But the Perry-controlled TEF and the Emerging Technology Fund have also been the source of much of the criticism Perry’s faced for creating a pay-to-play atmosphere in the state.

A report released Thursday by the campaign finance watchdog Texans for Public Justice — a group that’s made particularly great sport of Perry’s campaign contributions since he entered the presidential race — counts 43 companies that received grants from the TEF and returned the favor with contributions to either Perry’s campaign fund, or the Republican Governors Association. (For years before his presidential campaign, Perry was an officer with the RGA, which was, in turn, his most generous campaign contributor.)

These 43 companies have received $333 million from the fund since it was created in 2003, TPJ writes, and delivered $7 million to either Perry or the RGA. Hewlett-Packard and General Electric top the list, with $720,000 and $640,000 in donations respectively, most of which went to the RGA.

The report also notes that three of the companies in Perry’s stock portfolio — Perry dissolved his blind trust last month after keeping his investments hidden in a blind trust for years, revealing investments in 37 companies — received TEF money totaling $12.2 million.

What’s more, some of the fund’s biggest projects haven’t amounted to much at all. The group says they found “much wreckage among
the TEF projects that have generated the most political contributions,” from delayed job creation targets to aborted programs that left the state without creating a job, and returned the money they’d gotten.

The Texas Observer points out that the companies represent nearly half of the recipients of TEF money, and TPJ research director Andrew Wheat told them the campaign contributions amount to a conflict of interest:

Having the government give out public money to private companies is inherently controversial,” he said. “If indeed a government is going to have this kind of program it would seem to be prudent to have it heavily insulated from the political process, which this one definitely is not.”

Texas A&M University’s Institute for Genomic Medicine received $50 million from the fund, and has returned the favor with nearly $600,000 to Perry and the RGA, the report finds — $500,000 of it directly to Perry. As the Observer points out, though, the A&M program has drawn particular scrutiny just this week from the Wall Street Journal, which pointed out the inflated job creation claims attributed to the program.

As recently as Tuesday night, Perry touted the fund as a big win for Texas, as Bloomberg reports:

Asked during the Oct. 11 Bloomberg-Washington Post debate in Hanover, New Hampshire, about the taxpayer-funded programs, he said most of the money spent on job creation didn’t go to campaign donors, and that the Texas legislature looks at the program every two years.

Those programs “are part of the reason that Texas has led the nation in the creation of jobs,” Perry said. “You have to be able to give a climate where people know they can risk their capital and have a chance to have a return on that investment.”

Bloomberg noted Thursday that some of the companies mentioned in the report disagree with its conclusions:

“The report is misleading,” said Andrew Williams, a spokesman for Stamford, Connecticut-based GE. The company “donates to both the Democratic and Republican governors associations annually on a nearly equal basis regardless of who is chairing either association.”

In 2010, GE gave $205,900 to the RGA and $130,000 to the Democratic Governors Association, Internal Revenue Service records show.

The same records show that in 2010, HP gave $151,800 to the RGA and $150,054 to the DGA.

TPJ: Perry’s Piggybank TEF

The News Corp. CEO and Chairman is under investigation for allegations that the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World, hacked into the voicemail of a murdered British girl. (Murdoch has since offered a multi-million dollar settlement to the family of the young victim.) The controversy drew international scrutiny, and U.S. lawmakers have called on federal agencies to investigate allegations that others under his media empire hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims.

In July, at the height of the hacking controversy, Perry urged caution in judging the claims against Murdoch. The pause from Perry came after questions of whether or not he should return the $1.25 million News Corp. donated to the Republican Governors Association under Perry’s leadership last year.

“I think that to judge Mr. Murdoch at this particular point in time is rather premature,” said Perry, stressing there are contributions of “tens of millions of dollars made by a host of individuals” to the RGA. Perry said money has been given back, in some instances, after companies receive indictments.

