Rick Perry vs World

12 April 2010

Rick Perry for President?

I don't get the state media's obsession with promoting the idea that Rick Perry is running for president.

What evidence do we have of this? Running for president is a 2+ year job these days. The folks running are largely already planning how they want to do it. Mitt Romney is already organizing for straw polls.

Yet the Texas media is obsessed with it. Is it to sell papers and magazines? I guess some promote it because they think it will hurt Perry?

But there's not alot of evidence out there. Let's review what evidence we have.
1. I haven't heard a single rumor that Perry is telling people, "maybe" or "we'll keep the door cracked just in case."
2. Perry asked that his name be taken off the SRLC straw poll.
3. He did the same thing at Value Voters '09.
4. He turned down an invite from the Iowa Republican Party to speak up there.
5. Endorsing Rudy Giuliani. This is not a smart move from someone who is planning a future run for president.
6. The legislative session runs until mid-year.

So what's left? An "I'm mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!" run? Well, maybe, but I think someone will probably try to grab that particular message...and it's probably not a message that even gets you the VP slot.

I just don't see it. There's not enough time that after the legislative session Perry can turn around and say, "hey, I'm running for president." So, for me, the bottom line is: Rick Perry 1) says he isn't running, 2) says he doesn't want to run, 3) is taking no steps to run, and 4) will have some significant logistical steps if he tries to run.

To be honest, the only people who seem really convinced that Perry is running for president are people who work for Bill White.

Posted by Evan @ 04/12/10 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

Had Chris Bell already announced for dogcatcher?

Peggy Fikac:

There's no Democrat running against GOP state Comptroller Susan Combs, who reaped consumer complaints and bad headlines when an appliance rebate program's phone line and Web site couldn't keep up with the demand (her office demanded a performance review from the company that got an $876,525 state contract to handle the program.)

Sure, names were floated for the Democratic nod -- former congressmanNick Lampson, state Rep. Mike Villarreal of San Antonio and even Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-2006 independent gubernatorial candidate (and former comptroller)Carole Keeton Strayhorn -- but no one pulled the trigger.

"There was a lot of effort made to recruit a candidate for comptroller," said Democratic strategist Ed Martin, who said either Lampson or Villarreal would have been good.

Nick Lampson and Chris Bell will run for just about anything. When you can't get out-of-work career politicians after lots of effort, maybe Matt Angle's recruiting isn't up to snuff. Or maybe he was just spending too much time recruiting Linda Chavez-Thompson.

Posted by Evan @ 04/12/10 06:53 PM | Comments (0)

Punish your friends, reward your enemies: Germany

Dirk KurbjuweitDer Spiegel

Angela Merkel is traveling across America this week. It's a country she loves, but the German chancellor is still having trouble connecting with Barack Obama. Her political style couldn't be any more different from that of the US president. She's fighting to prevent the US from disregarding or dominating the Europeans.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is traveling around the United States this week. She loves the country, but she has a few problems with its president, Barack Obama. Her political style is vastly different from that of the US president, but she also has something else to contend with: Washington's disregard for and attempts to dominate Europeans.

That last sentence made me laugh. Europeans once longing for Bush's presidency to be over are now learning an age old lesson: be careful what you wish for.

Posted by Evan @ 04/12/10 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

09 April 2010

Perry speaks at SRLC, asks not to be on straw poll

I find it strange that in an article titled "Perry speech fuels 2012 talk," Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune didn't mention that Perry specifically requested to have his name left off the presidential straw poll.

Posted by Evan @ 04/09/10 06:43 PM | Comments (0)

Texas Watchdog stories

* Mark Lisheron at Texas Watchdog reports on our federal deficit at work:

If the people of Bedford, Texas, are still borrowing whatever they are calling books in 72 years, they may find themselves in the public library on the very day the energy saved by the library's planned solar power system finally equals the cost to build it.

The solar plant in Bedford, between Fort Worth and Dallas, would not have been built at all without a nearly $2 million Department of Energy stimulus grant.

