Rick Perry (Governor Good Hair) is back to his old tactics now by promising to do what he said he would do four years ago. The problem now is finding a way to pay for his empty and shallow promises.

Perry now says that he will be fiscally conservative in his next term and that his priorities are (and have been, according to his account) education, health care and transportation.

Let’s take a look at these priorities and Perry’s stance on them:

1. Education was only a priority to Perry after Tom DeLay stuck his big head into state redistricting to keep Republicans in power for years to come. By having an unbelievable margin of control in both state houses, Perry was able to ram-rod his form of education finance reform through. The problem is, his education reform brought property tax cuts that the state cannot afford.

From the Houston Chronicle today we have:

And the GOP chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee noted lawmakers next year will need to come up with billions of dollars to pay for a cut in local school property tax rates approved this year.

His own stinking party is sweating his plan. How crazy is this? The school finance system needed to be fixed, that is for sure. But the plan put forth by Perry is fiscally irresponsible.

2. Health Care is not a priority for Rick Perry. It never has been and never will be. He is too closely aligned with the lobbyists representing HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies. According to the Dallas Morning News, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state at 25%. He has tinkered with Medicaid enhancements over the years, but has really done nothing to correct the uninsured problem.

There have been attempts by Perry and Washington Republicans to tie the debate for health care woes in Texas to illegal immigration, but the DMN article indicates otherwise:

Uninsured Americans don’t get the preventive medical care they need. Once they’re really sick, they enter the health care system through the most expensive pathway – hospital emergency rooms – where their treatment tends to be passed on to insured patients and taxpayers.

Undocumented workers, particularly from Mexico, are often seen as the major reason that uninsured patients cost everyone else so much money. Last month, Parkland Memorial Hospital estimated uninsured illegal immigrants are costing $22.4 million a year.

But in fact, working Texans, not immigrants, are the vast majority of the state’s uninsured.

“Seventy percent are U.S.-born, 6 percent are nationalized, and the rest are immigrants – a large percentage of whom are documented,” Dr. Malinow said. “So to say the problem of the uninsured in Texas is a problem of the undocumented or even of all immigrants is really not true.”

The article concludes by pointing out that uninsured medical treatment cost [Dallas County Hospital] Parkland $410 million in 2005, with illegal immigrants representing only $22.4 million of that number (5.5%). That is a clear demonstration that Perry has done very little about health care, and gives us little hope that he is serious about it now.

But Perry’s real priority, transportation, is likely his worst political strategy.

3. Transportation in the mind of Rick Perry means creating lucrative deals with big construction companies to build a network of massive toll roads that criss-cross Texas. Toll roads are a poor decision on the part of the governor because it creates an additional tax on taxpayers, and is more harmful to those citizens who can’t afford another form of taxation. As we just witnessed, 25% of our citizens work in such low-paying jobs that they cannot get health insurance. How does Perry expect people to afford the expansion of toll roads? It would be one thing if new roads were constructed to ease congestion and made into toll roads, but the Perry plan takes existing highways and converts them back into toll roads as a way to pay for additional construction on a different road entirely. So, if you are in South Dallas Perry wants to convert certain roads into toll roads and use those funds for highway projects in North Dallas. That is just not fair and it’s not ethical.

At the peak of this toll road plan is Perry’s beloved TransTexas Corridor system. The Houston Chronicle recently detailed the plans of the road after a court ruled that the state must release all records of negotiations with private contractors to build the system:

Perry announced the corridor plan in 2002, calling for a $175 billion, 4,000-mile limited-access transportation network built mostly with private dollars for profit but owned by the state.

 

TTC-35 generally would run east of Interstate 35 from Oklahoma to Mexico and would include an $8.8 billion toll road from Oklahoma to San Antonio.

The proposal has received continual criticism, despite efforts by TxDOT to reassure the public.

Farmers and ranchers have expressed concern that their property would be divided or taken by eminent domain.

Local officials feared that the corridor would draw business away from existing routes.

Others were concerned that negotiating a 50-year contract for a project of such size was being done behind the scenes.

Despite its bulk — 1,600 pages — and the numerous maps included, the master plan does not include the actual route of TTC-35.

 

TxDOT says that will depend on the same federally required environmental process, including public hearings, as any other road project.

If all the hurdles are jumped, TxDOT says, construction could begin in 2011.

Because the master plan supersedes earlier “conceptual” development and financial plans that TxDOT declined to reveal in March 2005, these were released Thursday as well.

The Houston Chronicle and others had filed open-records requests to see the documents, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed they should be released.

