Free Republic

......One was born into a privileged family in a tony Michigan suburb; the other, onto a flat expanse of West Texas dirt with no indoor plumbing. One spent his youth tooling around his father’s car factory; the other, selling Bibles door-to-door so he could afford to buy a car. One excelled at Harvard University, simultaneously earning law and business degrees and swiftly climbing the corporate ladder; the other, his hope of becoming a veterinarian dashed when he flunked organic chemistry at Texas A&M University, joined the Air Force. [Perry graduated from A&M] Where Mitt Romney is obedient and cautious, Rick...

Reporting from Washington— The biggest political donor to Texas Gov. Rick Perry during his 11-year tenure has not been one of the state's oil barons or cattle ranchers, but a Washington-based organization into which Perry helped funnel millions of dollars. The Republican Governors Assn. — which Perry chaired twice — gave him $4 million in the last five years, making it the largest single source of the $102.8 million he has raised since 2001. The organization's donations came as Perry helped infuse the governors' group with millions of dollars from some of his major political patrons. Out of the $217...

Palin even went as far as to lend her voice to the charge leveled by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) during the debate against Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R): That he allowed a law to go though requiring HPV vaccinations for adolescent girls because of a $5,000 campaign donation and his relationship with his former chief of staff, who went on to lobby for a pharmaceutical company. "I knew there was something to it," Palin said of learning while she was Alaska's governor that her Texas counterpart had given the go-ahead to the vaccine. "Now we're finding that now, yea, something...

And, now, the group Americans for Rick Perry reports it has raised a fair amount of money in a short amount of time. Bob Schuman, a senior strategist for Americans for Rick Perry, said Thursday that the group is expanding its fundraising operation outside of Texas to include Miami, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. The group can accept unlimited donations but, under federal law, can't strategize with Perry himself.