The same could be said of nearly all the other 31 projects in Texas given approval for stimulus funding by the State Energy Conservation Office.

* Meanwhile, Steve Miller at Texas Watchdog finds that

South Texas is rife with agents from local political camps who prosper by organizing mail-in ballot fraud, elections administrators and other observers in the region say, even after a state-level push to curb the wrongdoing.

Signatures requesting ballots and signing ballots were different. Yikes.

Posted by Evan @ 04/09/10 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

Odds and Ends

* That post below took a surprising amount of time. This is why bloggers are so prone to snarky comments, I guess. And while I frequently criticize journalists, it underscores the need for original writing. That's why I try to put journalists names in posts and avoid over-excerpting.

* Dave Berri's first book (see interview) has probably kept my interest in the NBA alive significantly more than it would have been. I remember getting so annoyed at reading in the paper things like "Jordan leads Bulls with 24" and then seeing that he took 26 shots. My metric for the time was 1 shot (with 2 free throws equaling a shot) needed to bring at least a point, on average. This seemed obvious to me but was missing from all popular commentary. I was glad to see that my boxscore musings were close to being right.

I'm excited that Berri is doing research on soccer. If I had money right now or was a partner in a private equity fund, I would buy one of the English teams (Portsmouth essentially recently sold for assumption of debt if I recall correctly) and bring statistics into every aspect of the club's sporting operation. If successful, the branding from becoming a big club could be worth a billion dollars. I actually have something of a team of people in mind.

* I wrote a post off-line in Spanish, we'll see if I get around to typing it up. Maybe I should put something provocative in there to see if anyone actually reads it?

* Currently in the works is a magazine-length piece. Not sure if I'll post it here, try to sell it, or not ever get around to finishing it because I don't have time. It's about a specific special interest in Texas Politics; I think it'll be a pretty good story if I get it done.

Posted by Evan @ 04/09/10 06:51 AM | Comments (0)

Bill White is recycling Hutchison's attacks on Perry

Jared Janes in McAllen's Monitor:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White criticized Gov. Rick Perry for a high school dropout rate in Texas that White says hampers economic growth.

The gubernatorial hopeful said 30 percent of Texas high school students don't graduate within four years, limiting the state's workforce pool.

That sounded awfully familiar to me. It was a common theme for Hutchison's speeches.

She said she wants to move to Austin to combat a 30 percent high school drop out rate that imperils Texas' ability to attract next-generation jobs.

It's not true. Although I've been critical of Politipinion, they published solidly researched report.

First, researchers and governments have many different ways of measuring how many students leave school before graduating. Analyzing different data with different methods yields statistical results that vary -- a lot. To add to the confusion, any of those measurements might be termed the "dropout" rate in public discourse, depending on who is wielding the terminology.

Hutchison's campaign pointed us to several news stories that quoted the nonprofit Intercultural Development Research Association in San Antonio, which has its roots in the legal fight for school funding equity.

In other words, not exactly a disinterested just-the-facts group, but one with a predisposition to see things negatively. Politipinion's summary:

Our conclusion? If you ask how many Texas students drop out of school, you'll get wildly different answers. In our own analysis, we found dropout rates that range from 3 percent (the one-year rate) to 33 percent (the attrition rate), and each one had its defenders.

Hutchison's dropout reference is based on student attrition, a simplistic measurement that is not the way the state prefers to count dropouts but is nevertheless accepted by some experts.

To quote Janes again:

A study released last year by Texas A&M University�s Bush School of Government and Public Service projected the dropout rate for the class of 2012 to be 12.2 percent to 22.2 percent -- or 40,519 to 73,692 students -- using the various measures.

Nonetheless, since Hutchison used this line of attack for awhile, lowering the drop out rate is something we can all agree on. Surely Bill White has a plan to lower the dropout rate, right?

Er...no, according to Gary Scharrer's reporting.

White, the son of public school educators, conceded there is no single or easy answer to the problem.