TxDOT and Cintra-Zachry then sued Abbott, asking an Austin court to exempt the plans from disclosure on grounds that they would reveal proprietary information, give competitors unfair advantage and have a “chilling effect” on future proposers’ willingness to reveal their ideas.

The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday by agreement.

The campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate and state Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn had urged that the plans be made public.

Strayhorn said Gov. Rick Perry had “fought to keep Texans in the dark and his contract with a foreign-owned company to build toll roads across Texas a secret.”

Perry’s plan for transportation has all of the same characteristics of Dick Cheney’s energy plan of 2001 that to this day remains top secret.

For all this governor claims that he wants to accomplish, there is little reason believe that he will do any of it in an ethcical way, and even less evidence that he will do anything that is in the best interest of the vast majority of Texans.

According to a piece in the Houston Chronicle today, less than 125 donors account for 40% of all money raised in the Texas governor’s race so far, with those contributions ranging between $50,000 and $850,000. This astonishing figure highlights how influential just a few people are how only the rich get a chance to control elections and what legislative agendas are set.  Who stands to gain the most from these contributions? 

The governor [Rick Perry] has raised nearly $13 million over the past two years. About one-third of that came from 75 donors who gave $50,000 or more. This year’s legislative and gubernatorial elections in Texas are pivotal for the average Texan, simply because so much is at stake when it comes to healthcare, product and company liability, and property rights as they relate to land-grabs for the TransTexas Corridor highway. For the GLBT community, this election is critical since same-sex couples wishing to adopt children will most likely see their rights stripped further in the next legislative session. Who stands to profit the most from this agenda? Fewer than 125 people apparently. 

Chris Bell, the Democratic candidate for governor has raised a paltry $2 million with seven individuals or committees accounting for roughly one-third of that amount. (Naturally democrats represent the forgotten who can barely afford to buy gas and groceries, so contributing to the expensive political process is out of the question.) 

What is it with elected Republicans in understanding that people have the right to assemble and listen to their “leaders” speak? The Rove-driven White House has made it a common practice to keep those who have different views or opinions from the President (or VP, or Secretary of Defense, etc.) away from public events.

Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to be dancingto the same tune these days. On Tuesday the Governor was in North Texas to attend the dedication of a new highway in Denton and Collin counties. The public event was staged at a nearby middle school where Perry appeared with numerous elected officials from the local muncipalities and counties. The Democratic candidate for Denton County Commissioners Court, Amy Manual, was barred by security at the door.

The public has a right to see their leadership in public venues. The public also has a right to challenge the leadership in an open forum. The Republicans obviously understand this very clearly and obviously wish to remove another set of rights from the electorate.

Rick Perry has ordered a special election to replace Tom DeLay in the U.S. House. After months of saying that he would not hold a special election the Governor has had a change of heart and has ordered that the election take place on November 7.

Perry says that his change in heart came after all legal avenues to remove DeLay’s name from the Nov. 7 general election ballot ended in defeat for Republicans resulting in a massive write-in campaign to elect his replacement.

DeLay, who resigned in June, was elected in the March primary as the Repblican candidate. But since he resigned after the primary the courts have ruled that his name must remain on the ballot. DeLay argued that since he no longer lived in Texas, much less the district he represented, he should not be permitted to stay on the ballot. The courts, rightfully, acknowledged that DeLay’s case was no different than if the candidate died between the primary and the general election.

As a result of this wrangling, the GOP was forced to mount a write-in campaign to elect a Republican to the seat. The problem here is that the method of voting within DeLay’s district is electronic. Entering a write-in candidate on the ballot is very confusing since the space is limited to 25 characters (including spaces and hyphens), and the voter must enter the candidates name in completely. The local GOP managed to filter their choice down to a Houston city council member. Her name? Shelley Sekula-Gibbs.  Actually having voters remember the correct spelling and hyphenation will be a long shot at best.

In a show of how desperate the GOP is to keep this seat in the red,  Rick Perry has now decided to hold a special election in which Shelley Sekula-Gibbs’ name will actually appear printed on a ballot. So, when voters go to the poll on November 7 in DeLay’s district they will need to vote twice.

The special election move is a stroke of genius, politically speaking, since it helps voters remember the write-in candidate’s name. But from a citizen view, Rick Perry is an absolute mess. He has denied the people of the Sugar Land district representation in the U.S. House long enough, and until the legal options ran out he was fully prepared to leave that seat open until next January. Proving again that Perry does not care about the people, he only cares about his own political aspirations. In fact, given Perry’s record on everything (which is nothing really), I would say that he has done a remarkable job of failing Texas just as W failed Texas and now the United States.

Wake up America!