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Other tidbits about the Governor's race.....

Amid governor's race, Hutchison back in Washington for hearing

08:26 AM CST on Thursday, January 21, 2010
By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News
tgillman@dallasnews.com
WASHINGTON – It's all about multitasking and time management in the Senate. The votes, the floor speeches, the meetings. The campaigning for another job.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison – who vowed to devote most of the next six weeks to ousting Gov. Rick Perry in the GOP primary while also tending to vital Senate business – popped up in Washington in time for a three-hour hearing Wednesday morning on aviation security and the Christmas Day underbomber.
She left halfway through, though that was long enough to take some shots at the Obama administration and vent – as other senators did – about the lapses that allowed a suspicious passenger onto a flight headed for Detroit.
And to generate video of a senator at work that aides promptly posted on YouTube, of course.
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Perry shells out big bucks for volunteer recruiters

By Jason Embry | Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 09:43 PM
Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign paid more than $360,000 in the second half of 2009 to more than 300 “part-time field staff,” according to the campaign-finance report he filed with the Texas Ethics Commission.
Perry’s report for the first half of 2009 showed no dollars going to part-time field workers.
So what changed in the second half of the year? Perry launched his Perry Home Headquarters program, which offers cash incentives to supporters who enlist their friends to sign up voters who will support Perry. Usually campaigns don’t offer cash to their volunteers in the field, although the practice is legal.
The Statesman’s Kate Alexander did a great review of Perry’s report for the second half of the year and found that, in total, Perry paid $361,340 to 305 people listed on his reports as part-time field staff.
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Hutchison speaks softly about Texas' problems
Jason Embry, American Statesman
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison aired two television commercials this month that used an electronic road sign to criticize Gov. Rick Perry on the issues of toll roads and property rights.
There was no voice in the spots, just the sound of passing cars, the honk of a horn, the buzz of a chain saw. It was a fitting way to present a candidate who is barely audible on some of the most important decisions made by Perry, whom she is trying to unseat in the March Republican primary.
After waiting for months to formulate a position, Hutchison has said little recently about Perry's decision to reject $555 million in federal stimulus dollars for unemployment insurance, even though 10 of 19 Republicans in the Texas Senate voted to buck Perry and take that money. She doesn't talk much about his decision to shake up the Forensic Science Commission days before it considered whether Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham based on faulty arson science. And after Perry said he wouldn't seek $700 million in federal money for education, her campaign team, when pressed, said Perry made the right call.
Long heralded as a clash of the titans, this campaign has lacked a prolonged discussion of the numerous problems in state agencies that reporters have brought to light during Perry's tenure — problems including rampant abuse at the Texas Youth Commission and a routine failure to process food stamp applications in a timely manner. How much blame, if any, Perry deserves for those problems is up for debate, but it's a debate that Republican primary voters aren't having.
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