Regardless of how things pan out tomorrow night, Gov. Rick Perry's latest book will go on sale on Nov. 15. Excerpts of "Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington" are now available online and provide some details into how Perry is expanding his Texas-against-Washington message.
"I wish this book had never needed to be written," Newt Gingrich writes in the book's foreword. "It almost came too late. America is recklessly accelerating toward economic disaster. Fed Up! may be the last warning sign to the danger that lies ahead."
The book is copyrighted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin. In an author's note, Perry praises the foundation and reveals that all of his net proceeds from the book will go to the Foundation to support its Center for Tenth Amendment Studies. Perry donated the net proceeds from his last book, "On My Honor," to the Boy Scouts of America.
In its 240 pages, Perry covers a wide range of federal issues far beyond those he's touched on repeatedly on the campaign trail this year.
He calls Social Security a "failure" and compares it to a Ponzi scheme.
In a description of the last redistricting saga, Perry praises the Voting Rights Act but writes that it "has now become, in effect, federally mandated and judicially enforced gerrymandering on the basis of race."
In a chapter titled "Nine Unelected Judges Tell Us How to Live," Perry rails against the influence of the Supreme Court.
"The Supreme Court...long ago wrested away from the people the power to decide what is right and what is wrong and, at the most fundamental level, how we should live our lives. Nothing could be more offensive to the concept of liberty and the principle of federalism," Perry writes.
Perry also points to multiple areas where he finds the federal government is unreasonably intruding in people's lives.
"We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own, what kind of prayers we are allowed to say and where we can say them, what political speech we are allowed to use to elect candidates, what kind of energy we can use, what kind of food we can grow, what doctor we can see, and countless other restrictions on our right to live as we see fit."
In the preface to the book, Perry responds to a charge critics have been lobbing at him for months.
"Now, cynics will say that I decided to write this book because I seek higher office," Perry writes. "They are wrong. I already have the best job in America. I wrote this book because I believe that America is great but also that America is in trouble -- and heading for a cliff if we don't take immediate steps to change course."
You can check out the excerpt yourself here.
Update: The excerpt was taken down less than two hours after we first reported on it.
-Aman Batheja