Murdoch is the owner of a the world’s second-largest media conglomerate, including film, print, TV and online holdings — some of which have helped to fuel Perry’s rising star.

The op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal misleadingly praised Texas’ job growth record under Perry, and defended the governor’s “treasonous” remark leveled at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. “Everybody knows Mr. Perry meant no literal harm and was indulging the irrational exuberance that is one of his trademarks,” the Journal wrote. The paper has also been critical of Perry’s main GOP rival Mitt Romney.

Murdoch isn’t the only Fox-affiliated figure Perry has hung out with as of late, though. This weekend Perry also spent time with former Murdoch employee and controverisal Fox News show host Glenn Beck during a Lone Survivors Foundation Gala in Houston.

According to Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher, the Lone Star State accounted for 37 percent of net U.S. job creation since the recession officially ended in June 2009 (45 percent going by nonfarm payroll employment). That piece of data is impressive — and dovetails neatly with Gov. Rick Perry’s political messaging as he ponders a White House Run — but doesn’t paint the whole picture of the job market in Texas. While employment in Texas has been slightly more plentiful than in other states during the recession, the number of the lowest-paying jobs has also risen sharply in Texas.

For example, as of April 2011, Texas had an unemployment rate of 7.7 percent, one point below the U.S. as a whole, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but exactly the same as the state of New York, the site of Perry’s recent speech before Manhattan Republicans.

When the U.S. entered the recession in December 2007, Texas’ unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, compared to 4.7 percent in New York and 4.8 percent for the nation as a whole. By comparison, the unemployment rate in California, which has been conservatives’ popinjay in recent years, stood at 5.8 percent in December 2007 and 11.7 percent in April 2011.

After consulting with economists, Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Mitchell Schnurman concluded that the explanation for the relative health of Texas’ economy “is not that simple.” He wrote:

“The state also has immense natural resources, which benefit greatly from rising energy prices and breakthroughs in natural gas production. Exports are exploding.

“As for taxes, the state actually raised taxes almost 25 years ago to invest in education. Rather than hurt the state, that set the table for job expansion.”

According to The Economist, Texas’ gross domestic product grew by 2.8 percent in 2010, compared to national growth of 2.6 percent. (New York’s GDP grew 5.1 percent, and California’s grew 1.8 percent.)

While Texas’ unemployment rate has generally trended with New York’s and has been much lower than California’s since the recession started, wages in Texas lag behind its large counterparts, according to BLS data. (Caveat: The numbers do not take into account differences in cost of living, which can vary widely among different regions in states and among individual states.)

In December 2007, the average weekly wage for Texas workers was $790 (about $41,000 per year), compared to $870 for New Yorkers ($45,000) and $850 for Californians ($44,000). The U.S. average was $750 ($39,000).

During the recession, average weekly wages stayed fairly stable in New York, California and the U.S. as a whole, while Texas’ dropped to $750 per week, a drop of about 5.5 percent. Since the end of the recession, wages have generally risen in all of those regions. From December 2007 to April 2011, weekly wages in Texas increased 0.6 percent, compared to 2.5 percent in New York, 9.3 percent in California and 5.0 percent in the U.S.

As of April 2011, the average weekly wage was $790 in Texas ($41,000), $900 in New York ($47,000), $930 in California ($48,000) and $790 in the U.S. ($41,000).

Additionally, Texas has by far the largest number of employees working at or below the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour in 2010) compared to any state, according to a BLS report.

In 2010, about 550,000 Texans were working at or below minimum wage, or about 9.5 percent of all workers paid by the hour in the state. Texas tied with Mississippi for the greatest percentage of minimum wage workers, while California had among the fewest (less than 2 percent).

The state with the second-highest number of minimum wage workers was New York, with 264,000 (or 6.4 percent of all hourly workers in the state).

From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers in Texas rose from 221,000 to 550,000, an increase of nearly 150 percent.

