AUSTIN, TX.—Former Gov. Rick Perry (TX) today signed up for an additional 20,000 phone lines at his home here, explaining that he “needed them for personal use.”

“See, Anita needs one to talk to her friends, and then I like to have one in case someone wants to call to invite me fishing,” he explained. “And then there’s one for the Internet, which I hear is going to be big, and then it’s just polite to have one for each of 19,997 potential house guests we might have.”

Perry steadfastly denied that there was any connection to the decision by Fox News to limit participation in Wednesday’s Republican primary debates to the ten candidates with the highest polling numbers.

“First of all, I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” said Perry. “Second of all, even if the polling cutoff was tomorrow night, and even if pollsters do find targets by randomly dialling phone numbers, and if their statistical models regularly oversample Austin due to its high-sigma demographic profile, well, what does that have to do with anything?”

A twissblog reporter, dialling the Perry residence for comment, had a conversation with an answering machine that proclaimed its strong support for “Rick Perry for President 2016,” before asking the caller to leave a message “and ideally credit-card authorization for $2,700.”

Perry, who is currently in 11th place in polls with 2.8% of the vote, trailing Chris Christie with 3.4%, denied any connection to the message. “I suppose that’s just some God-fearing citizen of Texas expressing his views, he said. “I don’t know why it sounded like it was recorded through a sock.” Perry then looked confused. “So you hung up before it mentioned the George Washington Bridge thing? I mean, if it had mentioned that. Which I wouldn’t know if it did, or it didn’t.”



If elected President, Rick Perry promises to give every American a nice T-Bone steak, “about this big”