry became its chairman, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The award to G-Con is just one example of state money paying dividends for Perry benefactors. The company is working with the Texas A&M university system on a pharmaceutical manufacturing effort toward influenza vaccines.

Among G-Cons officers, according to records filed with the Texas secretary of state, is David M. Shanahan, who also has a significant ownership stake in the company. He is also the founder and president of Gradalis, a biotech firm based in Dallas that received a separate $1.75 million grant from the states technology fund in February 2009.

Campaign finance records show that Mr. Shanahan contributed $10,000 to the governor in November 2009. The following month, G-Con filed its application for an enterprise fund grant, said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman in the governors office. (Mr. Shanahan also donated $5,000 in 2007.)

State records from a network of firms associated with G-Con also list Mr. McHale, the longtime Democratic donor, as an officer.

Patricia Haigwood, a spokeswoman for G-Con, said Friday that Mr. McHale, who did not return messages asking for comment, was one of the original board members of G-Con. But she said he left the company in late April 2010 and had not made an investment in G-Con.

Gradalis, however, controls 10 percent of G-Con, corporate records show. And Mr. McHale and James R. Leininger, a San Antonio businessman who has given more than $230,000 to Mr. Perry, have minority interests in Gradalis, Ms. Haigwood said.

Gradaliss technology fund grant came under scrutiny last year when The Dallas Morning News revealed that Mr. McHale and Mr. Leininger, both major Perry donors, had significant financial interests in the company.

Ms. Nashed said that grants from both funds must be approved by the speaker of the Texas House and the lieutenant governor and that all recipients go through rigorous reviews.

Mr. Perry has also drawn criticism for his appointees to the board of the Teacher Retirement System, a $110 billion pension fund that is among the nations largest. In recent years he has appointed at least four top donors or fund-raisers to the board. Mr. Perrys trustees leaned on the fund to invest more money with hedge funds and private equity firms, as many public pension funds have in recent years. But in some cases, the appointees appear to have pushed for firms whose investors, officers, or partners were Perry donors.

In 2009 an investment manager at the fund, Michael Green, wrote to a board trustee saying that the funds chief investment officer had pressed him and other employees to set aside their objections to such investments, including allocations to two firms whose partners and former partners have donated more than $1 million to Mr. Perrys campaigns.

When Mr. Green complained about the pressure, a superior dismissed his concerns. Mr. Greens boss, he wrote to the trustee, told him: This is the way business is done. An internal investigation concluded that no rules had been broken.

Philip Mullins, a trustee, said, I think the concerns that were raised were based on a feeling that the chairman and some other people on the board were trying to set up a fund-raising campaign for the governor of Texas.

Another instance of political donations to Mr. Perry seeming to dovetail with his policy decisions came in 2005, when the TXU Corporation, a utility based in Dallas, sought permits to build coal-fired power plants. That October, Mr. Perry issued an executive order for a review panel to fast-track the application.

In the months that followed, current and retired TXU executives, as well as the companys political action committee, sent Mr. Perry more than $100,000 in donations, including one check dated the same day as Mr. Perrys order. Mr. Perrys office said at the time that the order was unrelated to the contributions. A state judge later blocked the order, ruling that Mr. Perry had overstepped his authority.

In 2003, after a rash of mold-related lawsuits against home construction companies, Mr. Perry championed the creation of a state board, the Texas Residential Construction Commission. The new commission was a priority of Mr. Perrys most generous contributor: Bob Perry, a homebuilder who has contributed more than $2 million to the governor over his career. (The two men are not related.)

The legislation creating the board also sharply limited the rights of homeowners to sue contractors for faulty construction, shunting most disputes to the commission. After its passage, Bob Perry and his wife sent two $50,000 checks to the governors campaign. Three weeks later, the governor appointed an executive of Perry Homes, Bob Perrys company, to the commission, which was abolished in 2009.

In 2009, as Mr. Perry was running for re-election, José Cuevas Jr., a restaurateur and the governors appointee as chairman of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, used a personal e-mail account to solicit donations for Mr. Perry from the owners of dozens of restaurants and bars overseen by the board.

In an interview last week, Mr. Cuevas said he saw nothing wrong with asking the owners, many of them business contacts, for donations. It was important, he said, for Mr. Perrys appointees to support his broader mission of smaller government.

When you personally know someone, Mr. Cuevas said, and know their abilities and vision, youre willing to raise as much money as hard as you can for that person.

--------------------

Perry criticizes government while Texas job growth benefits from it

Washington Post

By Michael A. Fletcher, Published: August 20, 2011

LONGVIEW, Tex. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapfrogged to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates largely on the strength of one compelling fact: During more than a decade as governor, his state created more than 1 million jobs, while the nation as a whole lost 1.4 million jobs.

Perry says the “Texas miracle” rests on conservative pillars that he would bring to the White House: minimal regulation and government, low taxes and a determination to limit the reach of Uncle Sam.

What he does not say is that much of that job growth has come because of government, not in spite of it.

