Rick Perry’s Blogger Summit featured big-name speakers, social media strategizing and a chance to shoot guns with the Governor. What it didn’t feature: much talk about Texas.
Griffin Perry
Social Studies
Thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter, we know the elected officials who represent us better than ever โ sometimes in weirdly intimate ways. You can find out that Dan Patrick had to put his dog down, that Wayne Christian is a fan of real estate wunderkind and reality TV star Chad Rogers, and that Bill White just finished listening to a book on tape. But woe to the pol who hasn’t updated her status in a year.
Spoiler Alert
What’s it like to be a person who wages a no-win campaign but, by taking votes away, dooms the chances of one or more of the other candidates in the race? Mark White knows. Kinky Friedman knows. Debra Medina could soon find out.
Primary Bloggers
On Jan. 23, bloggers learned the tools of the trade at the Perry 2010 Blogger Summit featuring Andrew Breitbart, Gov. Rick Perry, and others.
Life of the Parties
Early voting in the Republican and Democratic primaries starts in three weeks, and the election is in five. While there are nearly 200 legislative races on the ballot, only a few are real contests. Here are the ones worth watching โ as of now.
On the Records: Per-Capita Money Maps
The governor’s race candidates fill their campaign coffers disproportionately from some rural areas, according to a per-capita calculation. Each Dallas resident gave $1 to the race in 2009, for example, while those in Blanco donated $57.
2010: Rallying Cry
More than a week after they surfaced in the Republican gubernatorial primary debate, the politics of abortion are again heating up.
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Hu explores on the schism between Bushworld and Perrywold and the increasingly curious question of what Debra Medina wants; Stiles goes all Shark Week on gubernatorial campaign finance, with searchable databases, bubble maps and word clouds; M. Smith on what happens if there’s a GOP runoff; Rapoport on the sniping between Perry and KBH on transparency; Hamilton on KBH’s abortion issue odyssey; Ramshaw exposes the disgracefully low percentage of state school employees who abuse or kill profoundly disabled Texans and are then prosecuted for their acts; Thevenot on higher ed’s tuition time bomb; Aguilar on the Latino pay gap; Ramsey on Farouk Shami’s “gift” to Hank Gilbert; Ramsey and Philpott on the the Supreme’s Court’s corporate campaign cash fallout; and E. Smith’s interviews with House Speaker Joe Straus with retiring Republican state representative โ and future Texas State chancellor? โ Brian McCall. The best of our best from January 18 to 22, 2010.
The Brief: January 22, 2010
How will Thursday’s shooting change security guidelines at the Capitol?
No Love Lost
When George H.W. Bush becomes the latest denizen of Bushworld to endorse Kay Bailey Hutchison at an event at his West Houston home this morning โ following on the heels of KBH supporters James Baker, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Margaret Spellings โ it will be impossible to pretend any longer that there isn’t a Bush-versus-Perry narrative at play in the 2010 governor’s race. But what’s really going on here?


