Despite all of these remarks (and others that I don't have room for here), Rick Perry is responsible for Texas being the second biggest state recipient of ARRA stimulus dollars -- ostensibly "redistributed" from tax payers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and the president's home state of Hawaii.

In 2010, Perry was confronting a state budget deficit of $6.6 billion. A constitutional amendment mandated that Perry balance the budget somehow, but instead of using a "rainy day" fund established with state money, Perry decided to tap a different source to fill the void. The stimulus. According to Politifact, Perry and the Republican-controlled Texas legislature requested, received and used $6.4 billion in stimulus money to help balance the budget. 97 percent of the budget shortfall was filled with stimulus money.

There's more.

In addition to the $6.4 billion to balance Rick Perry's budget deficits, Texas also used $5.7 billion in stimulus money in 2010 for "programs such as highway and bridge construction, child care development programs and weatherization assistance."

That's a total of $12,100,000,000 in total stimulus money for Rick Perry's Texas in one year alone. Nearly seven percent of the total Texas budget in 2010 was stimulus money. That's a lot of "principle" being "tossed out the window." If Perry had, in fact, seceded, I wonder where that money would have come from. It stands to reason that a military confrontation with the United States would have created massive, unprecedented deficits in Texas.

As of the end of June this year, Texas asked for and accepted $17.4 billion in stimulus money with Rick Perry presiding over the state.

[...]

This is should be the argument against Rick Perry and the Republicans. They're closeted Keynesians. Using their own vernacular, they're socialists, and they're lying to everyone about their hypocritical true nature almost every time they fire-eat in public against the scary "misguided" generational theft being perpetrated by the White House and the Democrats. On a personal level, Rick Perry has even accepted more than $80,000 in federal farm subsidies while positioning himself as the viable tea party candidate running to be chief executive of a nation from which he wanted to secede because of "runaway spending." The contradictions are staggering.