Rick Perry is second coming of George W. Bush

Greenland, New Hampshire — Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entry into the Republican presidential race is giving the race a jolt.


Perry is an unabashed evangelical Christian who recently held a prayer rally at a Texas stadium.


He stepped out onto the backyard pool patio of New Hampshire Deputy House Speaker Pam Tucker, waved at the crowd of about 150 curious Republicans who had come to Greenland to hear him, and said: “Hi! Y’all!”


Before long, he was answering questions. People asked him about everything from energy to Israel.


“Israel’s not ever going to have to worry, if I’m President of the United States,” he said. “We’re gonna be standin’ with our friends, and if you’re our enemy, we’re not just going to give you some lip service. If you try to hurt the United States, we will come defeat you.”


Perry doesn’t shy away from talking about his faith.


“There are certain values that you don’t compromise,” he said. “There are certain things in my life, I’ll tell you, for instance, my faith is somethin’ I’m not going to compromise.”


Warren Gruen, a state representative from Rochester, was among the many at the party who liked that Perry was talking about his religion.


“I love his religious views,” Gruen said. “I’m a born-again Christian, just like he is, and if born-again Christians are going to be prohibited from being open about their faith and prohibited from being involved in public office, then we’re a hurtin’, hurtin’ nation.”


Like Gruen, many of the guests identified with the Tea Party, and the Tea Party includes many evangelical Christians.


Republican activists in New Hampshire tend to be religious, according to University of New Hampshire Survey Center Director Andrew Smith. But Smith said that’s not the case with many voters — Republicans and independents — who are expected to turn out in next year’s Republican presidential primary.


Perry is taller, has much better hair, seems to believe he has an even better pipeline to God than Bush did. And he comes out of Paint Creek, Tex., different from the Texas town that gave us Bush, the one we also know as Yale University.


Whether Dubya Perry is holier than Michele Bachmann, the new President of Ames, Iowa, remains to be seen. For now, though, Perry and Bachmann are the headliners of the moment in the Republican Party. Barack Obama must be rooting like crazy for both of them, at the beginning of a campaign where fringe Republicans might do a better job of saving Obama than he can of saving himself.


Perry is the latest guy in the race, announcing Saturday in South Carolina, not throwing his hat into the race as much as his helmet hair. This was the day after Bachmann, who really does think she can out-God Perry and everybody else in the race, wins a straw poll in Iowa with about 4,000 votes, which is a couple of blocks in New York City.


But that was enough for her to immediately be treated like some sort of front-runner on the Sunday morning talk shows. It was like watching the winner of a split-squad game the first week of spring training be declared the favorite to win the World Series.


The message was so strong that Bachmann didn't get 30% of the vote and nearly lost to Ron Paul. You want to know how desperate people are to start this campaign, even with the 2012 election 15 months away? Straw polls in Ames, Iowa, in the summer of 2011 are how desperate.


Yet there was Bachmann talking herself up big, answering questions about Dubya Perry, as if he is her main competition just by showing up. Of course they both genuflect in front of the Tea Party and the religious right, all those who cheer as Bachmann talks about "taking back the country" from Obama, and act as if gay marriage is more of a threat than the Taliban.


Obama really was elected President on Sept. 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers went under and it seemed like all of Wall Street was about to do the same. Obama didn't have any real answers about how to fix things that day, and apparently still doesn't. But John McCain didn't even seem to know what city he should be in, and Obama was smart enough to make it seem as if Bush and McCain had blown up the economy together. And what had been a fairly close race until then was over, just like that.


It seems like a very long time ago. A few months is a long time in politics, a few years is a lifetime. SEAL Team Six took out Osama Bin Laden in May, and there was the idea at the time that Obama had been reelected right there. Only now, less than four months later, people aren't talking about Obama being the President when we got Bin Laden, they are talking about debt ceilings and unemployment. Republican candidates run against the Obama economy the way he ran against Bush's. What goes around comes around.


Bush's old man once had approval ratings that went through the roof, right after the Persian Gulf War. A year later he was out of business because the economy tanked on him. Obama ought to be challenged on so many things, starting with how much he spent all of his political capital on health care when he should have been focusing on jobs, and how he has talked a better fight than he has actually fought.

Senator calls for utility plant worker background checks

NEW YORK—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) arrived fashionably late to a press conference Sunday morning at his office in Midtown Manhattan, held up by bumper-to-bumper traffic on the flooded Long Island Expressway on his way from Long Island.


One of the orders of business in his customary Sunday presser was announcing proposed legislation to tackle the threat of al-Qaeda’s infiltration of the nation's power plants.


“Do you know where the greatest threat comes from?” asked Schumer. “Terrorists who seek to infiltrate these plants by assuming jobs inside them and the recruitment of disgruntled employees already in the plants.”


When asked if any of New York's power stations were under threat, the senator did not elaborate on any specific cases but reiterated that it is a course of action the terrorists are taking throughout America. He cited a Department of Homeland Security report released several weeks ago titled “Insider Threat to Utilities.”


Suspected al-Qaeda member Sharif Mobley was apprehended in Yemen in March 2010, after having worked at five nuclear power plants in the United States. Legislation requiring nuclear plants to run background checks on employees with access to sensitive areas was enacted after his arrest.

Other utilities remain unprotected, however, and Schumer said terrorists could wreak havoc if they got access to these stations.


Control of energy sources means control over economy and lives, noted the senator. Many medical devices depend on electricity; production depends on electricity; and businesses, trains, and many other things that keep the wheels of prosperity running all depend on electricity.


Schumer gave the example of an employee at a power plant in Arizona who shut down operating systems to cause a methane buildup. The employee had no terrorist affiliations, but this case provides a glimpse at what employees of power plants are capable of.


Power plants and utilities present a tempting and potentially catastrophic target to extremists who are bent on wreaking havoc on the United States," Schumer said.


"Thorough background checks on all workers with access to the most sensitive areas of these operations are a must," he said, calling the DHS report "a wake-up call that we must ensure those with access to our most critical infrastructure -- and our power supplies -- are not compromised by extremist influences."


Currently only nuclear power plants are required to conduct FBI background checks on employees with unescorted access to facilities.


The New York Democrat said he would introduce legislation making it mandatory for all major utilities and critical infrastructure plants to run FBI background checks on workers with access to sensitive areas within utilities, when Congress reconvenes next month.

Obama Rating Drops to Lowest Ever, According to Gallup

Survey, made public today Melbourne time, shows that 39 per cent of Americans approve of the President's job performance, while 54 per cent disapprove.

Both figures are the worst numbers of his presidency, according to US media reports.

Mr Obama's approval rating peaked at 53 per cent in the weeks following the death of al-Qa'ida founder Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US special forces in Pakistan in May.

But it has been steadily declining in the wake of economic reports showing anemic growth and Standard & Poor's decision to downgrade the US credit rating.

The slide comes as Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, while he’s weighed down by wilting support among some of his most ardent backers, a stunted economy and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job.

"We've still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and it's going to take time to get out of it," the president told the U.S. over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.

A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans. Trying to ride out what seems to be an unrelenting storm of economic anxiety, people in the United States increasingly are voicing disgust with most all of the men and women, Obama included, they sent to Washington to govern them.

A poll Gallup released Friday on congressional approval showed that Democrats hold an edge over Republicans in the 2012 elections; 51 percent of registered voters favored Democrats, while 44 percent favored GOP lawmakers "if the elections for Congress were being held today."

The Democratic president will try to ease voter worries and sustain his resurrected fighting spirit when he sets off Monday on a bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The trip is timed to dilute the buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party's White House candidates. The state holds the nation's first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama's opponent.