"You need to start early with early childhood education," he said. "You need to offset summer learning loss (programs) for those elementary school kids who do not have access to books and computers at home during the summer. You need to have more flexible programs that accommodate and support those students in their attempt to graduate who must work when they are in high school."

I got 3 things out of that: 1) spend more money on early childhood education, 2) do something about summer learning loss, and 3) flexible programs to keep kids in school.

That's not really a serious proposal, it's a few off-the-cuff suppositions. Bill White's supporters continually impute that the former mayor is a first-order wonk, but if so, where's the beef?

Spending more money on early childhood education is theoretically a great thing, but if I recall correctly, most studies show gains evaporating long before students make it to high school. In other words, it probably makes more sense to make the schools that we have work before adding more years of ineffective schooling. In a world of limited resources, we need to choose programs that work.

As to summer learning loss, if I recall correctly studies fairly solidly show that the loss over the summer is mostly felt by students from low-income households. The only thing likely to have any impact is year-round schooling, and while 10-year-old-Evan can't believe what he is hearing from me, it's probably something worth looking at because it might actually be effective, especially in some school districts. And improving education for the poor would be HUGE. But of course, White didn't propose that. And let's be honest, anything short of that isn't going to change anything.

As for flexible programs to keep kids in school? Scharrer reports that Perry already proposed that:

Perry advocates "virtual high schools" to keep students in school.

"Give them the flexibility to be able to stay in high school. And I really like the idea of using the incentive that if you are of high school age and you are not either in a bricks-and-mortar or a virtual high school that you will not get a driver's license. It will be directly connected to whether or not you are in a school working toward getting that diploma," Perry said.

I remember Paul Burka arguing that this was a horrible proposal. I'm not convinced: it's an attempt to keep would-be dropouts within the system, and hopefully funnel them into virtual high school which help them make progress towards a GED. I think whether it turns out well or bad would largely depend on the incentives given. But it is a more serious proposal to combat the dropout rate than anything that Bill White has proposed to date.

Posted by Evan @ 04/09/10 12:56 AM | Comments (2)

Rick picks up a Kay education idea?

Do you remember when Kay Bailey Hutchison proposed putting Kindles in the classroom? Sounds like the Governor liked her idea. Kelley Shannon, AP:

Gov. Rick Perry proposed Wednesday that Texas abandon using traditional textbooks in public schools and replace them with computer technology.

"I don't see any reason in the world why we need to have textbooks in Texas in the next four years. Do you agree?" Perry asked participants at a computer gaming education conference in Austin.

During his wide-ranging speech, the governor offered some new ideas for boosting student performance and defended his education record.

I'll admit that when I heard Kay proposing a Kindle, I thought: what? But it would make it substantially easier to keep textbooks up to date. Plus with the capability of accessing the internet, teachers could potentially bring in current events to make things up-to-the-minute and relevant.

Sounds like Perry liked Hutchison's idea.

Posted by Evan @ 04/09/10 12:05 AM | Comments (0)

08 April 2010

Espanol para todos

I'm thinking of writing blog posts in English and Spanish, mostly for the fun of it. Maybe also because of the folks who would get angered by it.

Posted by Evan @ 04/08/10 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

Losing an election isn't an easy thing

Rick v Kay writes:

[Kay's behavior towards Rick] is a really weird situation... usually the loser has to grovel and beg for forgiveness and suck up to the winner... but in this case the loser Kay is acting a little like a sore loser.

I'm not so sure it's abnormal, and from Kay's position she has very little on the line personally, while she . She'll probably do an event eventually, because if she completely sits it out and Perry loses by a nose, she will lose some friends and alot of respect. But I don't think too many people begrudge her taking a little time -- although Hutchison immediately endorsed Perry...which is a pretty classy move after losing an election.

And George W. Bush didn't exactly grovel to McCain, but I seem to recall that he ate a little bit of crow and played nice to John McCain in 2000. Of course, the media was also quite fixated on the Bush and McCain relationship.

Posted by Evan @ 04/08/10 06:32 AM | Comments (0)

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