I'll try and give you links to the points you mentioned. I'll warn you now, the corridor stuff is insane. There is so much going on there, with all of the personal and working relations between the involved parties, including some lobbying for Cintra, then working on Perry's staff, then going back to lobbying for Cintra, as well as all of the actions that TxDOT/Perry/etc. engaged in. Because of how much TxDOT and Cintra tried to keep secret, even filing lawsuits to keep stuff secret, and because of everybody involved, I honestly don't think we'll ever have a full accounting of everything that transpired.
With the Trans-Texas Corridor, Perry was pushing for what would have resulted in the purchase or confiscation of land to handle 4,000 miles of roads, passenger rail, freight rail, pipelines, etc. That 4,000 miles of roads, rails, and pipelines and right-of-ways plus associated facilities was going to take between 500,000 - 550,000 acres. The corridors would be up to 1,200 feet wide. Texas DOT has removed many of the links about the Trans-Texas Corridor - you can see various versions of their website at Archive.org,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20070815000000*/http://keeptexasmoving.org by clicking on the dates that have archives. Some of the specific facts of the size were preserved on Archive.org at
http://web.archive.org/web/20051227194640/http://www.keeptexasmoving.com/publications/files/ttc_report_summary.pdf which also mentions the cost - $145 billion to $183 billion. There have been larger eminent domain projects, but those were at the federal level for parks and military bases. I'm not aware of any larger eminent domain projects pushed by the state of Texas. Even the largest state park in Texas, Big Bend Ranch State Park, is around 250,000 or 300,000 acres and some of that was donated and not taken by emminent domain.
The newborn DNA project. The Texas Department of Health Services was storing blood samples from newborn infant which are normally used for screening of various diseases, beyond the stated purposes. In 2002, the state of Texas began keeping the blood samples rather than destroying them, and using the DNA to perform genetic testing and other research or passing it to other organizations without the knowledge or consent of parents. 800 of those DNA samples ended up in a federal database. Texas A&M stored the samples and along with SDHS determined who got what access. This happened between 2002 - 2009. The Texas Department of Health Services
has published what research projects used the DNA samples stored at A&M, as part of the settlement and legislation from the Texas legislature. It was a very extensive list of organizations that received those samples or were able to work with them at the A&M facilities, as you can see from the list. If you read the emails that were published during the lawsuit/settlement, the state was very aware that parents would not be happy with this, as they denied A&M permission to publicly talk about the program. Perry could have put a stop to it when the public heard about it, but he chose to let it go to court, thereby using taxpayer money to defend the program. Once the public began to hear a lot more about it, the state quickly settled. If you need more, Googling Texas DNA newborns will turn up a lot of information.
Perry attended the Bilderberg conference in June of 2007, and it was widely reported, to the point that Perry's secretary joked about him learning the "secret handshake".
link 1,
link 2. The Dallas Morning News has the interview with Perry's press secretary where he joked about the secret handshake stuff, but since they've re-organized their site, old links are broken. Some
FR threads with a post repeating
the Dallas Morning News article complete with joke about handshake.
There is so much crazy crap going on between Perry, Giuliani, and Cintra, and various Perry aides that would be working on Perry's staff one year and then working for Cintra the next. I would seriously do some research on Dan Shelley and his ties to Perry. He helped get Cintra's foot in the door, then worked on Perry's staff drawing a state salary, then went back to work for Cintra. While sifting through some of these links, I found out that a Cintra partner was trying to buy over 40 newspapers that were along the proposed TTC routes, and may have bought up to 42 of them. That is something I didn't know and raises even more questions about all of this.
this FR thread covers the start of that attempt, and of course the company in question is foreign. As for the plans of the TTC, I would go through
Corridor News as they have full reprints or good summaries of a lot of the newspaper articles dealing with the TTC and they cover a lot of the smaller issues that are lost in the details including a lot more names and specific areas. Free Republic is also a good source as there have been many threads about the links between Giuliani's law firm and TxDOT/Cintra. There was a good thread about Perry trying to give the leasing rights of a Dallas bypass to Cintra covering 50 years in return for a few billion dollars to TxDOT, except that TxDOT tried to prevent other companies from bidding on it, and part of that bypass was build with public tax dollars which meant double-taxation. Liz usually posts a lot of good information covering the Giuliani/Perry/Cintra angles.
This site actually has a good article covering a lot more of the specifics of the actual corridor, including more about the high speed rail lines. TxDOT
tried to keep the financial and development parts of the agreement with Cintra confidential. You had Perry handing out no-bid contracts such as the
one for the first segments from San Antonio to Oklahoma, claiming, and I quote the Governor's office: "no cost to taxpayers" which is funny since the state would be confiscating land through eminent domain, which would cost taxpayers, and since taxpayers would have to then pay to drive on those roads, and since some of these roads had been started or partially built with tax dollars. Ironically, the Texas Attorney General agreed that since the deal had been signed, it should be revealed, which pitted the Attorney General against TxDOT. There were lawsuits against the AG to keep the records private (
good summary here reprinting some relevant articles). More, including some
FR comments about keeping it private. There were other lawsuits, including discussing
whether the state was using taxpayer money to push ads supporting the TTC and lobbying politicians. The state cannot lobby politicians to support its projects. The Transportation Commissioner even told people that the state was hiring lobbyists to try and sell it which made a lot of us go "huh?". The legislature did step in and knock down the lengths of some of the private contracts
down to under 50 years. If you want to go back to 2002,
this article has a lot of information about the early players and some of Perry's donors.
It gives me a headache reading through all of the connections involving the TTC.
Obviously you are familiar with
Perry endorsing Giuliani and going on
Fox News to stump for him and you are aware of both Perry and Giuliani then endorsing John McCain. You're also obviously aware that Perry was the Chairmain of Al Gore's Texas campaign in 1988.
By the way, I strongly agree with you that Romney is a frontrunner only because of the MSM, just as what we saw with McCain.