Texas Gov. Rick Perry has just received the kind of award nobody wants to get.
In the January edition of Texas Monthly magazine, it gives out the "Bum Steer of the Year" award to the person guilty of the "biggest screw-up, gaffe, fumble, stumble, train wreck, or humiliation." This year, the publication has decided that there is no person more deserving than the Lone Star state's governor, Rick Perry.
It caps off a rough couple months for Perry, during which he saw a rapid surge to the top of the GOP presidential primary polls, followed by a quick descent, precipitated primarily by self-inflicted wounds exacted under the klieg lights.
The past few months haven't been easy for Texas Monthly either, the editor writes in a description of the magazine's somewhat painful decision to bestow the badge of humiliation on the holder of the state's top office. The editorial board made steps to resist the urge to shame Perry with the award, but following his excruciatingly extended mental lapse at a debate in November, in which he proved incapable of remembering the third and final federal agency he had promised to eliminate just seconds before, it was given no choice. Perry's defeated "oops" sealed his "Bum Steer" fate -- and the magazine's January cover: MORE.....
By NBC News, msnbc.com staff
and news services
BAGHDAD -- U.S. forces
formally ended their nine-year war in Iraq with a low-key flag ceremony
in Baghdad on Thursday.
"After a lot of blood spilled
by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and
secure itself has become real," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at
the ceremony at Baghdad's still heavily fortified airport.
Almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers and
tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives in the war that began with
a "Shock and Awe" campaign of missiles pounding Baghdad and descended
into sectarian strife and a surge in U.S. troop numbers.
U.S. soldiers lowered the flag
of American forces in Iraq and slipped it into a camouflage-colored
sleeve in a brief outdoor ceremony, symbolically ending the most
unpopular U.S. military venture since the Vietnam War of the 1960s and
70s.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani were invited to the ceremony but
did not attend.
In addition to the dead, the
war left 32,000 Americans wounded and cost the U.S. more than $800
billion.
While the incomes of so many Americans remain the same size or get smaller, corporate chiefs can't say they're suffering in quite the same way.
American CEOs saw pay increases of between 27 and 40 percent last year, according to a GovernanceMetrics International survey cited by the Guardian. In addition, the median value of CEOs profits on stock options jumped to $1.3 million from $950,400.
This, even after Congress passed financial reform regulations that included provisions aimed at making CEO pay more transparent by allowing shareholders to weigh in. MORE....