Friday Roundup - The Rick Perry We Know and Love

I know we've all been wondering what's happening with Rick Perry lately. He's seemed so concerned, so progressive, so uncharacteristically wholesome, that I speculated he had to be tempering his image for a national run in the newly mainstream, centrist American political environment. So when, after spending a week tying the privatization of the state lottery to finding a cure for cancer, he implied that the late Governor Ann Richards would be "proud" of the idea, I knew the old Perry was back.

State Senator Glenn Hegar is carving out some space for himself among the right by filing legislation to overturn Perry's executive order on the HPV vaccine. I'm starting to get the feeling that this is going to dominate several news cycles between now and May. I also feel like there probably won't be much of an actual resolution unless somebody puts a whole lot of juice into a big push for one side or the other. This may be a situation in which it will satisfy the players to simply have the argument.

The John Edwards Blogoflap is still underway, and this time Democrats are complaining. The Politico outlines some complaints hefted about by the Religious Left. My feeling is that everyone should probably calm down, but then again, my sense of humor doesn't include caveats for offense, so I'm probably a bad barometer for what is and is not acceptable.

When Texas makes it into the national press we always hope its for something good, like trying to cure cancer. However, this story in the Washington Post about Cactus, Texas is not. Rather, it is about how that small town's population was decimated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at Swift & Co. on December 12. I feel like if an illegal immigrant roundup ruins a town's whole economy, there's probably a larger problem at work and all you've done is treat a symptom. That larger problem has probably been at work for a while.

Republican State Senator Craig Estes represents me in the Legislature, so I was particularly shamed to learn about his proposed plan to build a Texas prison in Mexico.

After all, he figures, the inmates would be closer to home and they're going to be deported anyway when their sentences are complete, so the move would save taxpayers money.
"The plusses are that it's a heck of a lot less expensive to build and staff prisons down there," Sen. Craig Estes said. "They would be Texas quality and they'd roughly cost about half."

When asked about the plan, the guy chairing the committee that would consider the bill said not no, but...

"Hell no!" Sen. John Whitmire said. "It's pretty generally accepted it's unconstitutional and unworkable. It's interesting to talk about it, but Mexico prisons are dysfunctional."

State Representative Valinda Bolton got a committee assignment that makes sense. Bolton spent several years working in non-profits combating family violence and child abuse, and her role on the House Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee is a good fit for her, so I hope people listen. Bolton is also a friend of the show.

We don't engage in alarmism here at the Blue; we are, after all, professionals. However, the fact that so many people in Texas have the flu that some schools have been forced to totally shut down for a while is cause for concern. So, uh, EVERYBODY PANIC. Or go get a flu shot, which the CDC says there's still time for.

When a school board meeting is contentious enough for the Chron to tag it as "rowdy," I am sorry I missed it and demand a CCTV broadcast. Teachers are mad about incentive pay bonuses to the point of screaming about it. As they are tied to standardized test scores, this adds to the rancor and the overall argument against standardized tests.

Finally, and again from the Politico, this story about new Congressmen and their staffers moving in on Capital Hill is pretty revealing. I like stories like this because it adds another layer of awareness to how you think about government, how real people have to deal with the same junk you do as well as the added problems of saving Democracy, or whatever you're there for.