This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/texas-people/rick-perry/visualizing-rick-perrys-book-fed/.

- NPR’s Wade Goodwin
Rick Perry’s start in the Lone Star state
Texas Gov. Rick Perry will officially make clear his intentions to run for the GOP presidential nomination during a speech on Saturday in South Carolina. But he has sounded like a candidate for a while.

“Until Washington figures out that the only true stimulus is more money in the hands of employers across all economic sectors, as well as a restrained bureaucracy that is no longer overreaching into the workplaces, our national nightmare will continue,” he said in San Antonio this week.

Perry has been governor of Texas since 2000, but his connections to the state extend long before then — to 1950, and his hometown of Paint Creek, Texas. More from NPR

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/texas-politics/2012-presidential-election/perry-announcement-set-saturday-south-carolina/.

by Chris Hooks, The Texas Tribune

COLLEGE STATION — When Rick Perry arrived at Texas A&M University in 1968, it was at the end of a summer in which Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring, protesters at the Democratic National Convention were met by a police riot and the United States reeled from the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

With its conservative culture, military tradition and focus on agriculture, few places in the U.S. might have seemed more insulated from the prevailing currents of the age. But A&M was in the midst of its own political awakening.

Facing falling enrollment, the school had begun admitting women and had made participation in the ROTC-like Corps of Cadets — long mandatory at this military academy — optional. This created a sudden and deep divide on campus between the civilian and military undergraduates. Many corps members shunned civilians (one corps leader even forbade them from speaking to non-corps members), and civilians sought student government posts to encourage the changing climate.

Among these civilian reformers were several future Texas politicians: Garry Mauro, who would go on to serve as land commissioner and was a Democratic nominee for governor; Chet Edwards, who would become a state senator and then a U.S. congressman; and Kent Caperton, a future state senator. They found a like-minded ally in the corps: John Sharp, who would serve in the Texas House and Senate, as a railroad commissioner and as the comptroller of public accounts. But not Rick Perry.

Perry, who decades later would serve in the Texas House, as agriculture commissioner and as lieutenant governor before becoming the first A&M graduate to occupy the Governor’s Mansion, was a staunch traditionalist devoted to the corps. When he finally won elective office his senior year — he’d been prohibited from doing so before because of scholastic probation — it was thanks to the votes of his fellow cadets.

A spokesman for the governor said A&M is very important to him and “helped shape who he is today.”

Sharp told The Texas Tribune in June that, as a young A&M cadet alongside Perry, nothing was further from their minds than national politics.

“We were insulated from all that stuff,” Sharp said. “You’ve got a whole lot of things on your mind other than national politics, like how to get breakfast in the morning without getting chewed out.”

College pranksters

Despite their opposing views, Perry’s time at A&M was defined in part by his relationship with Sharp: The two were in the same outfit of the corps and lived on the same floor of their dorm for three years. Their friendship would evolve into one of the great Texas political rivalries of the 1990s when they faced off in the 1998 race for lieutenant governor.

In a joint 1989 interview with the Abilene Reporter-News, Sharp recalled meeting Perry for the first time freshman year.

“When I first saw him, I thought he looked stupid,” Sharp said, referring to the regulation haircut that Perry had received as a freshman corps member. He told Perry so.

As buddies and corps compatriots, Perry and Sharp’s relationship was at first more mischief-making than politics. If you believe Sharp, it was Perry whose ingenuity and disrespect for seniority led to the most memorable stunts.

“Rick chose his targets pretty carefully. If he chose you, it was a pretty good clue that everybody else hated you, too,” Sharp told the Reporter-News. “Perry just did it with a lot more style.”

On one occasion, Perry put live chickens in the closet of an upperclassman and left them there during Christmas break. “You can just imagine the smell,” Sharp said. “Needless to say, he didn’t mess with Perry again.”

Another more elaborate prank took Perry months to execute. It involved M-80 firecrackers and an acquired knowledge of the plumbing in A&M buildings.