With a young and fast-growing population, a large and expanding military presence and an influx of federal stimulus money, the number of government jobs in Texas has grown at more than double the rate of private-sector employment during Perry’s tenure.

The disparity has grown sharper since the national recession hit. Between December 2007 and last June, private-sector employment in Texas declined by 0.6 percent while public-sector jobs increased by 6.4 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, government employees account for about one-sixth of the workforce in Texas.

The significant role of government in Texas’s relative prosperity stands in stark contrast to the “go-it-alone” image cultivated by Perry, who credits a lack of government interference for fostering a business-friendly environment in Texas.

“The fact is, government doesn’t create jobs, otherwise the last 21 / 2 years of stimulus would have worked,” Perry said this month in a speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Government can only create the environment that allows the private sector to create jobs. The single most important contributor to our jobs-friendly climate here in Texas is our low tax burden, because we know dollars do far more to create jobs and prosperity in the people’s hands than they do in the government’s.”

Perry has criticized Washington for “thumbing its nose” at the American people. In announcing his candidacy for president last weekend, Perry said he would “work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

Mark Miner, a Perry spokesman, said the governor’s job-creation record speaks for itself. He also said the state received less per capita — about $1,000 per resident vs. more than $1,400 in New York and $1,200 in California — than most other states from the stimulus plan while still producing more jobs.

Population boom

Analysts call the growth in government employment in Texas a natural consequence of the surging population, which has grown by more than 20 percent in the past decade to 25.1 million. The increase has caused local governments and school systems to hire more teachers, budget analysts, compliance officers and police officers.

“A lot of growth has been happening in the public sector to respond to a growing population,” said Don Baylor Jr., a senior policy analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group in Austin. “That has been an ongoing driver of our job growth.”

Baylor warned that the growth in government jobs may shortly come to an abrupt halt when state budget cuts take effect this year. In July, a dip in government jobs contributed to a spike in the state’s unemployment rate, which went from 8.2 percent to 8.4 percent.

“I think we are about to find out what the jobs picture looks like” without growth in the public sector, Baylor said.

The Texas economy also has benefited from the huge sums spent by the federal government. The state is home to several large military installations as well as NASA, which helped Texas reap more than $227 billion in federal spending in 2009 — more than double its 2001 total, according to the Census Bureau. Texas is the nation’s second-most-populous state, behind California, where the federal government spent almost $346 billion in 2009.

In the wake of the Great Recession, the state has raked in nearly $25 billion in federal stimulus money, which has gone to everything from road projects and unemployment benefits to helping to balance the state budget. Befitting its population, Texas has received the third-highest amount of stimulus money in the nation, behind California and New York.

“It is not like Texas does not benefit from Washington,” said Richard W. Fisher, president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “We get ours. But still, the driving force of the Texas economy is the private sector.”

Company executives and economic development officials credit Texas’s economic successes to what they call a pro-business culture. Texas is a right-to-work state, has relatively low business taxes and has no state income tax. They also applaud Perry for pushing through a series of tort reform measures, which limit medical malpractice lawsuits, impose fees on unsuccessful plaintiffs and make it easier to dismiss cases deemed to lack merit.

Texas also has abundant land for development and limited land-use restrictions, making development cheaper and easier than in many places.

Fluor, a global firm that designs and builds complex industrial plants, moved its corporate headquarters to the Dallas area from Orange County, Calif., five years ago. Alan Boeckmann, who was Fluor’s chief executive at the time, said the corporation was eager to take advantage of what Texas had to offer.

“Most of the reasons fall into the category of corporate efficiency,” he said. “We had very little in the way of clientele and business issues in California. Also, it was very difficult to recruit people to California because the cost of living scared them away.”

Texas’s relatively soft landing after the recession has helped its other assets, which include a booming energy sector, world-class airports, Gulf of Mexico ports and burgeoning trade with its southern neighbor, Mexico. Trade with China also is up sharply.

Housing prices in check

Texas was shielded from the worst of the housing-market bust by the state government’s tight regulation of home equity loans, which were not permitted until the late 1990s and are limited to 80 percent of a homeowner’s equity. Elsewhere, property owners often took out riskier home equity loans and mortgages that left them financially crippled when housing prices collapsed, causing damaging ripples across the economy.

At the same time, mortgage lenders in Texas are tightly regulated, which prevented abuses that were prevalent in many parts of the country. Taken together, the regulations helped keep Texas housing prices in check.

“Because of early and robust regulation, We never had that disconnect between incomes and home prices that you saw elsewhere at the height of the housing bubble,” said Douglas B. Foster, commissioner of the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending. “So there was no need for exotic mortgage products.”

Perry’s campaign called the mortgage regulations appropriate. “Governor Perry is not against all regulations,” Miner said. “He is against regulations that kill jobs and harm the economy.”

James C. Oberwetter, president of the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, says that, overall, the state’s economy has benefited from a light hand of government — even if that has allowed social problems to fester.

