If you are a person of a certain age,  you know, old, you’re gonna get a hoot out of this.  Jim Wright from Alaska watched the Tea Party Debate and, to his everlasting credit, he was almost sober.

And if that don’t help, here’s this.

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It seems that Anita Perry needed to find gainful employment when her children went to college.  She says they needed the money because, you know, being a millionaire with free rent, full time government employed drivers and staff, and your fancy taxpayer funded magazines and pool boy, just ain’t what it used to be.

There’s just never enough dollars in her purse.  Never.  So, Anita Perry needed to take a job away from a woman who … well, really needed a job.

So she becomes head of a non-profit called the TAASA.  I’ll let R.G. Ratcliffe at the Austin American Statesman take it from there.

Much of Texas first lady Anita Perry’s $60,000-a-year salary at an Austin nonprofit comes indirectly from Gov. Rick Perry’s political donors, state contractors and companies that do business with the state or have issues before the Legislature.

Of 37 major donors to the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault during Anita Perry’s tenure as a fundraiser for the group, only three have no ties to the governor or state business.

Anita Perry is paid out of the nonprofit’s pool of money that includes these contributions. The group also receives grants from state agencies, including the governor’s office.

Donating to the TAASA has become just one more legal way for those with an interest in state government to get close to Texas’ first family.

The details of this little scam outlined in the story are slimier than catfish guts and slicker than a pocket full of banana pudding.  But, that’s what you get with the Perry family, leftovers from the world’s most impressive Bacchanalia Greed Barbeque Festival.

Go on, People, elect him.  You’ll get government out of your pocket, but the entire Perry family will move in, and they are far more costly.

The news media, using that liberally bias thing called mathematics, is showing that Rick Perry took far more than $5,000 from Merck that he claimed in Monday’s debate.  It’s more like almost half a million dollars.

The real tragedy of the whole Texas HPV vaccine fiasco is not that Rick Perry made a mistake.  It’s that Rick Perry made the  mistake of being an untrustworthy jerk, and women will die for it.

When Perry first proposed the idea of inoculating all 12 year old schoolgirls in Texas with a vaccine against the human papillomavirus, the far religious right went nuts.  They claimed, because the vaccine is only effective when given to girls prior to them becoming sexually active, that giving them the vaccine would encourge them to become sexually active as teenagers.

It has been my experience that you really don’t have to do anything to encourage teenagers to become sexually active.  They seem to be able to do that all on their own, as the families of the extremists on the religious right continue to prove to us.

On the other side of Perry’s Executive Order on the vaccine were liberals, who immediately asked, “What’s Perry getting for this?”  We have been carefully taught by Rick Perry that Rick Perry does diddle squat out of the goodness of his own heart.  There’s always something for Rick involved.

It soon became public that Rick’s former Chief of Staff and close personal friend was a paid lobbyist for Merck.  Sometimes kickbacks come in prettier packages than money passed under the table.  Nice jobs for your friends is one of them that has a nice bow.  Rich friends can be generous.  Showing how nicely you treat your friends gets you more friends.  The shades of tissue paper are endless.

Liberals like me were immediately suspect of the vaccine.  Was it safe?  Why the rush?  Most importantly, why trust Rick now?  What’s in it for Rick?  And we thought that because there’s always something in it for Rick.  As it was this time.

I am old enough to remember government curing polio in America and then across the world.  In 1952, this country had 58,000 cases of polio.  Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin’s discovery was earth-changing.  In 1955, under the leadership of that wild eyed liberal, Dwight Eisenhower, in conjunction with the March of Dimes,  we inoculated children for free (or, if I recall correctly, a dime if you had it) across this country.  Nobody got rich.  Nobody got a kickback.

We could have saved women’s lives in Texas if Rick Perry had been trustworthy, and there was not the taint of dirty money involved.  Nobody would have asked, “What’s in it for Ann Richards?”  Everyone in Texas would have known that all that was in it for Ann was her granddaughter’s life.

And that is the tragedy of Rick Perry’s “mistake.”  The mistake of not being trustworthy.  The mistake of crony capitalism, and women will pay for it with cancer.  Simply put, Texans did not trust him with their children’s lives.  Neither should you.

I heard today that Michelle Bachmann was saying that a stranger came up to her after the debate claiming that her daughter had become suddenly “retarded” after this vaccine.  Hummmm …. that’s odd because a stranger came up to me today saying that listening to Michelle Bachmann had caused her ta-tas to fall off.  Holy crap!  That right there is empirical proof that Bachmann should shut the hell up!   Somebody, quick!  Make her shuddup!

For those of you wondering how Rick Perry got to be a millionaire while holding public office his entire life, here’s a start to the explanation.  He’s never paid for anything himself in the past 25 years.

Thanks to Mark for the heads-up.

Yipppeeeeee!

Former White House financial reform adviser Elizabeth Warren will officially launch her campaign for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts on Wednesday, challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown, a source close to Warren told TPM on Tuesday.

“The pressures on middle class families are worse than ever, but it is the big corporations that get their way in Washington,” Warren said in a statement. “I want to change that. I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.”

I will wear my ta-tas a little higher and prouder the day they swear-in Elizabeth Warren.  We should have known that the best man to fill Ted Kennedy’s shoes would be a woman.

Little known fact:  Elizabeth Warren’s undergraduate degree is from the University of Houston.

I cannot wait for her to take on Scott Brown.

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You’re gonna love this.  You’re just gonna love it.  Sixteen members of the Texas House of representatives are holding Rick Perry’s feet to the … ahem … fire.

Some lawmakers are urging Gov. Rick Perry to call a special session to address the wildfire devastation in the state. They sent a letter to the governor, hoping to revisit tapping the Rainy Day Fund for disaster use.

During the regular and special sessions earlier this year, Democrats argued for using the fund to ease education cuts. At one point, Perry stated the need to save the money for a possible future natural disaster like a wildfire.

Yes, he did in fact mention a wildfire specifically.   So, if we could tap him on the shoulder and remind him that WE ARE HAVING A FREEKIN’ WILDFIRE while he’s gallivanting all over with his hand out to raise money to be President, we might be able to help Texas first.

And if you think this doesn’t involve you, you’re wrong.  Other states pitched in to help because Rick perry cut our firefighter’s budgets by 75%.  And Rick Perry doesn’t have any plans to pay them back.

Donna Howard, a great Texas Democrat, explains —

“Unless the Legislature meets in special session, other states and local governments will not receive repayment for the resources they have incurred by assisting with the Texas fires, forcing them to carry this debt on behalf of Texas until at least mid-2013, or later,” Howard said.

More than $6 billion remains in the Rainy Day Fund. The state also has a Disaster Contingency Fund, which Perry’s office said has about $49 million. That could also be an option.

So far, Perry’s plan for the wildfires seems to be (1) hide out in his Austin swanky pad, (2) wear boots, and (3) wait for the mainspring to wind down.  The fire has to stop at the Gulf of Mexico, right?