Yep, just when you think things couldn't get any weirder and stranger down here in Texas, here comes the news that Tom Delay's lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, is calling for an investigation of Governor Rick Perry! Here's the scoop from the Austin Chronicle:
Quick note to Gov. Rick Perry: When even Tom DeLay's attorney is saying that the Travis County Public Integrity Unit should be investigating you, then you might want to re-think your future plans.
The crux of the matter is the long-running controversy about the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, a discretionary-spending source based out of the governor's office. There have been worries for years that both it and the Texas Enterprise Fund have totally failed to produce the jobs promised and required by the terms of the grants. The matter exploded on Sunday, when the Dallas Morning News reported that $16 million went from the fund to firms owned or run by big-time Perry campaign donors.
That's sixteen million dollars of our taxpayer money going to Rick Perry's biggest campaign donors.
The ETF is a really nice slush fund, when you can get it to work for your crony friends. Here's more on this developing story as well:
....DeGuerin is quoted as saying, "This is the kind of thing a Public Integrity Unit ought to investigate. If the fundraisers promised or suggested that grants would go to political donors and then that happened, that's criminal, plain and simple."
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About that $120 million. Let's remember, that's the unemployment fund for which Perry refused to take stimulus money. It's also the same fund that he has had to refill with a loan from the self-same Federal government, plus the state has had to raise unemployment insurance rates for employers. That could be a key component of this whole story: If Perry took cash from unemployed Texans that then ended up in the back pocket of his donors' firms, and then he put Texas in the hole to the Federal government, where's the fiscal competence?
And Governor Perry refuses to release documents from the ETF fund revealing investors in these private companies that get millions of our taxpayer money. Can you imagine how much bigger this scandal would get if the public had full transparency in how their taxpayer funds were spent by Rick Perry to enrich his campaign donors?
Gov. Rick Perry said today that he wouldn't release documents revealing investors in recipients of Texas Emerging Technology Fund recipients.
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But The News was unable to review the investors of all tech fund recipients because most are private companies. Reporters discovered investors by reviewing thousands of pages of documents from other sources, such as court filings and personal financial disclosures.
We have a $21 billion budget deficit shortfall that Governor Perry refuses to acknowledge, and it's a part of the many reasons why we ran the "Face US" print ad in over 40 newspapers across Texas yesterday. As you can see, Texans on our Facebook fan page are rightly outraged about how Governor Perry has mismanaged the state budget and played games with it for the benefit of his crony friends.
Please help us spread the word about Perry's refusal to stand up and face Texans like a man on Facebook and on Twitter!
Disclosure: Donations will be used by the Back to Basics PAC to advocate on behalf of Texans against the hypocrisy of self-serving politicians.
written by Noelle Bell aka slinkerwink, Director of New Media