“There are some conservative principles at work, which, true enough, cause problems for funding some of our social programs,” he said. “Yet, on the other hand, it leads us to great job creation.”

Many educators and others say that trade-off is evident in many social indicators. More than a quarter of the state’s population lacks health-care coverage. Texas is last in the country when it comes to the number of adults with high school diplomas. It is 44th in the country in school spending per pupil, and its rate of income inequality is the ninth- highest in the country.

The Census Bureau says 9.5 percent of the Texas workforce is paid at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, tying it with Mississippi for the largest share of minimum-wage workers in the country. Many restaurant workers are among those who earn less than the minimum wage.

“In Texas, as anywhere else in the nation and in all capitalist societies, you earn what you learn,” Fisher, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, wrote in a June op-ed piece in the Dallas Morning News, calling for educational improvements. “Income is directly correlated to educational attainment.”

In Longview, in the oil- and gas-producing heart of East Texas, the economy is growing swiftly, and employers are struggling to find qualified workers.

“We can’t get enough production welders,” said Aaron Lowe, a welding engineer at Trinity Rail, a railroad car manufacturer that has been expanding briskly in recent months after shrinking during the downturn.

The same is true at other employers. Eastman Chemical, which manufactures coatings, adhesives and other products, has seen a huge boom in sales with the drop in natural-gas prices. The two local medical centers also are hiring.

Still, education officials worry about the future of a city where only half of the high school graduates go on to higher education. “Every independent school district in Texas is underfunded,” said James Wilcox, superintendent of schools in Longview.

And that, he said, will hurt in the short run. Wilcox said he recently had to cut 20 of the school system’s 1,100 jobs to accommodate state budget cuts.

He also said it will hurt in the long run by leaving many of his students unprepared for the evolving job market.

“If kids go right to work from high school, they are only going to get pretty much minimum-wage jobs,” Wilcox said. “They have to be able to get some training that would make it so they don’t have to start at the bottom.”

Edited August 21, 2011 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

Rick Perry is a highly compromised man.

Rick Perry, his entourage and I like the SAME women. I don't know how I can be more clear than that. I am not 99% sure that Perry is a rampant and reckless womanizer, I am 100% sure he is. I have 3 excellent sources on that from the strippers, escorts and "young hotties."

By the way "young hotties" is a phrase used by a member of Slick Rick's entourage as he told a woman that I know, that Rick gets the young hotties when he is traveling. He then described orgies and group sex in the hotel to this lady.

By the way, I hope that I am not violating Ed Forum rules here.

Let's just say Rick Perry's sexual habits reminds me a lot of JFK and Lyndon Johnson.

The *gay rumors* on Rick Perry have been voluminous, intense and will NOT go away here in Austin.

For years I did not believe them, especially when I learned about all his womanizing.

But now I firmly believe the man is a rampaging bisexual adulterer. This is based on what I am learning even before I ran this ad. We having trouble getting strippers, escorts and gay men to come forward and on the record (for obvious reasons): hence the ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pry4a353VCE

I don't know what Perry's sexual preferences are - neither do I care.

But I do know this: You, Mr Morrow, are sexually obsessed. Based on what you've written in this forum over the past year, not only are you not to be taken serious about anything; to bring forward unsubstantiated claims (about anyone) the way you do into the public arena, is despicable. It amounts to nothing beyond slander what you are doing - again and again.

Attention seeking at it's worst.

Among those who could be characterized as "sexually obsessed" is Bill Clinton. Voters got an early warning in his first campaign for the presidency in 1992 when the Jennifer Flowers affair erupted and other women were linked to him. Did this deter Clinton? No. Right after he was re-elected in 1996 the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in which it was disclosed that he and Lewinsky had oral sex in the Oval Office. Clinton defensively claimed that "I did not have sex with that woman" because it was only oral in the Oval. The country then went through years of efforts to impeach Clinton and as a result his last term in office showed few real accomplishments.

Let us assume for a moment that Robert Morrow is right and that Governor Rick Perry, like Clinton, is also "sexually obsessed." If he is and if he is elected President, then at this crucial time in the history of the U.S. and the world we might witness another major Presidential sex scandal erupt that would be disastrous for the planet.

Even if Robert Morrow is "sexually obsessed, it can be argued that through his obsession he is doing the U.S. and the world a great favor by alerting us now to the alleged sexual obsession of Rick Perry before that man is elected President and puts everyone through Hell.

[Len Colby]

This article traces Rick Perry's career but omits any reference to the current controversy about his sexual activities.

That’s because, though I don’t always agree with him, Cockburn is a serious journalist not a tabloid one. Perry’s sexlife is irrelevant and Morrow has not produced any evidence that he has had affairs. Even Alex Jones is dubious. Luckily he is a Libertarian and not a Democrat. Morrow’s obsession with other’s sex lives reflects more about him than his targets be they the Kennedy brothers, LBJ or Perry.

Is his run of luck about to end?

I hope so, or at least by Nov. 6, 2012.