Free Republic

It’s a perennial complaint from Texas Gov. Rick Perry: The federal government places far too many restrictions on how states can run Medicaid, the entitlement program that provides health care to low-income Americans. “We know for a fact that, given that freedom, the states can do a better job of delivering health care,” Perry said in a Republican debate last month. He’s endorsed turning the entitlement program into a block grant and flirted with having Texas drop out of it altogether. But back in Texas, Perry is actually pursuing a highly technocratic and pragmatic attempt at Medicaid reform that doesn’t...

Rick Perry panic fires up the left by Ben Smith & Maggie Haberman August 30, 2011 In his two weeks as a presidential candidate, Rick Perry has done something that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney could do: wake up the left. Perry panic has spread from the conference rooms of Washington, D.C., to the coffee shops of Brooklyn, with the realization that the conservative Texan could conceivably become the 45th president of the United States, a wave of alarm centering around Perry’s drawling, small-town affect and stands on core cultural issues such as women’s rights, gun control, the death...