New Media Competition To Define Rick Perry's Record

Long before Rick Perry made his presidential aspirations official, the Texas governor was using Twitter and other Internet new media channels to create his "Texas Miracle" mythology. It seems to be working as the Main Stream Media uncritically memes Perry's "Texas miracle" economic claims," even as it's clear that everything from how Texas is doing to whether or not Perry should be associated with that performance are highly debatable claims.

Now, though, progressive activists in Texas are starting to use new media strategies to counter Perry's "Texas Miracle" mythology. PerryForPresidentFML.com is a website that prompts visitors to tweet from a list of 50 less-than-flattering facts about the current Texas governor's record to their Twitter followers. The message on the website reads, in part:

"Now that conservative TX Gov Rick Perry has officially launched his Presidential campaign, it is important to remember the lasting legacy he will leave for Texas. After 25 years in public office and 10 years as the Governor, Perry has dramatically changed what Texas looks like for future generations."

Click below to go to the website to see the tweets:

Origins Of The 'Texas Miracle'

The cliché: A "Texas Miracle" is on the move. A phrase that once existed only between quotation marks is now migrating outside of them to become generally accepted vernacular. Back in 2008, Texas experienced muted effects during the recession, and during the recovery, faster job creation [- from one limited statistical perspective.]

Seven Ways Rick Perry Wants To Change The Constitution

Rick Perry has many ideas about how to change the American government's founding document. From ending lifetime tenure for federal judges to completely scrapping two whole amendments, the Constitution would see a major overhaul if the Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate had his druthers.

Perry laid out these proposed innovations to the founding document in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. He has occasionally mentioned them on the campaign trail. Several of his ideas fall within the realm of mainstream conservative thinking today, but, as you will see, there are also a few surprises.

Texas Unemployment Rate Hits Its Highest Mark Since 1987

As Gov. Rick Perry touts job creation and limited government on the campaign trail, the Texas’ unemployment rate tied a 1987 record in July and the Austin-area took the brunt of the state’s job losses in the public sector, according to the Texas Workforce Commission's latest workforce statistics report.

The Texas Workforce Commission on Friday termed the employment results “mixed” because the state added 29,300 jobs but the seasonally adjusted jobless rate increased from 8.2 percent in June to 8.4 percent last month.

Having the state tie a 24-year high for unemployment rate could be coming at just the wrong time for Perry. Perry has long called Texas a national jobs-creation leader in a country besieged by unemployment. He traveled through Iowa this week on a bus with “get America working again” painted on the side.

The latest unemployment numbers could weaken that message. The rate hasn’t been this high since the mid-1980s oil bust. And even though Texas has received numerous accolades for creating more jobs in recent years than any other state, 26 states had a lower unemployment rate in July.

The Texas rate is still lower than the country’s, which was 9.1 percent in July. But that gap is closing.

Sources: St. Louis Fed (U.S. jobs/U.S. unemployed).
Texas Workforce Commission (employed and unemployed)
graph from dailykos.com

Economic Myths: Separating Fact From Fiction

Americans are hearing a cacophony of arguments about the wobbly economy. The federal stimulus package passed in 2009 was either a deficit-busting failure full of wasteful projects or an unparalleled rescue that would have been more successful if it had only been bigger.

Taxes are either stifling or the lowest they've ever been.

America needs to invest in infrastructure, or "infrastructure" is merely a euphemism for more government spending.

ProPublica published a guide to the most prevalent economic myths.

Rick Perry's "The Response" A Lesson In Political Community Organizing

The American Family Association, one of the co-sponsors of Rick Perry's "The Response" prayer event, sent an email message to the 30,000 event attendees as the next step of community organizing to register and mobilize 5 million conservative Christians for the 2012 election.

One of the key motivations for holding community organizing event is to collect contact information from the people who attend the event so that a regular line of communication can be opened to further organize and mobilize them.

About 30,000 people attended "The Response" prayer event at Reliant Stadium in Houston in early August 2011. The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis, which Gov. Rick Perry promoted and which looked a lot like charismatic, evangelical church service, was a well planned and well executed community organizing event that collected a lot email addresses and no doubt a lot of cell phone numbers to text.

These days, there are myriad problems that affect, and sometimes frighten us. As individuals we often feel powerless to address the things that affect our our lives and our families. We often feel powerless to make changes, feeling stuck and often hopeless. We don’t think that we have the power to make a difference. Community organizing is a process that empowers people to recognize and honor their individual and collective voices by working together to transform their communities.

Former State Department Official Matthew Hoh Talks About Afghanistan

By LINDA MAGID Published: August 18, 2011 @ 3:18pm

Matthew Hoh, who in 2009 famously quit his State Department post in Afghanistan to protest U.S. strategy there, spoke on August 11^th as part of the Dallas Peace Center’s dinner lecture series, and he didn’t mince words about how he thinks the war in Afghanistan is going.

“Afghanistan is a disaster.”

Hoh is a former Marine Corps captain who served six years in Iraq and worked as a civilian for the Department of Defense in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, he is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and the Director of the Afghanistan Study Group. “I agree with (U.S.) objectives. The problem is our policy will not achieve those objectives,” Hoh said.

To an audience of about 50 people, Hoh shared the “cold, hard facts” about Afghanistan and proved in simple terms that the Middle Eastern nation continues to be a graveyard of empires.

Background On Rick Perry's Claim "The Earth Is Cooling"

It would be nice if the myth of global cooling was a fringe theory among even a few legitimate climate scientists. Unfortunately, it's not!

Democracy Now! Headlines For August 18, 2011

DemocracyNow.org - This is a summary of news headlines from the United States and around the world as reported by Democracy Now! on Thursday, August 18, 2011.

NYT OpEd: Crashing the Tea Party

Professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam wrote an OpEd in the New York Times detailing that the Tea Party movement is made up largely of ultra-religious conservatives who insist America is a “Christian nation:”

Tea Partiers ... seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates.

...The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government. This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

...It is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics.

Now that America is catching on to this fact, the Tea Party people are much less popular than other groups who largely seek to mind their own business:

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

So, the Tea Party "movement" is now officially less popular among Americans than Muslims.

Ultra-right social conservatives often accuse "liberals" of undermining the Christian nation values.

But leading conservative strategist Karl Rove called the notion that the U.S. is a Christian nation “offensive” during a Fox News interview. “We are based on the Judeo-Christian ethic, we derive a lot from it, but if you say we’re a Christian nation, what about the Jews, what about the Muslims, what about the non-believers? I mean, one of the great things about our country is that the first amendment gives you right to believe or not believe as you choose."