Perry learned that he could drop something down the second floor toilet and get it to come out the first floor toilet. Then he learned M-80s had waterproof detonators — a perfect combination. His accomplice, Sharp, would give the high sign out the window when a potential target wandered into a stall. Perry, from the floor above, would flush the lit firework down.

“It kind of launched the guy off of the seat,” Sharp told the Tribune in June. “It was quite a hoot. It was one of our more perfect deals.”

But Perry wasn’t the only one with success in hijinks. In a 1988 interview with the Reporter-News, Perry recalled how Sharp, at a stoplight in Hillsboro, once intimidated a group of motorcycle thugs by eating live crickets.

Political rivals

By their senior year, Perry and Sharp had run each other’s campaigns and ended up in different places. Sharp was student body president, working to reform the campus to make it more hospitable to civilians. Perry was elected a yell leader — an esteemed male cheerleader who has traditional responsibilities at major athletic events — and social secretary for his class. And he was exceedingly loyal to the corps, which he credited with giving him the discipline to get an animal sciences degree — his 2.5 grade point average wasn’t high enough to go the veterinary route — and join the Air Force.

“I was probably a bit of a free spirit, not particularly structured real well for life outside of a military regime,” he said in the 1989 interview. “I would have not lasted at Texas Tech or the University of Texas. I would have hit the fraternity scene and lasted about one semester.”

Sharp’s position — student body president — may have seemed a better predictor of a career in politics. Perry saw it another way. “Really, being yell leader had more political consequence than anything else,” he said. “It was really visible.”

The distinction between substantive roles and visible roles would rear its head again: After stints as an analyst for the Legislative Budget Board, a state representative and a senator with policy-heavy positions, Sharp sat on the Railroad Commission and later became the state comptroller. Perry served as a state representative and, after switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party, as agriculture commissioner, allowing him to build on his rural base. By the early ’90s, with both men elected statewide, a competitive edge surfaced. The agencies run by Perry and Sharp repeatedly came into conflict. On one occasion, Perry even interrupted Sharp’s press conference.

State Rep. Rick Perry with Railroad Commissioner John Sharp (D) on the floor of the House during the 70th Legislative session, May 20, 1987.

“If you’re running against Rick Perry,” Sharp said in his June interview with the Tribune, “you better bring your lunch.”

By the time the two Aggies took each other on in the close 1998 race for lieutenant governor, Perry’s high profile, combined with shifting political tides, made him formidable. Less than two years after winning that contest, Perry was headed for the governorship. And six years after that, the two reconciled after striking up a conversation in an Austin gun store. Perry and the Legislature were struggling to pull together a school finance package. He turned to Sharp, putting him in charge of a blue-ribbon task force of business leaders and others. That panel devised a controversial package that lowered local school property taxes and replaced them with a new business margins tax. The governor got anti-tax activist Grover Norquist to bless the idea, while Sharp convinced the business community. In special session in spring 2006, the two got the Legislature to bless it. The tax remains controversial — many blame it for the recurring $5 billion annual hole in the state budget — but the changes forestalled lawsuits over school finance, and the two old friends turned rivals turned friends have remained close ever since.

Mauro, now an attorney, said that of all the student leaders he dealt with at A&M, Perry was not the one he would have expected to become governor. “Anyone that isn’t kind of in awe of what he’s done is jealous,” he said.

But in the 1989 interview with the Reporter-News, Sharp said A&M was the ultimate political training ground.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said at the time. “Politics outside A&M was much easier than politics inside A&M. It was a microcosm.”

Jay Root contributed to this article.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/texas-people/rick-perry/perry-aggie-years/.

byAbrahm Lustgarten ProPublica

For years the natural gas drilling industry has decried the lack of data that could prove or disprove that drilling can cause drinking water contamination. Only baseline data, they said, could show without a doubt that water was clean before drilling began.

The absence of baseline data was one of the most serious criticisms leveled at a group of Duke researchers last week when they published the first peer-reviewed study linking drilling to methane contamination in water supplies.

That study2014which found that methane concentrations in drinking water increased dramatically with proximity to gas wells2014contained 201Cno baseline information whatsoever,201D wrote Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, in a statement debunking the study.

