New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie can forget ever getting the Republican presidential nomination after turning his trademark bluntness on a significant faction of the GOP base.
“This Sharia law business is crap,” said Christie, denouncing critics of a recently appointed Muslim judge. “It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
Veterans of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s unsuccessful 2010 primary challenge to Perry recalled being stunned at the way attacks bounced off the governor in a strongly conservative state gripped by tea party fever. Multiple former Hutchison advisers recalled asking a focus group about the charge that Perry may have presided over the execution of an innocent man — Cameron Todd Willingham — and got this response from a primary voter: “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”
It may not be long before George W. Bush’s title as worst president from Texas is usurped.
Rick Perry, often described as Bush on steroids, has spearheaded an effort to “re-engineer Texas’s leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability.”
The initiative stayed pretty much under the radar until last fall, when it became public that Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University, had compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money.
Well since everything must be run as a business, perhaps we should start ranking doctors by the profits they generate. That might discourage keeping people alive, however, a real quandary for the party of Terri Schiavo.
Perry, meanwhile, is getting ready to play host to a who’s who of Christian extremists at his non-ecumenical prayer meeting.
One of the endorsers of the event, for example, has gone after Oprah Winfrey. Mike Bickle, founder and director of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, says in a YouTube video that she is a precursor to the “Harlot Babylon” movement that he says will bring on the Antichrist at the end of this world. Winfrey, he says, is “a charming woman but has a spirit of deception, and she is one of the clear pastors, forerunners to the Harlot movement.”
One of AFA’s outspoken leaders, Bryan J. Fischer, confirmed in a brief interview with the Texas Tribune on Thursday that he would be attending the event. Fischer has said homosexuals “gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” He also once blogged that that social welfare programs made black women want to “rut like rabbits.”
Some chilling photographs of “life” inside North Korea.
