There are some of us here in Texas who are enjoying Rick Perry’s meteoric rise in the GOP standings.

The higher that rise, the bigger splat they make when they fall.  And he will fall.  And it will happen for one simple reason:  you simply cannot buy everybody.  There is not enough money.  And when you can’t buy everybody, you hack off those who don’t get paid.

Take for example, nuclear waste.  No, please, take it.  We don’t want it.

Texas governor Rick Perry tried to sideline a state commissioner who opposed expanding the scope of a nuclear-waste landfill owned by one of the governor’s biggest political donors, Reuters has learned.

Bobby Gregory, owner of a wildlife ranch and landfill company south of Austin, had opposed a plan to let 36 states send nuclear waste to a 1,338-acre site in Andrews County.

On the other side of the issue was billionaire Harold Simmons and his company Waste Control Specialists LLC, which stood to gain millions of dollars from accepting out-of-state shipments. Simmons had donated over $1 million to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns.

Now I am practically certain that even Bobby Gregory would admit that it might to cool to have the animals on your ranch glow in the dark and genetically mutate into something Martian-looking that Sarah Palin might want to shoot and hang on her wall, I am also practically certain that Bobby Gregory doesn’t want that animal to be his grandchildren.

Bobby Gregory and Friends

When Gregory, a member of the Texas Waste Commission,  began to object, Rick Perry tried to bribe him with a  “prestigious appointment as a regent of a state university.”  If Gregory took the appointment, he would have to resign from the board that makes the approval about the nuclear waste.

Bobby Gregory turned Rick down flat.  He also pleaded with his other commissioners —

“Without question in my mind this is too much, too soon, too fast, and I’ve added the caveat — if at all,” Gregory told the meeting. “It is beyond preposterous, it is beyond absurd,” that the commission should vote without reading over 5,000 public comments, he said.

He lost.  And then his term ran out and we got nuclear waste that we weren’t ready to accept.

Perry got the political donation, Harold Simmons got rich off the heath and safety of Texans, and Bobby Gregory got respect.  He’s the only one of he three who can take his reward to heaven with him.