Now it turns out that some of that data does exist. It just wasn2019t available to the Duke researchers, or to the public.

Ever since high-profile water contamination cases were linked to drilling in Dimock, Pa. in late 2008, drilling companies themselves have been diligently collecting water samples from private wells before they drill, according to several industry consultants who have been working with the data. While Pennsylvania regulations now suggest pre-testing water wells within 1,000 feet of a planned gas well, companies including Chesapeake Energy, Shell and Atlas have been compiling samples from a much larger radius 2013 up to 4,000 feet from every well. The result is one of the largest collections of pre-drilling water samples in the country.

201CThe industry is sitting on hundreds of thousands of pre and post drilling data sets,201D said Robert Jackson, one of the Duke scientists who authored the study, published May 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jackson relied on 68 samples for his study. 201CI asked them for the data and they wouldn2019t share it.201D

The water tests could help settle the contentious debate over the environmental risks of drilling, particularly the invasive part of the process called hydraulic fracturing [1], where millions of gallons of toxic chemicals and water are pumped underground to fracture rock. Residents from Wyoming to Pennsylvania fear that the chemicals will seep into aquifers and pollute water supplies, and in some cases they complain it already has. But the lack of scientific research on the issue 2013 including a dearth of baseline water samples 2013 has hindered efforts by government and regulators to understand the risks.

The industry has two reasons to collect the data: To get to the bottom of water contamination problems, and to protect itself when people complain that drilling harmed their drinking water.

201CUnless you have the baseline before the analysis you can argue until the sky turns green,201D said Anthony Gorody, a geochemist who often works for the energy industry. 201CThe only real way to address this without anybody bitching and moaning is by doing this before and after.201D

Chesapeake Energy alone has tested thousands of private water supplies in the Marcellus Shale, and the company says its findings demonstrate that much of the water was contaminated before drilling began.

201CWater quality testing2026 has shown numerous issues with local groundwater,201D wrote the company2019s spokesman, Jim Gipson, in an email to ProPublica. 201COne out of four water sources have detectable levels of methane present2026 and about one in four fail one or more EPA drinking water standards.201D

Gipson declined to elaborate on the findings or share Chesapeake2019s test results, making it difficult to verify whether the companies had, indeed, found the water was contaminated before drilling began. But he did note that Pennsylvania does not regulate water quality in private wells and that water sampling is typically not done by homeowners.

201CThis fact substantially explains why many of these pre-existing issues have not been previously identified or resolved by landowners,201D he wrote.

It is also unclear whether Pennsylvania state environment officials 2013 who declined to answer questions for this story 2013 have been allowed to review the industry data or are using it when they investigate drilling accidents in the state.

That leaves open questions about who will see the water data, whether it has been verified by independent labs, and how it might be useful in the public debate. The Environmental Protection Agency2019s study of hydraulic fracturing is due to be completed next year, and the Department of Energy recently appointed a review panel to assess the risks of drilling.

Energy in Depth2019s Tucker and others expect the industry will eventually make its data public.

201CThere has been talk about releasing it and putting it in the public domain,201D said Fred Baldassare, a former Pennsylvania environment official and expert on underground gas migration who now consults for the industry. Baldassare said the drilling companies were concerned that releasing water test results could affect property values for residents and amounted to a violation of their privacy. 201CHow do you identify these points while maintaining some confidentiality?201D

Jackson said the data should be made available now to independent researchers and to agencies investigating the hydraulic fracturing process. But even without the data, he stands behind his study. The Duke report said that the link between drilling activity and water degradation was clear, and said the contaminants could be migrating through manmade underground fractures, or, more likely, were coming from cracks in the well structure itself. The researchers said the wells they analyzed had been hydraulically fractured, but that more study of that process was needed to understand whether fracturing might be causing the contamination. No indicators of fracturing fluids were found in the samples.

Jackson likened the questions about drilling risk to those about the link between smoking and lung cancer.

