The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

There has been sustained job growth in Texas for 20 years and more. Long before Pistol Pete Perry showed up.

Much of the economic growth in Texes is due to immigration.

In El Paso, the a-hole of Texas, the effects of the national recession have been mitigated due to the heavy influx of immigration from Mexico which, in part has been due to the drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, it's sister city, and other parts of the state of Chihuahua.

While El Paso's poverty rate remains much higher than the national average, the rate is dropping -- the opposite of what is happening nationwide.
The ranks of the working poor climbed to the highest level since the 1960s, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report.
The poverty rate in the U.S. climbed to 14.3 percent last year, the bureau's report said. That means 43.6 million Americans now live in poverty. In 2008, 39.8 million Americans lived in poverty.
The report states that one in seven Americans lives in poverty. That is better than in El Paso, where one in four lives in poverty, according to the 2008 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau.
The current poverty rate in El Paso County is 25.2 percent. That is 4 percentage points lower than in 2005

Lots of media chatter about Neut's upcoming campaign trip to the heavily contested primary state of Hawaii (wink, wink).

Daniels says he has spoken to Ryan about a bid and encouraged him to run, but that they haven’t talked in the past couple of weeks. He disagrees with those who believe that the political calendar makes another entry too difficult. “It’s not too late. If it’s not too late for Rick Perry, it’s not to late for Paul. I’m a more-the-merrier kind of guy about the primary field. Absolutely there’s time.”

Daniels also dismisses concerns about Ryan’s age. “It didn’t stop the last guy,” he says, laughing. “This president would have a hard time arguing that Paul wouldn’t be a serious candidate.” When asked if that might be an object lesson, Daniels says no. “It’s a natural question but I think people would be reassured both by hearing him talk and by the people he’d put around him.”

Another prominent conservative reformer, Jeb Bush, also thinks Ryan should run.
“Paul Ryan would be a formidable candidate. I admire his substance and energy. Win or lose, he would force the race to be about sustained, job-creating economic growth and the real policies that can achieve it.”

Ryan has been receiving encouragement from his colleagues in the House for months. California congressman Devin Nunes, who has worked extensively with Ryan on entitlement reform and spending issues, has been pushing Ryan for months. So has John Boehner, according to two sources familiar with their conversations. Boehner has praised Ryan as a “natural candidate” to fellow House Republicans.

Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, a leading conservative in the House and head of the Republican Study Committee, is also bullish on a possible Ryan bid. “He'd certainly be an asset to the race. When Paul talks about Cut, Cap, and Balance as a key to solving America's debt problem, people get it.” The Weekly Standard

Jonathan Alter BREAKING: My sources say NJ Gov. Chris Christie is conducting focus groups in preparation for a possible run for president in 2012
8 minutes ago

Jonathan Alter
If Christie chooses to run, he would have wide support within the party and become the likely frontrunner for the GOP nom
4 minutes ago

Jonathan Alter
Christie would likely have the support of Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes and many in the business wing of the party.
2 minutes ago

There has been sustained job growth in Texas for 20 years and more.

One of the things Perry likes to talk about is how Texas leads the nation in job creation. But Paul Krugman in The New York Times calls this so-called economic miracle a myth.

Turns out the Texas unemployment rate is higher than in states like Massachusetts and New York and one in four Texans doesn't have health insurance. That's the highest rate in the nation.

Krugman writes that the idea of a Texas miracle comes from the economic effects of population growth. Because the population has been growing faster in Texas than the rest of the United States, job growth is also higher there than in other states.

And, because the rapid growth in the Texas workforce keeps wages low, lots of companies want to move production there.

Almost 10% of Texan workers earn minimum wage or less.

So what do Americans think of the Fed now? What inspired the question to Perry? And what gave him the confidence to start talking treason?
"I think it reflects two things," says Kohn. "One is that the economic recovery has been disappointing. The Fed has been trying to help the recovery along. But the efforts of the Fed and the government haven't been enough to put people back to work. So they look at the economy and think, surely, the government could have done better. They include the Fed in that sentiment. Two, I think it reflects a feeling that the Fed, through its actions in the crisis, helped the large banks and didn't do anything to help ordinary people."
Anger at the Fed, and mistrust in the Fed, did not spring up because Ron Paul willed it to. It's a reaction to failure.
"The Fed has become politicized," argues Allan Meltzer, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon and a historian of the central bank. "It's doing fiscal operations. It's doing a lot of things that the public doesn't like, like bailing out the banks. So it's unpopular, and deservedly so."

though he seems to be trying to not be so provocative for the time being....

