Bill Maher threw potential GOP presidential candidate and current Governor of Texas Rick Perry under the bus and ran over him a few times during his New Rules segment on Real Time With Bill Maher this week.
MAHER: And finally New Rule, if you think the Republican presidential candidates can't possibly get any lamer, then you haven't met the new Republican flavor of the month, Rick Perry. If you're not familiar with Rick, he took over as governor of Texas from George W. Bush, who's now referred to as “the smart one.” Rick carries a gun even when he's jogging. He wears cowboy boots with a suit, and the boots say, “come and take it”, which sounds kind of gay to me.
And he threw such a tantrum when Obama won, he actually talked about Texas seceding from the union, because that's what America needs; a President of the United States who's not really sold on the whole “United States” concept.
Now, last week, Rick Perry announced that he rented out a 70,000 seat football stadium in Houston, for something called the response, which sounds like a home pregnancy test, but actually is to quote the governor “a Christian prayer service to provide spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face as a nation.”
Or as stadium employees are calling it, batshit day. I guess the idea is to get together in a big group and pray all at once. That way the signal is stronger and god doesn't lose you when he's going through a canyon.
But here on planet reality, may I point out that there is no such thing as spiritual solutions to national problems. If that's where we are as a country, if our official government policy is “yee haw... Jesus take the wheel!” then we're dead already.
On his JesusPalooza web site, Perry writes, there is hope for America. It lies in heaven and we will find it on our knees. He also says some beyond our power to solve. What?!
I thought we were the can do people. And if Perry thinks only god can solve our problems, why is he even in government? Why doesn't he just stay at home and light a bunch of candles like Sissy Spacek's mom in Carrie?
Here's an opposing view. Not only are our problems NOT beyond our power to solve, they're actually fairly easy to solve. You have a giant budget deficit, like Perry has in Texas, raise taxes.
Federal tax revenues haven't been this low since 1950 and THAT, plus two wars and a recession are the reason we have a huge deficit. It's not because god is angry over the gay kissing on Glee.
It doesn't require prayer to solve it, it requires a calculator.
Politicians like to say, “We need new ideas.” Bullshit. “New ideas” is just a secular version of spiritual solutions, someone who's going to magically fix everything. What new idea is going to solve our health care crisis, a magic pill that makes obese children crap out gold bricks?
We don't need new ideas. We need the balls to implement the ideas we already know work, cut corporate welfare, slash the defense budget, tax the rich, support the strong unions that created a middle class in the first place, build infrastructure and take the profit out of health care.
By the way, Rick Perry isn't just talking when he says he has spiritual solutions. Back in April when faced with a devastating drought, Rick did what any solutions oriented, 21st century civil servant would do.
He proclaimed a day of prayer for rain, because we're ancient Mayans now.
Here's what Texas looked like back in April with the drought in red. And here's the Eden it is here today. If the words of Sister Mary Ignatius, god answers all your prayers and sometimes the answer is no.
The key to what Bill says is that we need the BALLS to do what works. We know what works and the obstructionists know it works...that's why they're fighting it so hard. You see, they stand to a lose a little money short and long term if our nation gets back to a good place for the middle class.
That's the unpatriotic part about the whole thing. Those with money and power are selfishly wrecking our country and could not care less about the whole.
OVARIES are needed too.
n/t
naughty bits?
"that's the secret password that we use down at the club"
Then Perry prayed for rain. And ours went away after a pretty wet early May. Takes a while to grease the wheels of heavenly answer-giving.
"Courtesy is owed. Respect is earned. Love is given." --Unknown author, found in Guide to Texas Etiquette by Kinky Friedman
.. and totally unacceptable to 30-40% of the electorate?
It took me a loooooonnggg time to figure out that the Evangelical Approach to Problem Solving [EAPS] is praying hard and working harder to make everyone else live by their moral code so their Big Buddy In The Sky [BBITS] would reward 'murka and the 'murkins with everything we want at x-mas.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Nothing.
And yet these simpletons vote.
And hold pancake breakfasts at the local churches on election day, and make sure grampa in a wheelchair and great auntie with her walker all get rides to the polling place.
And it's not just national elections. It's the school board election and the local sheriff election and the county supervisor election and the town council and the state legislators.
They are droids and they are legion.
When will government of the people, by the politicians, for the corporations perish from this Earth?
Not soon enough!
(Sigh) ... I know. And that makes more work for us, but we have to do it. We just can't give up completely.
or seceding?