201CIn an ideal study you follow people through their lives. You take measurements on them in their lungs as they start smoking and as you grow old. That2019s what you need to prove cause and effect,201D he said. 201CBut instead they asked: 2018If you smoke, did you get lung cancer?2019 That doesn2019t prove that smoking is the cause, but it2019s a pretty good step.

201CThat2019s all we did here. If you live near a gas well are you more likely to have methane contamination? That answer is yes. It2019s not proof, but it2019s a good first step.201D

Follow on Twitter: @AbrahmL [2]

Austin’s own Wyatt Brand, a public relations, design and branding firm helmed by husband-and-wife duo David and Rachel Wyatt, serves as the stateside representatives of the i: Made in Israel project. The pair signed on with the southwest office of the Consulate General of Israel in Houston in January, having been recommended for their expertise in arts and culture branding and PR.

Founded March 15, 2006, Wyatt Brand brought David’s experience in representing arts organizations and non-profits together with Rachel’s experience in magazine art direction and production. The endeavor started modestly, operating out of the Wyatt’s home. “For a while in the beginning, we were making conference calls with Miles [the Wyatt's son] in a sling, or having these really quiet meetings because he was sleeping,” David said.

The Wyatts soon found themselves with a niche market to match their expertise.

“Often, you find that an organization, if they have a PR department, they have one person who is straight out of school, or they are the pro bono client of a large firm that’s not specifically versed in arts. There is definitely a desire to find someone who is specialized and who understands their needs,” he said.

Among their favorite moments are the opening Ballet Austin’s downtown facility and their recent work for the Texas Medal of Arts campaign, their first state-wide project. For i: Made in Israel, Wyatt Brand named the project, developed the on-site branding for the trade
show booth and executed a nation-wide campaign in both traditional press and new media.

“We’re helping people discover the cool things coming out of Israel,” he said.

Eatliz, a Tel Aviv-based rock band, is making their North American debut this month, following a handful of shows in Canada with a showcase performance at South By Southwest. The band, known for the stunning visual effects of their live shows, is part of a group of “cultural delegates” whose goal is to demonstrate the wide variety of Israeli innovation in design, music, film and technology. The project, called i: Made in Israel, will feature the creative efforts of artists from across Israel.
Among the i: Made in Israel events will be screenings of Andante, a film by Assaf Tager, live performances by four bands, participation in the Technology Summit and a digital exhibition of Israeli design curated by Flatstock 29. Visit http://schedule.sxsw.com for a full listing of i: Made in Israel events.
For Eatliz, SXSW is an exciting venue for both playing their music and enjoying the music of acts they admire. The six-piece band has toured across Europe, and enjoys heavy radio airplay in both Israel and Germany. Their first North American tour offers an opportunity to share their unique style with an entirely new audience.

PMT:What interests you about SXSW?
Eatliz: It’s going to be our first time in a large scale showcase festival such as SXSW and we are highly excited to take part in it! We just performed at Canadian Music week, which is also a showcase festival , but much smaller, so it was a kind of a work up
There are lots of amazing artists we wanna see live for the first time at SXSW such as Menomena, Queens of the Stone Age, Owen Pallett and many more. We wanna get to know new bands, see the city, go to the parties, make lots of new friends and colleagues, get the Eatliz word out there and just have fun!

PMT: What are you hoping will come from this experience? Any specific aims for your time in Austin (or your North American tour)?
Eatliz: We’re interested in getting inspired by the music and and vibes, in getting our own music and performance across and reach new audiences with kick-ass shows. After performing so many shows in Israel and Europe, this long tour gives us the feeling that something bigger and very good is on our way.

PMT: How did you get involved with the I: Made In Israel delegation?
Eatliz: We submitted to SXSW a while ago and was very happy to be accepted! A bit after our acceptance we found out that some more great acts from Tel Aviv are coming too; Electra, Hadag Nahash and Onili. Every act has a different style of music, so we are happy people will be able to see the eclectic and diverse side of Israeli music; Hip Hop & soul, Electro, Garage-rock and Art rock, which is what we do. We have 3 internationally warded animation music videos that were screened all over the world and got our name out there, but we were never present at all these screening cause it’s far from Israel. The I:Made in Israel music videos showcase will finally allow us to perform with these animation music videos with a new surprising extra animation.

