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June 05, 2015 01:27 PM UTC

Welcome To The Clown Car, Rick Perry

  • 14 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
So many candidates.
Your 2016 dance card is filling up fast.

CNN:

This time, Rick Perry has nowhere to go but up.

Four years after his first presidential campaign was crushed by the weight of his debate gaffe and stump speech mishaps, the governor who spent 14 years presiding over Texas launched his second bid for the Republican nomination on Thursday.

“I’m running for the presidency of the United States,” Perry said at a sweltering rally in Addison, Texas, where the former governor and his guests on stage could be seen sweating profusely at the midday event…

Perry’s speech at Addison Airport outside Dallas — delivered without pause for more than 20 minutes even as sweat dripped down his face — focused primarily on foreign policy, which has been his calling card of late on the stump. His GOP competitors emerging from the U.S. Senate have looked down on the class of governors for lacking that foreign policy experience.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Rick Perry’s disastrous 2012 campaign may well have left him with “nowhere to go but up,” but it’s very tough to see things going better enough this year to make a difference. Rick Perry’s endorsement was worth approximately squat to Colorado gubernatorial loser Bob Beauprez last year, and Perry has few friends even in Texas after 14 long years of intraparty infighting and scandal as governor. If that wasn’t enough, Perry is still fighting a felony indictment by a grand jury over an alleged attempt to bully the state’s public integrity investigations office.

Our state is expected to factor heavily in everyone’s campaigns next year, so we expect Perry to move quickly to set up shop in Colorado. You might remember that in 2012, Perry’s Colorado chairman was none other than Rep. Mike Coffman–who praised Perry’s labeling of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” and sat quietly while Perry ran ads bemoaning the fact that gays can serve “openly” in the military. Neither of those messages we think would help either Perry or Coffman today.

We’ll be watching to see if New Perry® has learned anything from New Coffman®.

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14 thoughts on “Welcome To The Clown Car, Rick Perry”

  1. we shouldn't take Republican ridiculousness and radicalism for granted, nor use it as a major part of our policy or strategy decisions. Less stupid than the other guys is not quite the standard we want.

    1. Let's put this idiot mobile in one of Newt's magic rockets, dump the moon colony idea and send these yahoo's deep in to space to Titan.  From there they can drill their way to prosperity..

    2. No it doesn't in any meaningful way for the simple reason that it's completely straightforward about what it is and isn't and has worked as promised for decades. It is not an investment program. Those paying in fund those collecting. That's how it was set up. No false claims were made about how it works. The pattern of distribution of the paid in funds is nothing like that inherent in Ponzi schemes which is why it has worked not just for those few starting it up but has and continues to work exactly as promised for millions over decades. It's our governments longest lived successful program.

      Despite dire warnings it has been there for everyone who has payed in, completely un-Ponzi like. It was there for my grandparents, parents, husband and will be there for me. It hasn't and needn't collapse as Ponzi schemes always do. The most logical, fair way to keep it running just as it has successfully for decades would be to get rid of, or even just significantly raise, the cap so that high income earners aren't paying only a tiny proportion of their income compared to everyone else. Do that and there's no reason why it can't work for my generation's children and beyond.

      Investments of your own money are great. Savings are great. But they can and have been wiped out, sometimes in real Ponzi schemes perpetrated by supposedly respectable financial institutions. So far the benefits people collect from the social security fund have always been there for them, as promised, funded by earners paying in. I've never heard of a Ponzi scheme that has accomplished anything but the opposite of that. The results continue to be the opposite of the results of Ponzi schemes. That's what matters.

      1. B.C., It has worked as a "pay it forward system" for so long that people forget that it wasn't actually quite set up that way. People also forget what happened to the millions of dollars that had accumulated in Social Security accounts between1932 and 1960. We spent it on NASA and the Space Race. They needed a great deal of money immediately and it wasn't in the Federal budget.There was that enormous pile of cash that, at the time wasn't really needed to pay extant retirees. So the Feds wrote an I.O.U. to Social Security, spent the money to build rockets, and turned retirement security into the pay it forward system we have today. My mom remembers hearing President Kennedy's speech explaining why the change was necessary. At that time, they actually believed the government would be able to pay back the money. 