The federal minimum wage rose from $5.15 per hour to $5.85 in July 2007, to $6.55 in July 2008 and to $7.25 in July 2009. That certainly contributed to the sharp increase minimum wage earners; however, even though the minimum wage remained unchanged in 2010, the number of Texans making minimum wage or less rose from 474,000 to 550,000 that year, an increase of 16 percent.

The median hourly earnings for all Texas workers was $11.20 per hour in 2010, compared to the national median of $12.50 per hour.

In a May 13 editorial, the paper condemned the Chambers of Commerce in Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville for joining “with the teachers unions to kill education vouchers.” The claim is a reference to an April 27 letter the chambers wrote to the state legislature, asking lawmakers to consider the metrics used to determine how private schools will spend the money. The letter also expressed concern the language of the bill allowed for insufficient oversight monitoring students’ performance in voucher programs.

The WSJ editorial then lobbed charges of hypocrisy at the chamber groups:

The Tennessee chambers aren’t nearly as opposed to public money going to private institutions when they receive the checks. A study by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research discovered that over the past several years the Chattanooga Chamber has received $450,000 in state and local funds. The Nashville Chamber has received nearly $3 million in taxpayer subsidies.

We doubt a single child of officials in these chambers of commerce attends a school in the poor parts of Memphis or other places where dreams die before high school. Yet these captains of industry are willing to deny that choice to others. Business executives who really want to make the U.S. more competitive ought to stop contributing to lobbies that want to preserve the dreadful status quo.

On Tuesday, the city chamber groups responded (PDF), accusing the paper of misrepresentation and incorrect statements about their finances.

Highlights include:

In the April 27 letter, we clearly stated that a voucher system needs to be debated more thoroughly. Accountability is a critical element in Tennessee’s education reform efforts, and the original bill included no such measures. Spending public dollars at private schools without being able to track student progress and the return on the public’s investment is at issue here. Additionally, the capacity of private schools to accept students has not been examined.

[...]

The column also inaccurately states that the Nashville Chamber receives government subsidies of $3 million. Local governments in Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Nashville contract for economic development services with each chamber – services for which the local governments receive regular reports. The Nashville Chamber’s annual contract amount is actually $300,000.

Finally, but not insignificantly, The Wall Street Journal inaccurately reported the status of the Tennessee Equal Opportunity Scholarship Act. The bill was not “killed,” but referred to a Summer Study Committee, which will provide the opportunity to review the bill and its implications more carefully.

The Tennessee Equal Opportunity Scholarship Act seeks (PDF) to offer poor students living in districts with at least 38,000 students a voucher to attend a private school worth 95 percent of what the state would pay to have that student enroll in a public school. Total spending per pupil in Tennessee is lower than the national average; the state ranks near last in spending at just over $7,800, but that figure includes federal dollar contributions. Non-federal funding per pupil was $3,892 in 2008, according to the Federal Education Budget Project.

The Children’s Defense Fund lists child poverty in Tennessee at 24 percent; 11 percent of minors living in the state are in extreme poverty. Of the 1,493,252 children who live in Tennessee, 394,134 receive food stamps.

The American Independent also questions the source of WSJ’s claim that “the vouchers are capped at 50% of the per-student costs of the public schools.” As stated, federal funding contributes over 50 percent of total funding; the language of the bill clearly states 95 percent of state funding will go toward per-voucher funding.

Paul raised $3 million in the first three months of 2011, assisted by a moneybomb on Washington’s Birthday that brought in more than $700,000, The Texas Independent previously reported.

As Slate’s David Weigel (a former reporter for our sister publication The Washington Independent) writes:

Paul, who starts the race with the biggest grassroots fundraising network, good poll numbers, and no pundit thinking he can win, veered between protecting his vulnerabilities and screwing with the moderators. He said Israel “didn’t need us telling it what to do,” meant to be a calming line for conservatives who fear his isolationism. He was also so bemused by a question about drug legalization that he ended his answer with a wacky impression of a heroin user. And why shouldn’t he be bemused? As he debated, a one-day moneybomb for his campaign was raising more than $1 million.