PMT: How valuable is it for Israeli culture to have the kind of exposure a festival like this provides?
Eatliz: We see ourselves as ambassadors. it’s important for us to show to the world that Israel is not just wars and politics, the music is not only “kleyzmer”, and we don’t ride camels in the streets. We have a very unique and vibrant musical scene, crossing different genres, from alternative to metal to hip hop and hardcore and ska, many bands sing in English, and we’re not even mentioning other art forms such as visual arts, dance, film and theater… Participating in SXSW is a way for us to bring that message out.
Everytime we get abroad we find ourselves talking with people and rising above the media stereotypes people tend to see about Israel in the news. For us, Tel Aviv is really like New York, Berlin or Toronto. Every night you can see hundreds of live shows, theatre, dance, galleries and museums. The rock scene in Tel Aviv is diverse and performed in high quality standards, way more than you would dream to expect from a tiny Middle Eastern country.

PMT: What will American audiences find surprising about Eatliz and about the rock scene in Tel Aviv?
Eatliz: Eatliz has a very distinctive visual art concept, especially animation music videos that we combine in our live shows. We got 3 guitars and none of them is “lead”, we use regular instruments in an irregular way. We cross genres and we play complex parts without neglecting the energies of rocking out onstage. We call it Art Rock, cause we can’t really define it to one specific genre. People that discover us often say they never heard songs like our, cause they are a bit weird and grow on you.

Tuesday’s SXSW Interactive lineup got a shot of humor with a panel focusing on the benefits of using humor as an alternative to traditional modes of communicating important issues. Organized by Carnegie Mellon graduate student Chelsey Delaney, Comedic Communication: Developing User-centered Humor Design featured Adam Frucci, founder and editor of Splitsider, Baratunde Thurston, Director of Digital at The Onion and Lisa Cohen, founder of WitStream. A graduate of the University of Texas, Delaney said the interaction between humor and design provides a space to find solutions to complex problems.

“I started realizing as I got older that I used humor to cope with a lot of my problems, and that the approach was often lauded for its positivity. Once I really started getting into design and seeing that design is essentially responsible for facilitating and/or solving problems, I felt like no one had carved out the space for my go-to problem-solving option (humor). I decided to try carving out the space with a hope that designing for complex problems might become less intimidating for users and designers alike.”

Thurston echoed these comments during the panel, saying humor creates vulnerability in the audience by exposing a different element of their humanity. That vulnerability in the presence of laughter enables people to see opposing viewpoints without hostility.

Frucci said laughter’s value comes in part from its social nature. “It seems personal, but it’s really very social. People laugh when others laugh. Our peers influence when we laugh,” he said.

All of the panelists agree that technology has created new platforms for comedic communication. For Frucci, the openness of the internet has created a need for an authoritative voice to help curate the massive amount of humorous content.

“The internet has made it easier to create, but harder to filter out the good,” he said. For Cohen, the accessibility afforded by the internet requires an extra effort to stand out. “It really forces everyone to up their game,” she said.

The panel advocated humor as a way to cope with tragic world events. For Thurston, events like the revolution in Egypt offer a way to alter perception of those events by offering a statement of truth wrapped in humor. That humor offers an element of healing in the face of difficulty. For Frucci, humor fills a need humans experience in times of tragedy by giving them space to laugh.

“We are waiting for permission to laugh,” he said.

The panel came into existence as an outgrowth of Delaney’s thesis work, and concluded with by examining the valuable effect humor has on the way people think. Humor creates “an enabling mechanism for thought,” urging the audience, as they consider the implications of a piece of design to realize more about themselves.

“I think what I really wanted was to throw these ideas out there and make sure they were capable of rationally being real. I honestly expected more challenges to the ideas we shared, so I was impressed to learn that many people had had the same thoughts but just hadn’t had a venue to articulate them. The reaction shifted my goal from getting feedback for my own sake to collaboratively establishing Design theory, which is beautiful,” Delaney said.