Chupacabra report

News that Gets My Goat

One good thing about being down with airplane-itis is that I got down time to scan the news stories I missed while I was visiting foreign states. As usual, our governor, Rick Perry takes the cake.

The Chronicle reported Tuesday that the Teacher Retirement System and the Employees Retirement System of Texas have made no progress on Perry’s bold foreign policy initiative to divest their holdings of all things Iranian. Turns out that Perry has no authority to order such things.

“Those funds don’t belong to the state. They belong to the employees and the retirees, and they want to see the best results,” said Bill Ceverha, Chairman of the Employees Retirement System, and former bagman for Tom DeLay’s TRMPAC, which funneled millions in illegal contributions to Republican candidates in 2002 statehouse races.

This same bunch of cronies recently invested Teacher Retirement System funds in Republican “Daddy Warbucks” Dr. James Leininger’s Kinetic Concepts Company, the stock of which soon tanked, losing millions for the teacher fund.

Wednesday’s paper announced that the Governor found $3 million in federal funds to install web cameras on the Mexican border so that vigilante types could watch for illegals without having to change out of their pajamas. Makes me wonder, if Uncle Sam’s got money to burn, why not use it to hire real border patrol agents?

This may explain why Rudy Giuliani has been able to raise so much money in Texas. Folks may be hoping that Rudy will appoint Perry to an Ambassadorship, say maybe Carjackistan or Elbownia