Chupacabra Report: News that Gets My Goat

Rick Perry in the News

-The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this month that Rick Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund has awarded $16 million to companies owned or controlled by big donors to Perry’s campaign.

Perry says that politics doesn’t figure into these awards, as they are vetted by his 16-member advisory committee (which Perry appoints) and then must be approved by the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and the House Speaker.

Subsequent reports show that the Governor side-stepped this process to award $4.5 million to Convergen Lifesciences, a company owned by David G. Nance, who has given Perry $80,000.

-And The Houston Chronicle’s Rick Casey reported Wednesday on allegations that the Texas Retirement System ignored

“the analyses and recommendations of staff members in order to hire outside investment firms whose principals had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gov. Rick Perry.

“the White campaign produced an e-mail, apparently written in 2009, from a TRS executive to the chairman of the board of trustees laying out instances of staff members being told to change their recommendations and quoting a top TRS executive as repeatedly saying: "I manage a fund with billions of dollars in assets. Upsetting a board member or friend of the fund over the investment of a few hundred million dollars doesn't make sense.”

-Meanwhile, the business section has a story about the Houston Port Authority preparing to meet new EPA requirements for NOX emissions three years ahead of schedule. If Rick Perry and Greg Abbott ran the Port of Houston their response would have been to sue the EPA.

-And this week PBS ran Frontline’s first show of the season, Death By Fire, about Todd Willingham, executed for the arson murder of his three young daughters. Willingham was convicted with questionable evidence from fire investigators and testimony of the witness-for-hire known as “Doctor Death,” who cited the satanic posters in Willingham’s home as evidence that Willingham was unfit to live. The posters were of album art from Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden.

Rick Perry appears in the story; first denying clemency before the execution, preventing arson experts from presenting new testimony; and after the execution, firing three members of the State’s Forensic Science Commission before they could review the case, almost keeping the story out of the news in this election year. Thank you PBS and WGBH in Boston.