Paul had a couple of other reasons to be in a good mood, namely a CNN poll that identified him as the GOP’s best matchup against Pres. Barack Obama (trailing 45 percent to 52 percent), compared to Mike Huckabee being down 8 points to Obama and Romney down 11 points — as well as a Suffolk University poll showing the libertarian congressman from Texas in a three-way tie for second among GOP hopefuls, with Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Paul all receiving 8 percent in a survey of New Hampshire GOP primary voters.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney dominated the other 17 names in the survey, being favored by 35 percent of respondents to the Suffolk poll.

Giuliani, Romney and Trump did not participate in the Fox News debate last night; and neither did Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and other potential top GOP contenders.

The absence of those big names compelled Daily Beast columnist Matt Latimer to dub Fox News the biggest loser of the night. “The many, many voters who missed this clash of ‘Governor Tim Pawlenty and the also-rans’ can continue their lives without a care,” writes Latimer, a former speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Former Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty was the biggest target among the field of candidates at the debate, which also included Paul, pizza magnate Herman Cain, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.

“If I’d been there to watch the governor walk onto the stage, I would have screamed at him, Admiral Ackbar-style: “‘It’s a trap!’” Latimer writes.

The Daily Beast‘s columnist Howard Kurtz writes, “Bottom line: Pawlenty took most of the flak but made no major mistake. And even if he had, who’s going to remember this debate a week from now?”

Meanwhile, our sister publication The Colorado Independent reports that Cain was the big winner of the debate, at least according to conservative RedState blogger Erick Erickson.

And the Wall Street Journal reports that Fox News terminated its contracts with Gingrich and Santorum after they started talking publicly about vying for the White House.

Read more about the debate in the Los Angeles Times.

The Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat.” Such action would need prior approval from FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers, according to the memo, which was issued in December but not made public.

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said the memo ensures that “law enforcement has the ability to question suspected terrorists without immediately providing Miranda warnings when the interrogation is reasonably prompted by immediate concern for the safety of the public or the agents.” He said “the threat posed by terrorist organizations and the nature of their attacks—which can include multiple accomplices and interconnected plots—creates fundamentally different public safety concerns than traditional criminal cases.”

Firedoglake’s Marcy Wheeler outlines why an FBI memo allowing for abbreviated Constitutionally-mandated Miranda rights flies in the face of Supreme Court rulings:

It is not as if this is some kind of unexplored area with no legal precedent; there is clear precedent on the nature of Miranda rights. In Dickerson v. United States 530 U.S. 428 (2000), the Supreme Court left no mistake as to the nature of Miranda:

But Congress may not legislatively supersede our decisions interpreting and applying the Constitution. See, e.g., City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 517—521 (1997). This case therefore turns on whether the Miranda Court announced a constitutional rule or merely exercised its supervisory authority to regulate evidence in the absence of congressional direction.
….
In sum, we conclude that Miranda announced a constitutional rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively.

Furthermore, the “public safety exception” the administration disingenuously bases their new Miranda policy on, is limited and does not support their expansive power grab. The public safety exception, first announced by the Court in Quarles v. New York, applies only where there is an imminent and immediate “great danger to public safety” and the officer who questions the suspect reasonably believes the information sought is necessary to protect the immediate public safety and the questions are limited to only those necessary to obtain the information to mitigate such threat. That is NOT what the Obama/Holder DOJ is contemplating or restricting their policy to and, thus, their policy is simply unconstitutional and inappropriate.

Let us not forget, this attempt by the administration is not aimed at terrorists and enemy combatants on foreign soil, it is aimed squarely at individuals arrested on domestic soil under the regular Article III criminal system. The law is quite established that the reading of the Miranda warning does not confer rights upon the arrestee, the rights are inherent and flow from the Constitution.

