Point Austin: A Thanksgiving Miscellany

Still lying: In his memoir Decision Points – in addition to lifting uncredited passages from other sources – ex-President George W. Bush resumes his reflexive habit of telling whoppers. As David Corn recounts in Mother Jones ("Bush's Biggest WMD Lie?" Nov. 19), Bush claims he was "shocked" and "angry" when the invading U.S. military forces found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that he had a "sickening feeling every time [he] thought about it" and its devastating effect on U.S. credibility (and his own). The supposed presence of WMDs, of course, was the Bush administration's primary justification for the invasion, even though the evidence reflected that Iraq had no such weapons or even development programs.

Yet if Dubya was so sickened, writes Corn, why did he turn the missing weapons into a comedy routine at the annual Radio and Television Cor­re­spond­ents' Association Dinner, held on March 24, 2004? At the event, Bush narrated a slide show that featured him searching the Oval Office – gazing out the window, hunting under the furniture – while insisting, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

Corn continues: "Bush was actually joking about the missing weapons of mass destruction. He was making fun of the reason he had cited for sending Americans to war and to death, turning it into a running gag. His smile was wide and his eyes seemed bright, as the audience laughed." Before a sycophantic audience of Capitol reporters, Bush was happy to laugh away the invasion as well as the carnage that followed. As Corn wrote at the time, "I wondered what the spouse, child or parent of a soldier killed in Iraq would have felt if they had been watching C-SPAN and saw the commander-in-chief mocking the supposed justification for the war that claimed their loved ones."

Of course, it's not worth recalling those tens of thousands of Iraqi families who also lost loved ones and watched their country blasted to rubble. Then again, very few of them attend D.C. correspondents' dinners or read presidential memoirs. They wouldn't get the jokes.

Traitors to Their Class

On a recently created website (FiscalStrength.com), a group calling itself "Patriotic Million­aires for Fiscal Strength" has issued an open letter to President Barack Obama, asking him to "stand firm against those who would put politics ahead of their country" and allow the tax cuts in favor of those making more than $1 million a year to expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. The undersigned – among them musical luminary Moby, ice cream magnate Ben Cohen, and Waco insurance tycoon and Democratic funder Bernard Rapo­port – write that they have done well in recent years and declare, "We don't need more tax cuts, and we understand that cutting our taxes will increase the deficit and the debt burden carried by other taxpayers."

It's a noble if utterly quixotic effort, not just because the letter features all of 45 signatures, rather a tepid percentage of the 375,000 Americans (the page notes) who have annual incomes of more than $1 million (it's lonely at the top). No doubt thousands more millionaires will soon line up to add their names, and Billionaires for Economic Justice will not be far behind.

More illuminating than these fancies are the statistics the millionaires provide:

• Between 1979 and 2007, incomes for the wealthiest 1% of Americans rose by 281%.

• During the Great Depression, millionaires had a top marginal tax rate of 68%.

• In 1963, millionaires had a top marginal tax rate of 91%.

• In 1976, millionaires had a top marginal tax rate of 70%.

• Today, millionaires have a top marginal tax rate of 35%.

• Among members of Congress, 44% are millionaires.

• Letting tax cuts for the top 2% expire as scheduled would pay down the debt by $700 billion over the next 10 years.

If you're not doing quite so well yourself, note that percentage of congressional millionaires (including more than half the Sen­ate), consider how many Washington media hotshots earn at least $1 million a year – and don't spend your holiday wondering whether there will be a D.C. groundswell of Winter Soldiers for Fiscal Fairness.

Still Following the Money

If patriotic millionaires are insufficient to fill you with seasonal spirit, consider instead Texans for Public Justice. During his closing argument in the Tom DeLay trial Monday, DeLay attorney Dick DeGuerin denounced TPJ's Craig McDonald (as well as campaign finance expert Fred Lewis) as "highly partisan ideologues" for having the gall to bring charges and testify against DeLay. Travis County Assistant District Attorney Gary Cobb responded angrily that McDonald and Lewis "are about as nonpartisan as you can get, and when they found evidence of a crime, they did what you would want any citizen to do – they went down to the courthouse and reported it."

The exchange returned me to TPJ's website (www.tpj.org), where I found the group's recent research report, "Governor Perry's Patronage." It records the staggering amount of money the governor has collected over the years in "campaign contributions" (i.e., political kickbacks) from his thousands of official appointees.

A few highlights:

• From January 2001 to February 2010, Perry nominated 3,995 appointees, 5,662 times, for hundreds of state agencies, boards, and commissions.

• Perry's campaign received $17,115,865 from 921 of these appointees or their spouses. In all, Perry's appointees accounted for 21% of his $83.2 million raised since 2001.

• The highest roller was Wendy Lee Gramm, appointed to the A&M board of regents and the Texas Tax Reform Commission; in 2002, the U.S. Senate campaign of Gramm's husband, Phil, transferred $610,000 to the Perry campaign.

• Peter Holt and T. Dan Friedkin, both appointed to the Parks and Wildlife Com­mis­sion, gave more than $450,000 apiece; in all, Perry received more than $2 million from P&W ($118,477 per appointee).

• The next-best givers were A&M regents: $113,127 on average.

• Next were Inaugural Committee appointees: $102,194 on average.

• By comparison, University of Texas regents were a tea-sipping fourth, averaging only $83,463.

No doubt Gov. Perry will continue dunning and rewarding his deep-pocketed friends. The rest of us will just have to give thanks for the good folks at Texans for Public Justice, doing their diligent and valiant part to document who really rules Texas.