Today, the watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste, named Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison October's "porker of the month".
Todd Gillman from the Dallas Morning News:
This month's award goes for her request for 149 projects worth $1.6 billion in the various bills that will comprise the 2010 federal budget.
Hutchison strenuously defends her earmarks, which top $10 billion since 2005 for Texas military bases, transit systems, highways, museums and more, as we reported earlier this month.
It's not a great headline for Hutchison, but Rick Perry's been rocked by far tougher headlines recently -- ones that might linger for awhile.
If you want a great primer on the Perry Arson/Execution thing, you can't do better than The Chicago Tribune's report on October 12, and Perry's exacerbated the story by being less than forthcoming about key aspects of the case.
If this story has legs, the execution part might not hurt Perry. After all, this is Texas, and it is a primary.
Politically-speaking, though, the story fits into the meme that Perry's administration has been unusually secretive.
In fact, so much so that it makes predecessor George W. Bush's tenure look positively Kardashian (according to a piece in today's Houston Chronicle).