A sharp divide has emerged between two leading Republican presidential candidates on the issue of climate change. While apparent front-runner Mitt Romney believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern, Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday called that “a scientific theory that has not been proven.”

Taking questions at the storied Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, N.H., Perry was asked about a passage in his book, “Fed Up!,” in which he expresses skepticism of the science behind global warming.



In the book, Perry writes that there has been “doctored data” and accuses former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his call to action on climate change, of being a “false prophet of a secular carbon cult.”

And it should be noted that Perry has refused to back down,

In the book, Perry writes that there has been “doctored data”

Rick Perry defends his climate change denial
Category: Creationism • Culture Wars • Policy and Politics
Posted on: August 17, 2011 11:00 AM, by Josh Rosenau

In his book Fed Up, Rick Perry came out solidly in the climate denial camp, repeating long-discredited claims of that the underlying science is fraudulent. ThinkProgress quotes him writing:

For example, they have seen the headlines in the past year about doctored data related to global warming. They know we have been experiencing a cooling trend, that the complexities of the global atmosphere have often eluded the most sophisticated scientists, and that draconian policies with dire economic effects based on so-called science may not stand the test of time. Quite frankly, when science gets hijacked by the political Left, we should all be concerned. …
And it’s all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight. Al Gore is a prophet all right, a false prophet of a secular carbon cult, and now even moderate Democrats aren’t buying it.

Perry was, it should be noted, Al Gore's Texas committee chairman when Gore ran for President in 1988. And Perry must have missed the headlines when about a dozen separate investigations refuted claims of "doctored data" or other manipulation. The claim of a "cooling trend" is easily refuted, as are claims that climate science is too hard or that climate change policy would be too hard.
But on the stump in New Hampshire, Perry doubled down, telling reporters:

I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we're seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They've been changing ever since the earth was formed.
But I do not buy into that a group of scientists who have in some cases found to be manipulating this information and the cost to the country and to the world of implementing these anticarbon programs is in the billions if not trillions of dollars at the end of the day. And I don't think, from my perspective, for America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective is more and more being put into question.

Note the careful phrasing "was formed" – a creationist dogwhistle in the midst of his climate change denying rant. Note, too, his return to the "it's just a theory" rhetoric pioneered by William Jennings Bryan in the era of the Scopes trial, and widely repeated by creationists and climate change deniers since then.
All of his substantive claims have been addressed long ago, but this isn't about substance. It's about claiming the "conservative white male" mantle of science denial, locking in that crucial demographic in a messy Republican primary battle.

For comparison, here's his recent answer to a question about evolution:

There are clear indications from our people who have amazing intellectual capability that this didn't happen by accident and a creator put this in place.
Now, what was his time frame and how did he create the earth that we know? I'm not going to tell you that I've got the answers to that. I believe that we were created by this all-powerful supreme being and how we got to today versus what we look like thousands of years ago, I think there's enough holes in the theory of evolution to, you know, say there are some holes in that theory.

Texas Freedom Network notes that Perry has called himself "a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect," adding that it should be taught in schools. He told a constituent:
Recognizing evolution is a theory, and not claimed by anyone to be more than that, the governor believes it would be a disservice to our children to teach them only one theory on the origin of our existence without recognizing other scientific theories worth consideration. Intelligent design is a concept that is gaining greater traction because it points to a notion that most people believe to be true: that we were created by an intelligent being who designed the human race with great detail and complexity.
To further that end, as TFN and Phil Plait point out, he's appointed 3 successive creationist chairs of the Texas Board of Education. In 2009, the Board added creationist and climate change denying rhetoric to state standards. This year, the board voted not to force creationism into science supplements, but didn't consider environmental science supplements, pushing that fight down the road.

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/08/rick_perry_defends_his_climate.php

. . . and that's not surprising, because there's been sustained migration into Texas long before Perry showed up. More people means more workers and consumers, which in turn means more jobs. When you look at employment and unemployment as a percentage of the population, nothing miraculous is happening in Texas jobs.