The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer points out that Miranda rights don’t apply to interrogation rules, just what can be allowed as evidence in court.

So are Miranda rights being gutted here? I think that overstates what’s happening. Miranda does not govern interrogation. It governs the admissibility of evidence in court. The FBI can interrogate someone without giving them Miranda warnings, it just can’t use the information from that interrogation against them. The Supreme Court never stated that Miranda warnings were mandatory, just that statements would be inadmissible without them. So I’m not sure this actually changes anything with regards to defendant’s rights, but it certainly may make it harder for the FBI to convict terrorists by making fewer of the statements they get admissible.

Serwer also notes that this action by Obama’s DOJ is likely the product of kowtowing to Republicans that politicized Miranda rights in claiming offering terror suspects like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the Christmas Day ’09 “underwear bomber” — such Constitutional rights squanders intelligence-gathering opportunities. In addition, Serwer contends, the move could be to avoid Congress from pressing for the Department of Defense to handle domestic terror cases rather than the FBI.

Republicans have attacked the administration for “giving” terror suspects constitutional rights they already have, and the administration is concerned about looking soft on terrorism. But because Republicans know this isn’t an actual problem, they rebuffed administration overtures to codify a public safety exception with legislation. But by by issuing this memo, the administration has conceded the point. While not solving an actual national security problem, this further erodes the administration’s argument that Miranda does not impede intelligence gathering.

[...]

A secondary question though, is whether by doing this–or rather, by leaking word of the memo–the administration is trying to hold off efforts by Republicans to mandate that all domestic terrorism cases be handled by the military by assuaging fears that the FBI isn’t making intelligence gathering first priority in interrogations.

A spokesperson for Lamar Advertising (the company that owns the billboard) said the company decided to remove the billboard because of “concerns for public safety,” according to CNN.

The spokesperson told CNN that the company did not object to the content of the billboard — featuring a picture of a young African American girl and the message “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Rather, the spokesperson said patrons were harassing wait staff at a restaurant in the building to which the billboard was attached, and a protest had been scheduled for today.

A Life Always spokesperson told CNN that more billboards will appear “across the country” in the next couple of months.

In December, Follett told the Texas Independent that he hoped to help groups establish crisis pregnancy resource centers in major urban areas such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. He also said he planned on expanding Heroic to places such as Houston, Connecticut and the Los Angeles area.

The Wall Street Journal reported the advertisement cost $20,000 and was expected to be up for a month, and that Life Always now does not expect to be charged.

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on the Follett family’s frozen food fortune and large-scale philanthropy, plus Heroic’s campaigns in Florida and Texas.

Read the Florida Independent for previous reporting on a prominent Florida Republican who said he “does not condone” Follett’s comparison of African American abortions to “genocide,” plus Mike Huckabee’s continuing support of Heroic Media despite criticism from a Democratic Florida congresswoman.

As for the rest of us, we can celebrate what with any luck is the death of campaign-finance reform and the revival of more robust political competition. Thirty-five years after it began in the wake of Watergate, the liberal crusade to limit campaign spending has proven once again to be a hopeless failure.

In the spirit of charity (or the fact that many campaign finance laws are still on the books and don’t look to be in any danger of being struck down by the courts), however, the Journal is willing to offer the reform community something of a grand bargain that entails striking down all campaign finance limits and the Federal Election Commission in exchange for full disclosure:

These columns have long supported disclosing political contributions as part of a larger deregulation that allowed any American to give as much as he wants to any candidate. This is the Virginia model and it works well, as it did at the national level for decades before the goo-goos got into the act. Lately, however, as we’ve watched Democrats and liberals attack Target Corp. and other businesses for donating to independent groups, we wonder if even disclosure is wise. But as the price for a wholesale repeal of all campaign-finance limits and putting the Federal Election Commission out of business, we’re willing to compromise.

