{"id":48960,"date":"2013-07-09T15:39:56","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T14:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/10-worst-things-about-rick-perry\/48960\/"},"modified":"2013-07-09T15:39:56","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T14:39:56","slug":"10-worst-things-about-rick-perry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/10-worst-things-about-rick-perry\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Worst Things About Rick Perry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Texas Governor Rick Perry speaks during an address to the 39th Conservative Political Action Committee February 9, 2012 in Washington, DC. Perry announced Monday he will not seek re-election next year, while leaving open the prospect of launching a second<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

July 9, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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With his announcement Monday that he will not seek an unprecedented fourth full term as Governor of Texas, Rick Perry (R) will retire from the office in January 2015. Sadly, he will leave behind a record of right-wing extremism that few could match. <\/p>\n

Here are ten of the worst moments from his 13 years as governor and his \u201c oops<\/a>\u201d 2012 presidential campaign: <\/p>\n

1. He allowed Texas to become the nation\u2019s worst polluter.\u00a0Texas under Perry has led the nation<\/a>\u00a0in carbon dioxide emissions and is home to five of the ten<\/a>\u00a0worst mercury emitting power plants in the country. Rather than try to do something about this, Perry sued the federal government<\/a>\u00a0to try to avoid complying an EPA ruling<\/a>\u00a0that the state was in violation of the Clean Air Act. A proud<\/a>\u00a0climate change denier<\/a>, Perry called the 2010 BP oil spill an \u201c act of God<\/a>\u201d while speaking at a trade association funded by BP. And his solution to the nation\u2019s economic ills in 2011: more oil drilling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

2. He executed a likely innocent man and impeded an investigation into the matter.\u00a0In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Huntsville, Texas after being convicted of arson and the murder of his three children. Despite significant evidence<\/a>\u00a0that arson had not caused the fire (thus exonerating Willingham), Perry refused to grant a stay of execution. Five years after Willingham was executed, a report from a Texas Forensic Science Commission investigator found that the fire could not have been arson. As the commission prepared to hear testimony from the investigator in October 2009, Perry fired and replaced three<\/a>\u00a0of its members, forcing an indefinite delay in the process. With a record of executing juveniles and mentally disabled<\/a>, Perry said in a 2011 GOP presidential debate that he had \u201c never struggled<\/a>\u201d at all with his decisions to administer the death penalty to more than 230 people. <\/p>\n

3. He actively sought to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.\u00a0Perry argued that Texas and other states should be able to opt out of federal entitlements like Medicaid<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Social Security<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 even though such a move would actually cost his own state\u2019s economy billions of dollars. Despite their popularity and success, he called these programs and Medicare \u201c Ponzi schemes<\/a>,\u201d and suggested they are actually unconstitutional<\/a>.<\/p>\n

4. He consistently backed legislation to restrict women\u2019s reproductive rights.\u00a0Perry has made news in recent weeks for his embarrassing attacks<\/a>\u00a0on State Senator Wendy Davis (D) and his efforts to ram through<\/a>\u00a0a likely unconstitutional bill to shut down the vast majority of Texas clinics<\/a>\u00a0that provide abortion. But his attacks on women\u2019s reproductive choice are nothing new; in 2011 he pushed for and signed<\/a>\u00a0\u201cemergency legislation<\/a>\u201d to require women to have unnecessary sonograms prior to abortions. <\/p>\n

5. He demonized LGBT Texans and worked to increase legal discrimination against them.\u00a0Perry was staunch defender of Texas\u2019 unconstitutional<\/a>\u00a0anti-sodomy law which criminalized the private consensual sexual behavior of adults. After the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s 2003 ruling in\u00a0Lawrence v. Texas, Perry called ban \u201cappropriate,\u201d and blasted the Court decision<\/a>\u00a0as the result of \u201cnine oligarchs in robes.\u201d As a presidential candidate, he ran a shockingly anti-gay ad<\/a>, blasting open service by gay and lesbian members of the Armed Services as part of President Obama\u2019s \u201cwar on religion.\u201d He vocally opposed<\/a>\u00a0the Boy Scouts of America\u2019s half-measure<\/a>\u00a0allowing openly gay Scouts but not leaders, claiming<\/a>\u00a0the tiny step \u201ccontradicts generations of tradition in the name of political correctness.\u201d Even in his speech Monday, he proudly boasted that Texas had defended \u201cthe sanctity of marriage\u201d by writing discrimination into the state\u2019s constitution. <\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Texas Governor Rick Perry speaks during an address to the 39th Conservative Political Action Committee February 9, 2012 in Washington, DC. Perry announced Monday he will not seek re-election next year, while leaving open the prospect of launching a second July 9, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}