Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann buttons hot sellers at New Orleans event

It’s about as unscientific as you can get, but the Rick Perry 2012 button is a hot item at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, where several major presidential contenders are fighting to win the who-is-most-conservative contest.

Perry, who is still just “thinking” about a run for the White House, doesn’t get here until Saturday. He’s got a book signing event scheduled in the morning and will speak to the gathering in the afternoon.

In the meantime, the button contest at the conference is well under way. At the Buttons by Design booth at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel, Christopher Davis was busy making up buttons that say “2012—Perry—President.”

“Rick Perry, his buttons are selling, like, so fast,” Davis said. “It’s probably one of our top sellers out of the candidates.” The booth was also selling quite a few Perry/Bachmann buttons, with Perry as president and Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota as his running mate.

The conservative congresswoman got high marks for her performance in the recently televised debate in New Hampshire. She drew a large and boisterous crowd at the conference, which is dominated by southern conservatives. It has drawn several presidential and would-be presidential contenders, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, businessman Herman Cain, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsyvania and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

Governor Rick Perry's Speech at Red State Conference in 2010 (Video and Notes)

[snip]

"Texas has led but it’s been a hell of a struggle against Washington D.C. – they must trust the people, they don’t trust the people.

Governing isn’t that hard…

First – Don’t spend all the money!

TX legislature meets 140 days every OTHER year!

TARP – Stimulus – great concern in Texas, country, world --- small businesses don’t know what shoe will fall next – what regulations – costs – job loss. Health care bill – cost – loss of access to health care…..

Second: Fair and predictable tax and regulatory policy…..

Third: Legal system that does not allow for over suing. Sweeping tort reform 2003 in TX has paid HUGE dividends. Went from Jack-pot Justice (legal hell hole) to 60% more doctors practicing in Texas from 7 years ago (expands more on this) – about access to health care.

Last step: Loser Pays tells them, you better have a case. If frivolous – fishing for settlement – they’ll foot the bill! (since this speech, Perry signed it into law)

Haley Barbour told him, If "Loser Pays" passes you can put turnstiles on the TX border and charge people to come into your state!”

THAT’S IT! Put those 4 principles into place and tell government to get the hell out of the way.

You also need to work with principled people."

[snip]

”Rick Perry's Tenth Commandment [excerpt] Speaking of presidents: Rick Perry has a complicated relationship with the Bushes, which is to say that he’s hesitant to criticize them and they hate his guts. W. stayed well away from Perry’s gubernatorial-primary melee against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose oatmeal-mushy Republicanism has a distinctly Bushian savor to it. But the mark of W. was all over the campaign against Perry. Former president George H. W. Bush endorsed Senator Hutchison, an unusual step for the habitually reserved retiree, who usually stays well removed from the dirty business of vote-grubbing, surveying the groundlings from the heights of his eminence. Bush père was joined in his support by former vice president Dick Cheney, who offered an endorsement and called Hutchison “the real deal.” Hutchison was further fortified by the Bush clan’s in-house Machiavelli, former secretary of state James Baker, who led the Florida recount fight in 2000 and remains their go-to fixer. W. mouthpiece Karen Hughes came out of the political woodwork to support the insurgency, along with W.’s secretary of education Margaret Spellings. Karl Rove advised Team Hutchison. The gang was all there: All this in a primary challenge to unseat an incumbent Republican governor with one of the most conservative — and most successful — records to be found: Que paso, Bushes?

Part of that was payback. Perry, generally circumlocutious on the subject of W., gave himself a little time off the leash during the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. Often caricatured as yet another snake-handling southern social conservative, Governor Perry backed thrice-married dress-wearing pro-choice lapsed Catholic Rudy Giuliani, on the theory that Rudy would be a badass commander-in-chief abroad and a reliable constitutionalist at home. Politics being politics, the Texan and the New Yorker met up in Iowa, where more than a few Hawkeye conservatives were already getting restive about out-of-control federal spending on the Republicans’ watch. Governor Perry let loose the observation that “George” — and the Bushies hate it when Perry calls him “George” in public — “has never been a fiscal conservative.” Never? “Wasn’t when he was in Texas . . . ’95, ’97, ’99, George Bush was spending money.” He also criticized Bush as being limp on immigration.

The truth hurts, but there’s more to the Bush-Perry friction than that. One longtime observer of Lone Star politics described the Bushes’ disdain of Perry as “visceral,” and it is not too terribly hard to see why. The guy that NPR executives and the New York Times and your average Subaru-driving Whole Foods shopper were afraid George W. Bush was? Rick Perry is that guy. George W. Bush was Midland by way of Kennebunkport. Rick Perry’s people are cotton farmers from Paint Creek, a West Texas town so tiny and remote that my Texan traveling-salesman father looked at me skeptically and suggested I had the name wrong when I asked him whether he knew where it was. (Governor Perry confesses that one of the politiciany things he’s done in office is insisting that the Texas highway atlas include Paint Creek, making him the hometown boy who literally put the town on the map.) Bush is a Yalie, Perry is an Aggie. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, and Perry was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, flying C-130s in the Middle East. Bush has a gentleman’s ranch, Perry has the red meat. The irony is that Perry, a tea-party favorite, personifies the hawkish new fiscal conservatism that has allowed the GOP to find its way out from under George W. Bush’s shadow, but he himself remains in the shade of that politically poisonous penumbra. [end excerpt]

Texas Gov. Perry not a 2012 candidate just yet
By PHILIP ELLIOTT and BRIAN BAKST Associated Press © 2011 The Associated Press
June 18, 2011, 10:28AM
NEW ORLEANS — A candidate in waiting, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is elbowing the Republicans already in the 2012 presidential race as he courts party activists, operatives and donors still shopping for someone to back against President Barack Obama.
His appearance Saturday at the Republican Leadership Conference could offer another tantalizing hint that he's ready to upend a crowded field of candidates who have worked months to amass name recognition, organization and campaign cash. The longest serving governor of his state is drawing much interest despite little effort.
He long insisted he wouldn't run. But in recent weeks, he has softened his refusals and his advisers have started laying the groundwork for a campaign in Iowa.
end snip

Rick Perry's Gardasil Problem

But if Rick Perry does step under the bright lights, there's at least one question that has the potential to hinder his pursuit of the GOP nomination: Why in early 2007 did he sign an executive order mandating that 11- and 12-year-old girls in Texas be given the vaccine Gardasil?

Gardasil was developed to prevent the human papillomavirus (HPV), the most commonly transmitted sexual disease in the United States. In June 2006, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, which is made by the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. The treatment was initially hailed as a breakthrough in protecting against four strains of HPV that are responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts.

In January 2007, Gardasil was put on the "recommended" immunization schedule issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control. Merck immediately mounted a massive lobbying effort of state legislatures around the country to get Gardasil added to their respective lists of state-mandated vaccines.

But in Texas, Gov. Perry chose to bypass the legislature and on Feb. 2, 2007, he issued an executive order making Texas the first state in the country requiring all sixth-grade girls to receive the three-shot vaccination series (which cost about $120 per shot). The move generated a fierce public debate. Conservatives slammed Perry for promoting what they saw as an intrusion by the state into private health decisions of parents and their children. Some also complained that the mandate would encourage promiscuity among teenagers.