As if Trump's presidency couldn't get more surreal, Politico is now reporting that the Energy Department's international climate office has been told not to use the phrase "climate change". Yes, really: A supervisor at the Energy Department's international climate office told ...read more

Rick Perry, the former Texas Governor, has been tabbed by Donald Trump to run the Energy Department -- a government agency he not only wanted to abolish, but couldn't actually name when asked about it in 2012.  Perry is also a proud climate change denier (he believes it's a ...read more

They may not have made the main event, but these 7 Republican presidential candidates will have a chance to make their mark at the Fox News "Happy Hour" debate, and subsequent viral video clips. See them here first. Of course, the first bit of pulse in this debate came when ...read more

Fox News has announced the line-up for the Republican presidential debate this Thursday, and it promises to be an epic display of political savagery. Fox picked the top 10 candidates by taking the average of the five most recent national polls, then relegated the losers to a a ...read more

The stakes for next week's first Republican presidential debate are fairly high for everyone involved, as frontrunner Donald Trump seeks to break things wide open, and everyone else prays they can slow him down. The stakes are arguably highest, though, for Rick Perry, who not ...read more

Stuffing as many people into a compressed space as possible is a long, storied and stupid American tradition, from the 1950s phone booth cramming craze to the ever-declining size of airline seats. Today's Republicans are already applying the same principle to their ongoing ...read more

Bridgegate, the notorious 2013 incident in which  New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and senior administration staffers allegedly caused a three-day traffic nightmare on the George Washington Bridge as revenge against a political opponent, is still unfolding. But Christie's goose ...read more

Gov. Rick Perry (R-Oops) sank to a new low, both intellectually and morally, when he tried to rob Joan Rivers' grave to pimp his anti-abortion law. During a Q&A session at the Texas Tribune Festival, Perry was asked why he had supported and signed Texas HB2, a measure that ...read more

Welcome to the second edition of THE WEEKLY MILLENNIAL!!1 So last week was great. Thank you for the tweets/comments/whatnots that helped me convince Editor Ben that this was worth taking up a few hours of my week again. And I promise to tone it down on the snark about the ...read more

“Will Rick Perry wear his hipster glasses in his mugshot?” This is the question we’ve been asking ourselves since the indictment dropped, and we finally have an answer: No. It turns out county rules require that you take your glasses off. Too bad. Perry arrived at the ...read more

I get that a lot of people want Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be convicted and see the bespectacled buffoon go straight to jail, not pass go, and not collect $200. But here’s the thing: That’s not going to happen. He’s not going to jail. And no amount of internet-fueled hatred of the ...read more

Texas Gov. Rick Perry was indicted on two (thankfully not three) felony counts of abuse of power Friday by a Texas grand jury. The indictment is the latest move in a long-running dispute between the state’s outgoing governor and his Democratic rivals, who allege he illegally ...read more

If you want to know who has the edge right now in the unofficial race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, just take a look at who's being attacked by other presumptive candidates and party establishment types. Right now, that whipping boy is Rand Paul, who's not ...read more

For the last several days, the above photo of Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Sean Hannity has haunted me. During the current unhinged freakout surrounding immigration reform and, specifically, the Central American teens and children being held by the U.S. after having entered the ...read more

Few things have been quite so insulting to our national intelligence lately than Texas Gov. Rick Perry's "comeback tour." In case you missed it, Perry has been doing the rounds on the media circuit now that there's an immigration crisis on the border with Mexico. It's a thinly ...read more

When George Bush landed on  the USS Abraham Lincoln in flight suit and  aviator boots to announce 'Mission Accomplished' after the Iraq War, red blooded white men in America felt something stir in their loins. "What a tough guy!" they thought. Because that's all you need to be a ...read more

On the heels of CNN's Ashleigh Banfield winning life yesterday by excoriating rabid anti-immigrant conservatives, fellow CNN anchor Kate Bolduan took on Texas Governor Rick Perry Thursday morning, and delivered the second-best thing you'll see on cable news this week. After ...read more

By now you've probably heard about the truly incredible practice of "rolling coal," whereby people install smoke stacks in their trucks so that when their engines are revved, they emit large plumes of black diesel smoke. In this video, you can see the driver has placed a bumper ...read more

One of the big pieces of "news" to come out of Thursday's Republican Anti-Immigrant Antiques Roadshow was the fact that Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) wants the National Guard to "secure our border" from the 50,000 children who are streaming across it from Central America, but ...read more

The tea party put on quite a show on Sunday. Billed as the "Million Veterans March," roughly 300 people turned out to hear Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) deliver brief remarks about "the Obama shutdown," followed by a ceremonial gathering of government barricades from ...read more

Happy Friday, kids. Here's what you should be reading today instead of working or daydreaming about the weekend. 1. Giving Good Ed It's tough for me to recommend anything from Salon these days, even screwing around. And yet occasionally the site prints something so ...read more

It may not have seemed possible, but in some strange way I respect Wendy Davis even more right now that I did the night she stood up and stood down a draconian anti-abortion bill two weeks ago on the floor of the Texas senate. Davis's 13-hour filibuster was instantly the stuff ...read more