        1. Raiding social security has long been a DC pastime but it was set up from the start as a system funded by the taxes paid in. In that sense it was always pay it forward, present workers paying taxes which provided the benefits for retirees. In the beginning that was pretty much it. Other benefits were added such as survivors benefits and the rest. It was never a system in which you got back the proceeds of the money you put in as you would a personal investment earning interest.  And it was never a Ponzi scheme in which the money goes back from the growing base to the individual or group who initiated the plan. How the government has chosen to treat the proceeds is a different issue.  Whatever shenanigans the government has pulled the promise has always been met. Those who claimed decades ago that social security would on longer be there when the people working then got to retirement age were wrong. If it were a Ponzi scheme it would have performed like one. It hasn't.

          1. The amazing thing is that Dems and FDR convinced the people to begin collecting SS funds years before they would be paid out. And Americans at the time seem to have been smarter than some who now can't understand how it works:

            Q1:  When did Social Security start?

            A: The Social Security Act was signed by FDR on 8/14/35. Taxes were collected for the first time in January 1937 and the first one-time, lump-sum payments were made that same month. Regular ongoing monthly benefits started in January 1940.

            We could kill it to fix it, like Mark Udall wanted to do. But it is quite easily fixable by lifting the 100K+ salary limit. 

            On CNN, Bernie Sanders said, "Look, what Rick Perry and these other guys are talking about, this is the decades-long attack on Social Security by the Republican Party. They want to privatize it eventually. They want to make cuts. We have millions of seniors struggling twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand dollars a year. I will not accept the cutting Social Security.”

            Even when it was enacted Dems were conservative in what was covered, knowing how R's are. They hated it anyway. (Sound familiar?)

            Compared with the social security systems in western European countries, the Social Security Act of 1935 was rather conservative. But for the first time the federal government took responsibility for the economic security of the aged, the temporarily unemployed, dependent children and the handicapped.[80]

            The Wold Blitzer tried to muddy the subject and make Bernie defend something he doesn't support. 

            Blitzer asked Sanders about means testing and if millionaires and benefits deserve to get benefits. The Democratic presidential candidate answered, “They’re not talking about millionaires and billionaires. They’re talking about lowering it to forty thousand dollars a year."

            Bernie told Wolf something he has difficulty understanding:

            "It’s a universal program. Everybody deserves to put into it. Everybody deserves to get a benefit out of it. We can extend that program by not asking anybody more than the top two percent to contribute into it.”

            And those who want to kill it really haven't thought through the number of elderly who would be sent to a retirement of poverty, sickness, and misery – the things Social Security was designed to fix. It did.

            I guess the greed and the shortsightedness of those who can't stand helping their neighbors may never go away. R's always say we're the greatest nation in history, but they don't want to fund the programs that made us that way.

             

            1. I have a tendency to think of it in a tribal context, Zap. Republicans are the greedy, fearful bastards who push the weak away from the campfire and take their food. Civilized humans made rules of conduct so that we would not be like the jackals and hyenas, each greedily and viciously taking for themselves.

              Democrats are the humans who made those rules for sharing, for peacefully co-existing. The Republican party has become the party of the "fuck you, I've got mine"…segment of society that has always existed. They are antithetical to the common good.

              The Republican party has become the embodiment of the crowd that Jesus (the Christ) of Nazareth famously drove out of the great temple in a fit of rage. They were bankers….

               

            2. In the early days there were ad campaigns with celebrities talking about accepting social security to encourage proud but needy people not to view it as taking charity  or being on the dole but as something that everyone was to benefit from, including famous Hollywood stars. 

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