Day: 9/1/2011

Fed Up? Rick Perry Sucks Up To AT&T And Vice Versa

Posted by on September 1, 2011 at 4:09 pm. 19 Comments :

A couple of weeks ago Rick Perry was caught on tape with a representative of Bank of America who offered a comforting message to the Texas governor saying that “We’ll help you out.” He wasn’t kidding.

Rick Perry

ThinkProgress documented the extent to which BofA had already provided abundant comfort to Perry. He has received over $125,000 from BofA’s PAC. He has received $4 million from the Republican Governor’s Association, to which BofA was a major contributor while Perry was its chairman. In exchange, Perry has been a stalwart advocate of deregulation for banking and financial services. He regards the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as unconstitutional.

But Bank of America is not Perry’s only CFF (Corporate Friend Forever) He is also intimate with AT&T. He recently endorsed the mega-merger between AT&T and T-Mobile (which the Justice Department recently announced it would challenge). I’m sure that had nothing to do with the $500,000 Perry has received from AT&T over the past decade.

In addition, the Dallas Morning News reported last December that AT&T bought 700 copies of Perry’s book, “Fed Up!” to distribute to attendees of an ALEC-sponsored luncheon. (Read more about ALEC)

“…the book purchase was arranged between [AT&T] and the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC], the conservative outfit that invited Perry to speak at its annual policy summit.

“A spokeswoman for the Exchange Council said the book order cost more than $13,000. AT&T said the sponsorship was meant to share Perry’s agenda with people who attended the summit, many of whom are state legislators from across the country.”

The relationship between Perry and AT&T, a Dallas-based corporation, raises many ethical and legal questions. Throw in a connection to ALEC and you have the makings of a world-class larcenous affair that suggests a slight modification to the AT&T slogan, “Rethink Ethical.”

This sort of pay-to-play politics is typical of the Perry regime in Texas. He has long run an operation out of the governor’s mansion that produced lucrative state contracts in exchange for political donations.

Rick Perry Pay-to-Play

Texas business as usual. And as I’ve said before “Perry is an evangelical huckster with no substantive record of achievement? He’s Elmer Gantry with a government job and gets his snake oil straight from the well.”

Fox Nation vs. Reality: On Tea Party Negatives

Posted by on September 1, 2011 at 12:30 pm. NO Comments :

Fox Nation continues to inhabit a universe that does not remotely resemble the real one that the rest of us inhabit. Take, for instance, this item posted today:

Fox Nation - Tea Party Negatives

So according to Fox Nation, the poll (from Quinnipiac) shows higher negatives for the Democratic Party (51-35) than the Tea Party (42-29), which, of course, doesn’t exist. That’s actually true, even if it isn’t a complete reading of the poll’s results (more on that later). What the Fox Nationalists omit from their sensationalist headline is that the Republican Party has even higher negatives (53-32) than the Democrats. The gap between the favorable and unfavorable numbers for the Democrats is 16%, while the gap for the GOP is much worse at 21%.

As for the Tea Party’s numbers, it is important to take into account a couple of significant factors. First of all, the survey reported that the number of people that have not heard enough about the Tea Party to have an opinion (29%) is about two and a half times more than for the Democrats and Republicans. Were that number lower, the negatives for the Tea Party would exceed those for the other parties based on the distribution of the Tea Party’s known numbers. Secondly, the Tea Party’s favorable numbers are lower than those for both the Democrats and Republicans.

The bottom line for this survey is that the numbers for the Democrats, while nothing to boast about, are better than either the Republicans or the Tea Party when fully analyzed. And that’s not quite the way the Fox Nationalists reported it – as usual.