One of the major takeaways from the series dramatic political events over the last 48 hours is quite simply that the Republicans will do anything to win. Almost literally anything. Chicanery and complex scheming in politics isn't anything new (see also House of Cards), but the ...read more

By Bob Cesca: We've all known a kid who upon losing a board game would freak out, hurl the game across the room and storm off while shouting something like, "This game sucks anyway!" The modern permutation of this unhinged sour grapes tantrum is to chuck a video game controller ...read more

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM: Late last week more than a dozen Republican governors declared that they will not build the insurance market exchanges called for by the Affordable Care Act, including prominent names like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of ...read more

Dear Texas, So word has it you're talking about seceding from the United States and, I guess, forming your own country. I wish I could react with shock, but the truth is we've heard this kind of thing before; we hear rumbles of it every time something happens politically on a ...read more

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM: If hardcore conservatives are looking for generals in their post-election civil war, they may have to look beyond some of the biggest names on the right. Following President Obama's re-election last week, a group of virulently ...read more

By Bob Cesca: By way of a follow-up to my column yesterday about the Republican effort to disenfranchise millions of poor, elderly and working class Americans by passing Voter ID laws that require a government-issued photo ID in order to vote, I'd like to cover a well-worn ...read more

It was only a matter of time before the political and economic reality set in for team Rick Perry. Their candidate, a religious nut and corporate hack was only going to appeal to the base of the party - not the crucial middle needed to win a general election. Perry's ...read more

Every time I put aside an evening to watch the GOP debates, I find myself unable to muster the strength to sit through 90 minutes of one of the most embarassing spectacles in US political history. I must confess that I have only seen segments of some of the debates - all of ...read more

Hard to see how Rick Perry comes back from this epic flop: Andrew Sullivan's live blog captures the mood perfectly: Perry collapses. Cannot remember a list of three federal government departments he wants to abolish past the first two. Seriously. And then he says "oops." He ...read more

Chez Pazienza on the unfortunate reality Herman Cain is now facing: A gaffe-prone black guy won't win the GOP nomination if there's an equally conservative gaffe-prone white guy to get behind. And a cartoonish pizza salesman with zero governmental experience who in the span ...read more

According to a Quinnipiac poll, Obama is now matching up rather nicely against the current GOP field: 47 - 42 percent over Romney, compared to a 46 - 42 percent Romney lead October 5; 52 - 36 percent over Perry, up from a 45 - 44 percent tie last month; 50 - 40 percent over ...read more

Image via Wikipedia Paul Krugman compares the Right's nonsensical arguments against global warming and economic inequality: Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies ...read more

If you are a liberal dissatisfied with President Obama and are threatening not to vote for him in 2012, just watch this video from last night's Republican debate where Ron Paul was asked whether he thought someone without health insurance should be left to die. Paul waxed lyrcial ...read more

Image by david_shankbone via Flickr There are many people who believe Obama is in deep trouble when it comes to the 2012 election. They point to his low approval ratings, a tanking economy and an inability to get anything serious past the Republican congress. While this is ...read more

Bob Cesca on Republicans hell bent on ridiculing the Federal government despite taking money when it suits them: They suffer from outrageously selective amnesia by ignoring the unparalleled bloodshed of the Civil War and suggest that states could potentially secede from the ...read more

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has now emerged as the front runner for the Republicans party's 2012 presidential nomination. From Gallup: To say this is worrying would be an understatement - this is positively terrifying. Perry represents the underbelly of GOP politics - he is a ...read more

Yes, it has really come to that. The Republican party is now so extreme that George Bush would be considered a liberal in the current Presidential field. Michael Tomasky draws a comparison: Bush—and it leaves me speechless that he’s starting to look reasonable by comparison ...read more

Robert Scheer dispells the myth that Gov. Rick Perry had anything to do with Texas's economic recovery: Thanks to breakthroughs in oil field technology that Perry had nothing to do with, there have been controversial new drilling techniques that have vastly expanded the ...read more

Matt Taibbi believes that had Obama properly dealth with the banking crisis (ie. instituted serious regulation), the Rick Perrys of American politics wouldn't exist: To me this whole issue encapsulates the basic failure of the Obama administration. It has surrendered to Wall ...read more

Juan Cole rips into Rick Perry and the alternate universe he resides in: It used to be that political divisions were about the different methods proposed to deal with social problems by persons with different political philosophies. Nowadays, politics is about which ...read more

The trench warfare between Democrats and Republicans in Washington occurs over a very small piece of land, and the Democrats have been retreating off of it for about 30 years. Little by little, the Democrats have ceased to represent working people and now only offer up tidbits ...read more

I have been highly critical of Obama's Presidency on a variety of issues, mostly out of frustration with his negotiation tactics and not his general politics. On far too many issues Obama has staked out a centrist position then allowed the Republicans to pull him further and ...read more

Oliver Willis on Texas Governor Rick Perry's unforgivable Presidential gaffe: Not that being George W. Bush’s understudy didn’t already disqualify him, but palling around with Glenn Beck is the sign of a supreme moron. If Fox News doesn't want anything to do with Beck, ...read more