I think y’all should be nicer to Rick Perry.

I was just mortified to read that there might be an investigation of some of his activities in the Pay to Play or Crony Capitalism department.  Like any good capitalist, Perry used the Texas Enterprise Fund, which is  basically a slush fund for the Governor, to offer $20 million in grants to Countrywide and $15 million to Washington Mutual Inc.  In return, he got large campaign contributions from both of them.

We know what happened after that.

Perry didn’t appear to recognize that the industry his administration had subsidized was damaging the national economy.

The AP analysis found that Washington Mutual, Countrywide and their subsidiaries boosted risky lending in Texas within a year after receiving grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund.

Now, look, Rick Perry doesn’t know much and suspects even less.  The boy’s got a iffy fuse in his thinker box.  How do you expect him to understand an activity with words like “subprime,” or “lending volume,” or “mortgage-backed assets?”

He understands, “Hey, Bubba, I’ll give you $10 of the taxpayer money and you hand me $5 to put in my back pocket.”  Look, if the lunch check is for more than 3 people, Rick Perry is pretty much stumped.

Now there’s a whole mess of people out there trying to tell me that I am undermisestimating Rick Perry.  They say he’s a cagey fella and not as dumb as he acts.

Bullshoot.

He’s got some cagey boys working for him, but his intellectual limits are limitless.

He became a millionaire while holding public office because the real cagey boys just kept handing him money deals.  They taught him  to  field dress a lobbyist on his desk with only a pair of scissors and a Bic retractable ball point pen.

So, ease up on him.  We don’t want him limping until after the GOP primary.

Okay, so I heard there are only four horsemen of the apocalypse, but I think a fifth one has appeared since Rick Perry started running for President.

First thing right out of the box, Texas was hit with a major drought.  Then, days after he announced, wildfires.  All over Texas.

And now….

Hairy, Crazy Ants.

Oh yeah, like fire ants weren’t bad enough.  We have to have hairy crazy ants.  And we’re sending them to Mississippi, just like we do our educational standards.

It sounds like a horror movie: Biting ants invade by the millions. A camper’s metal walls bulge from the pressure of ants nesting behind them. A circle of poison stops them for only a day, and then a fresh horde shows up, bringing babies. Stand in the yard, and in seconds ants cover your shoes.

And they are not only just hairy.  They are also crazy.

The flea-sized critters are called crazy because each forager scrambles randomly at a speed that your average picnic ant, marching one by one, reaches only in video fast-forward. They’re called hairy because of fuzz that, to the naked eye, makes their abdomens look less glossy than those of their slower, bigger cousins.

And apparently, when you kill one, it sends out a chemical to call other hairy crazy ants to come to the rescue.  So, when you kill one, you get thousands more.  These vicious little guys have martyrdom down to an art form.

Which kinda reminds me of something else.  Hummm …

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Hairy, Crazy Ant

Hairy, Crazy Politician

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Oh yeah, I remember.  The GOP Presidential field.  When one falls from grace, 50 more step up to fill the void of stoopid.

By the way, they say the Texas drought is going to last 9 more years.  I wonder if Rick Perry’s Presidential aspirations will last as long.

Thanks to Deb for the heads-up on the real hairy, crazy ants.

I love my Texas.  I love everything about it, even the gawdawful weather. Next year on my birthday, I’m getting a Texas Star tattooed on my ankle so when I get to heaven and God is picking us up by our nakkid little feet and tossing us into the right pile, he’ll know that I belong in the Texas pile.  I would hate to spend eternity in the Florida or the Idaho pile.  I love yew, Texas.

So, dammit, I hate it when the Washington Post starts nosing around in Texas.  There some things here that I’m so damn ashamed of that I can’t bring myself to expose it to the folks in foreign states.  In the deepest, darkest corners of Texas, there’s some unforgivable things going on.

Most of that stuff is in East Texas, but West Texas made the front page of the Washington Post today.  And every word of it is true.

Welcome to Rick Perry’s West Texas:  where white men are men and Black men are …..

If you think it is not possible for you to respect Rick Perry even less than you do now, you’re wrong.  The Washington Post Story.

I can promise you that not all of West Texas is like this, but Rick Perry is very comfortable in the part that is.

The heads-up goes to about 15 people who wrote me to say it’s time we quit hiding this stuff.

A big one stumbles —

Steve Stevlic, one of the top organizers of TeaCon 2011, describes himself as an ordinary family-values man. But, as Gawker reported today, he’s not ordinary in at least one sense: He was arrested last summer for soliciting a prostitute.

I’ll bet you my best pair of pink boots that the hooker was a Republican, too.  The Republicans have overrun the nasty business, and taken all the jobs away from Democrats. We used to be pretty good at the nasty business, but, Honey, we cannot hold a candle to the new crop of rightwing family values proponents.

Keynoters at TeaCon today included Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck, and U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., a party favorite and an afternoon highlight.

Okay, so let me get this straight:  the family values TeaCon was organized by a hooker’s John, they let a guy too crazy for Fox News speak, and the highlight of the day was a man who is like ten years behind in his child support.

I dunno about you, but I’d buy a ticket to see that circus.

Thanks to Irene for the heads-up.

The good people at the University of Minnesota did a study about which Republican Presidential candidates were most unable to speak without using clichés.

Guess who won.

Yep, our boy.  And he really blew the curve on this test, earning the coveted title of “The Cliché King.”  He won’t like that title, even after someone explains it to him, because he thinks that if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for America.

Here’s the stunning results —

A Smart Politics review of the last three Republican presidential debates finds that Rick Perry has incorporated more clichés into his answers than any other candidate.

In fact, the Texas governor has tallied nearly twice as many clichés as the entire rest of the field combined.

Gig ‘um, Rick!

The first example they show has Rick saying “but the fact is” or “as a matter of fact” three times in a three sentence answer as he was attacking Mitt Romney.  There’s a damn good reason for that the uppity pinheads at the University of Minnesota don’t know about.  Unless Rick Perry prefaces a sentence with, “The fact is,” he’s lying.  It’s the Perry Code.  Keep that in mind when listening to him speak.

Another example they give is his answer to Wolf Blitzer about the HPV mandate ….

“No, sir it wasn’t. It was very clear. It had an opt-out. And at the end of the day, this was about trying to stop a cancer and giving the parental option to opt out of that. And at the end of the day, you may criticize me about the way that I went about it, but at the end of the day, I am always going to err on the side of life. And that’s what this was really all about for me.”

“At the end of the day” means, “Good God people, get me outta here.  I need a nap.”

I just thought you folks from foreign states would want to know these things.

Thanks to MaryK for the heads up and the working title, “At the end of the day, the fact of the matter is, it’s the end of the day.”

My friend Tony is visiting in Taos today and swears this sign is in G. Robinson Old Prints & Maps.

That’s what I like about my customers.  We are a literate and well-traveled bunch.  I feel sure that Tony took this picture at Chief Bob’s Hoochy Trading Post but made up the whole map store thing to impress somebody.