[lentulusgracchus]

Evan Thomas is a sleek, vaguely poofty widdle wiburul editor of a Texas coffee-table magazine for people with money and big, fancy coffee tables. He has a PBS interview show, and his ideal interviews are people like Danny Glover, Gore Vidal (interviewed 'em both) and the late Louise Nevelson (missed her).

This statement of his in the (notice it's the) WaPo is inaccurate, and showoffily so:

Perry is more hard-knuckled in his dealings not only with Democrats (now a minority in the House and the Senate) but with insufficiently conservative Republicans — what we in Texas pejoratively call “moderates.”.....

In the recent session of the Lege, the RiNO speaker of the Texas House, a man returned to the speakership by a party-line vote of the Democratic minority, ginned up a decennial redistricting plan that paired eight of the most conservative Republicans in the house against one another and guaranteed future Democratic gains, and Rick Perry did absolutely NOTHING about it.

Rick Perry also did not fight for a bill that would have ended the "sanctuary cities" policies of a number of big-city Democratic mayors, including former Houston mayors Kathy Whitmire, Bob Lanier, Lee P. Brown, and Bill White (a former chairman of the Texas Democratic Party and last year's Democratic candidate for governor, opposing Perry). One would have expected Perry, if he were a REAL conservative, to have clubbed "sanctuary" policies out of the park, especially considering that his opponent was a champion of such policies and had had a couple of his Houston police patrolmen murdered on duty by illegal aliens armed with pistols.

Rick Perry is nobody's "hard-knuckled" conservative.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

.....In the recent session of the Lege, the RiNO speaker of the Texas House, a man returned to the speakership by a party-line vote of the Democratic minority, ginned up a decennial redistricting plan that paired eight of the most conservative Republicans in the house against one another and guaranteed future Democratic gains, and Rick Perry did absolutely NOTHING about it.

What could he do? Are you implying that Rick Perry likes dems? How in the hell did Texas EVER get a GOP super majority under Rick Perry's leadership???? /DRIPPING SARCASM