News Ticker: August 9

Louie Gohmert chooses his own adventure, Rick Perry makes a catty remark, and Cathie Adams prepares for end times. Catastrophe is on the News Ticker.

• Oops. Sen. Ken Paxton was forced to issue a correction when Empower Texans' Michael Quinn Sullivan revealed to the Texas Tribune that he has yet to endorse any attorney general candidate. The revelation also calls into doubt some of Paxton's other purported endorsements, including Ronald Reagan and the Snuggle fabric softener bear.

• Controversial performance artist Rep. Louis Gohmert is still on his crusade to expose the multilingual subterfuge of "radical Islamists."

• Meanwhile, Tea Party activists are trying to get Gohmert to run against Sen. John Cornyn in the next election. Gohmert spurned those advances, telling The Washington Examiner that, "It's not on my radar."

• Texas energy aggregator cum climate change apologist Electricity Bid is boasting that former V.P. Al Gore will not like their 3,000 Facebook likes, which is a bit like a runner bragging about being ahead just as the race's victor laps them.

• The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin has ten ideas for making Gov. Rick Perry a viable 2016 presidential candidate. We only have one, but we're a little fuzzy on how he can become Hillary Clinton with such short notice.

• Perry was not impressed by yesterday's Texas visit from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, delivering the withering bon mot "It's not that Americans don't understand Obamacare, it's that we understand it all too well." We always suspected he had a little Dorothy Parker in him.

• Former Texas Republican Chair Cathie Adams fears that immigration reform will lead to Armageddon, which is a disappointing because she really hoped that the GOP would bring about the end of the world.

• We are looking forward to the debates between new Democratic challenger Michael Cole and incumbent Rep. Steve Stockman. We always wondered how things would go down if the McLaughlin Group suddenly wondered onto the set of the Gong Show.

• As gotcha journalism goes, The Weekly Standard's getting Sen. Wendy Davis to say "I don't know what happened in the Gosnell case" isn't exactly on the same level as Katie Couric's infamous Sarah Palin interview. It's more like that time your nephew got you to sit on a partially deflated whoopee cushion.

• In case paranoia profiteer Alex Jones makes up some story involving the Illuminati, Leslie Cochran, and Screech from Saved by the Bell, rest assured that the upcoming homeland security exercise planned by the Texas Department of Public Safety probably has nothing to do with establishing a new world order.

• That said, it's no coincidence that BMW introduced its electric car in Austin. Open your eyes, people!

• State Comptroller Susan Combs's page for this weekend's sales tax holiday is bursting with useful information. Before today, we didn't know that "a backpack is a pack with straps one wears on the back." We've been wearing them as codpieces for years.

• We don't mean to gloat, but the Chronicle is, like, totes besties with Rachel Maddow.