If you need funds to pay for essentials, you have a revenue problem
If you need funds to pay for frivolity, you have a spending problem
With all the idiot politicians that Texas has given us---Dubya and Louis (Gomer) Gomert, come to mind--Jefferson Davis Perry's secession wouldn't be a problem.
Let 'em go, but keep the Federal dollars poured into Texas. It would be the ultimate irony if Mexico reclaimed Texas, that would make Perry's white anti-immigrant bigots the minority!
Democratic Party progressive, Vietnam veteran and proud Union member for 41 years
http://www.theonion.com/articles/texas-constr...
Thanks for saying; fixed.
That was great.
I wish he had mentioned Perry being angry at Obama for not providing FEMA aid to Texas fast enough while declaring that Texas didn't need aid from the government, but Maher only had five minutes and Perry has enough batshit to fill an hour.
I'm pretty sure that was Kay Bailey Hutchinson (or what ever her name was).Nope, I was wrong. They are all crazy though, and I have the great privilege of living in this dump so it all sounds the same to me.
Whenever I hear about Perry, I remember author and columnist Molly Ivins, who died from breast cancer in January 2007 at the age of only 62 -- so young for a writer and thinker.
She always referred to him as "Rick 'Good Hair' Perry," and had the OVARIES to challenge the powerful Texas political establishment with her brilliant writing.
She would have loved the current scene, and would have shredded the slate of ridiculous poseurs that the Republicans have put forth. I still miss her.
she kicked ass. with a smile.
Me too! Her books were terrific.
If I were a psychopath, I would join the republican party, and get in on the gravy train taking the Teabircher morons to the cleaners.
Not yet, at least not the thug type.
Texas is just Mississippi with bigger cities.
. . . about economics. He routinely allows the conservative asshats he invites - including the two on his panel last night - to make up stuff, and is incapable of rebuking them.
Case in point - one of his guests suggested that Paul Krugman was a hypocrite for criticizing Bush for excessive deficits but not Obama. Bill let it pass. But Krugman isn't a hypocrite he's a Keynesian, which means you pay down debt when times are good (like Bush's first year, when Clinton left him a surplus) and run deficits when times are bad in order to keep the economy afloat. The problem, the, isn't deficits - its what you do when you're flush.
stop supporting the myth that the conservative party has been anything but destructive to our country? The only reason most of these asshats claim to have any credibility is because we all choose to pretend that the "80s was a time of great prosperity--hey, let me cut a trillion dollars worth of hot checks and I could make it look like a huge economic recovery--the main reason we're in the economic quagmire we'll probably never recover from is because Reagan and the Republicans threw basic math out the window in the 1980s. I defy any of these rightwing candidates to demonstrate on paper how any of their plans to fix the economy will actually work. (it's our crappy luck that our President bought into the myth of the eighties too)
Did he use his personal funds? Taypayer money? PAC money?
Lame is a big understatement , way way way too nice Heather .
Insanity , it is what it is , there is no understanding it .
Add another turd to the heap ? Sure , why not ?
Insanity , it is what it is , there is no understanding it .
It could be that Goodhair is using a TI calculator to do his calculations, so let me tell you about Texas Instruments. At A&M the lost and found holds a semiannual auction of the things that were lost and turned in more than six months previously. Whenever a calculator comes up, if it is Casio, then the engineering students bid it up. If it's a TI, then the only people bidding are the education majors.
Once my son won a super duper TI model in a math contest. It lasted less than six months before some of the keys didn't work.
For this reason, it is possible that Goodhair screwed up his budget because his calculator didn't work.
More people need to be shouting about Texas' $27 billion budget deficit. That's billion with a "b". You'll never hear the mainstream media talk about it. But you will hear bucketloads about California...
-Crank
www.thebeardedcrank.com
Perry, like Michelle Bachmann, has shown up on the Glenn Beck show on Fox. This is not a so-what observation. The Republicans in the contest for President will not make a bid deal out of this, but we sure as heck need to make the point over and over again as either Perry or Bachmann gain support and start winning primaries, that these are extremist, far-right reactionaries.
"The antidote to bad speech is more speech." ~~J.S. Mill
I think a lot of low information voters are going to be much the wise after seeing the great GOP brain-fart of 2010 in action this year and next.
If I were a psychopath, I would join the republican party, and get in on the gravy train taking the Teabircher morons to the cleaners.
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