So how about it, goo-goos? Your standard bearer on Capitol Hill looks like a goner, and the Supreme Court has rightly gutted your schemes to limit political money as a violation of the First Amendment. John McCain is still around, but we doubt any Republicans will be foolish enough to follow him again down this primrose path. Accept the fact that money can’t be purged from politics, and we’ll even give you something in return for admitting reality.

It’s a nice offer, sort of, but it ignores two realities. The first is that the Supreme Court just yesterday rejected an appeal from the conservative group SpeechNow.org, which sought to limit the scope of what it had to disclose to the FEC about its donors and activities. The decision was consistent with other opinions offered by the Roberts court — including Citizens United — which indicate that full and prompt disclosure is both constitutional and desirable, so it seems strange that Democrats would feel the need to trade anything for the cause.

The second, sadder reality is that while the Journal still appears to (tepidly) endorse the concept of disclosure, recent Senate votes on the DISCLOSE Act indicate that every single Senate Republican has abandoned it. Several GOP Senators, of course, have indicated that their objections to the bill lay not in disclosure but in its smaller provisions — like the one limiting the speech of large government contractors — which they say provide an unfair advantage to unions in election contests.

It’s for this reason that the reform community is getting increasingly vocal about Democrats trying to pass a stripped-down, disclosure-only bill during the lame duck session. In doing so, they either can get their desired disclosure (without trading anything) or force Republicans in the Senate to cast a vote on whether they still think transparency is a good idea after all.

The leading candidates for the [Appropriations] panel’s chairmanship, Reps. Jerry Lewis (R., Calif.) and Rep. Harold Rogers (R., Ky.), are longtime members of the panel who have been stalwart defenders of earmarks, which allowed lawmakers to direct money to local projects outside the normal federal funding system.

Mr. Lewis was a senior member and chairman of the panel during the George W. Bush [era]. Conservative critics say Republicans allowed spending to run out of control at that time.

“Have Republicans learned their lesson?” asked David Keating, executive director of Club for Growth, a political group that has backed many tea-party candidates. “One way to find out is who they put in charge of Appropriations. If it’s Jerry Lewis, the answer is: Probably not.”

Also up in the air is the chairmanship of the House Energy Committee. The ranking Republican, Rep. Joe Barton (Texas), is also seeking a waiver on the term limit rule, but some colleagues are arguing his public apology to BP executives during the hearings following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may be hurting his chances.

The Times’ piece digs into corporate tax filings and finds that while the Chamber claims 300,000 members, nearly half of its $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors — and  many of those large donations coincided with lobbying or political campaigns that appeared to benefit those donors. Its accompanying graphic, which calls the Chamber “The Top Non-Party Spender,” says the Chamber has thus far spent over $21 million on this election cycle — more than any group save three of the traditional political party committees.

The Journal’s piece, for its part, says that AFSCME  is spending a total of $87.5 million on the midterm elections following a decision by the union — made possible by Citizens United — to tap its membership dues to pay for $17 million worth of ads backing Democrats. The article observes that while the political debate and the public’s attention have thus far largely focused on the advertising buys of Republican-backing groups, unions have flown partly under the radar because they traditionally spend much of their cash on other forms of political activities, like get-out-the-vote efforts. Its graphic shows AFSCME’s total edging out the Chamber’s $75 million goal and American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS’s $65 million pledge.

Neither paper’s claim is wrong, per se — they’re simply measuring different things. The Times has attempted to tabulate money that’s been spent (though other databases, like the one at the Sunlight Foundation, suggest that the Times’ figures might be too low), while the Journal is comparing money that groups have pledged to spend. There’s no reason that these groups would lie, of course, but there exists a convoluted logic in campaign finance in which many groups try to both downplay and talk up their importance. “We’re the big dog,” Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME’s political operations, couldn’t help telling the Journal. “But we don’t like to brag.”