Nobody may know that better than Rick Perry, the Texas governor, who suffered an embarrassing memory lapse during the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday. Mr. Perry stops midsentence as he struggles to remember the name of the Department of Energy, one of three federal agencies he has often said should be eliminated. A pained look crosses his face. He stammers. He starts over. He changes the subject. But the words don’t come.

How the gaffe will affect Mr. Perry’s political aspirations isn’t known. But among brain researchers, the moment is a fascinating display of a common human experience: the brain freeze.

“There are a lot of potential explanations for why it happened,” said Daniel Weissman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist who studies attention. “A lot of things are going on when we try to recall memories, and problems at any stage could lead to failure.’’

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/rick-perrys-brain-freeze/?hp

Nope... I know all about brain-freeze. and this is why I signpost my ideas and that is why I use pegs and keywords to keep my train of thoughts on track... This does stop me from serving myself a cup of coffee in a flower vase, accidentally mixing concepts...

...

"I stepped in it last night, that's for sure. I don't mind saying clearly that I stepped in it last night," he said.

"I stepped in it is what my wife would have said."

The Texas governor has made a sweep of the morning shows, trying to laugh off what has been described as an "epic lapse" or as one tweet put it, "the moment Rick Perry dug his own grave, jumped in and pulled the dirt in on top of him".

The headlines of both the New York Times and the Washington Post read simply "Oops".

Mr Perry smiled and gritted his teeth through endless playbacks of the moment commentators say he turned his campaign into a smoking presidential train wreck.

In interview after interview Mr Perry copped cringe-worthy questions like: "Is there a chance in the wake of your debate performance last night you are going to call it quits?"

Mr Perry responded with: "I readily admit I may not be the best debater or the smoothest politician on that stage."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-11/perry-flops-in-debate/3659444?WT.svl=news2

Romney also noted that 18 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product is spent on health care, while no other nation spends more than 12 percent. He said this illustrates why we need to reduce government’s role and “get the market to work.” No one had the chance to point out that other industrialized countries have single-payer health systems that require much more government involvement than we have in the United States, not less.

Newt Gingrich spent the evening acting grouchily superior and reminding us that he once was a professor of history. Asked what he did to earn the $300,000 he was paid by quasi-public mortgage giant Freddie Mac during the subprime housing bubble, Gingrich claimed he had just offered advice “as a historian.”

Gingrich’s PhD thesis at Tulane University was titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.” Who knew the job market for historians of colonial Africa was so hot?

Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul were merely present and accounted for.

Oh, and Herman Cain. In many ways, his gaffe was worse than Perry’s: He referred to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as “Princess Nancy.” Cain has spent the past week trying to convince the nation he’s not guilty of chronically piggish behavior toward women. Belittling the first woman to become speaker of the House with a flip, sexist insult was telling — and appalling.

Once again, a GOP debate produced a clear winner. Once again, it was President Obama.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-gop-debate-nonsense-ruled-the-stage/2011/11/10/gIQAX0KL9M_story.html?hpid=z3

Conservatives need to contemplate what the Rick Perry and Herman Cain stories say about the state of their movement and the health of their creed.

Perry’s debate gaffe last week was about something more important than “brain freeze.” Memory lapses can strike anyone, and Perry probably helped his cause a bit by poking fun at himself at Saturday’s CBS News/National Journal debate and on the David Letterman show.

What really matters is the subject that sent Perry’s brain into lockdown. He was in the middle of describing sweeping changes in the federal bureaucracy closely connected to his spare vision of American government. One presumes a candidate for president ponders such proposals carefully, discusses them with advisers and understands their implications.

Forgetting an idea at the heart of your program, in other words, is not the same as forgetting a phone number, a friend’s name, a football score or the title of a recently read book.

Perry’s memory lapse showed that he wasn’t asserting anything that he is truly serious about because he is not serious about what government does, or ought not to do. For him, governing seems a casual undertaking.

“And I will tell you,” he declared, “it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the — what’s the third one there? Let’s see.”

Yes, let’s see what “gone” might imply. Would Perry end all federal aid to education? Would he do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the part of the Commerce Department that, among other things, tracks hurricanes? Energy was the department he forgot. Would he scrap the department’s 17 national labs, including such world-class facilities as Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., or — there’s that primary coming up — Aiken, S.C.?

I’m not accusing Perry of wanting to do any of these things because I don’t believe he has given them a moment of thought. And that’s the problem for conservatives. Their movement has been overtaken by a quite literally mindless opposition to government. Perry, correctly, thought he had a winning sound bite, had he managed to blurt it out, because if you just say you want to scrap government departments (and three is a nice, round number), many conservatives will cheer without asking questions.

 read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/conservatives-mindless-opposition/2011/11/11/gIQAa33BJN_print.html

Welcome to Tony Abbott's style of negativity that does not make any sense, as applied to the US...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has a warning for federal employees: If I win the White House, you’d better get in line.

Campaigning Tuesday in New Hampshire, Perry said he would seek to reassign federal employees who disagree with his policies if he’s elected president.

The statement earned angry responses from federal worker labor unions, who launched personal attacks on the governor in response to his statement.

In response to a question at a town hall in Derry, N.H., Perry said Tuesday that he would employ advisers and officials “that understand my core philosophy that government should do a few things, but do those few things really, really well.”

That would mean restructuring the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies to reduce federal regulations on people “who are out there trying to create jobs and create wealth for this country.”

And what would he do with career federal workers who disagree with his changes?

“Health and Human Services is a great example,” he said. “If you have Health and Human Service bureaucrats who try to block our being able to block grant dollars back to the states, so you all can decide how best to deliver health care in New Hampshire. I don’t think you can fire federal bureaucrats, but you can reassign them. So, but reassign them to some really God-awful place.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/rick-perry-disagreeable-federal-workers-would-be-reassigned-to-some-really-god-awful-place-video/2011/11/30/gIQAtQceCO_blog.html?hpid=z2

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Could not remember the name of Hell, either... see toon at top...

 Mr. Perry invoked the provision last year, disclosing in December that he had increased his take-home pay by more than $90,000 a year through his on-the-job retirement. He also makes $150,000 a year as governor.

His decision provided the first opportunity for a public, in-depth look at a retirement perk that was quietly enhanced and slipped into the law.

In Texas, the considerable pension benefits given to politicians are exempt from government transparency laws and not subject to ethics disclosure rules. But Mr. Perry, a presidential candidate before dropping out last month, had to reveal the pension payments to the Federal Election Commission.

The unexpected news that he was already collecting retirement benefits stirred disbelief from critics and open-government advocates. They wondered how a politician could “retire” without leaving work — or having to tell anyone about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/us/politics/perrys-on-the-job-retirement-lifts-pension-perk-from-shadows.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1330203651-hWDhVMdDUFbivpnxUdkqsQ