Rick Perry dominates the Googlesphere

News about Rick Perry was dominating Google and other search engines on Tuesday, much of it simply focusing on his high profile since announcing his candidacy Saturday for the GOP presidential nomination.

Amid a mixed bag of news about Texas governor and the latecomer to the Republican presidential race, was an LA Times report on Perry's campaign donors faring well in his home state. 

The Times said it found dozens of examples in which major donors to Perry had benefited during his tenure, and cites data compiled by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice.

Among them Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who gave the governor $1.12 million in recent years, and who subsequently has "won permission to build a low-level radioactive waste disposal site in Texas, a project that promises to generate hundreds of millions of dollars."

Meantime, Perry has come under fire over comments he made at the Iowa State Fair on Monday — his first campaign trip since declaring he would seek the Republican nomination for president — that Americans want a "president who is passionate about America."

After Perry also suggested that President Barack Obama may not share the sentiment, telling a reporter to "go ask him" if he loves America, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs hit back Tuesday.

Gibbs said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that it was a "remarkable turnaround" for the Republican presidential candidate to say he was passionate about America just a few years after he was talking about the possibility of Texas seceding from the U.S., the National Journal reports.

"And now this campaign has caused him to profess his love to the United States,” Gibbs reportedly said, adding: "Any day now, Rick Perry will ask to see the president's birth certificate."

The Associated Press, meantime, reported that the candidate was the subject of new book by James C. Moore, co-author of the anti-Bush best seller "Bush’s Brain," and that Perry's book, "Fed Up!" had received a bump in sales from the announcement. The foreword, AP notes, is by Newt Gingrich, one of Perry’s rivals for the Republican nomination.

Perry, for his part, is doing everything possible to add to his searchability.

In the space of less than 24 hours, ABC reports, Perry has "managed to call Obama the 'greatest threat to our country,' raise questions about rival Mitt Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts and suggest that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might be close to committing a 'treasonous' act."

Perry, taking aim at Bernanke — incidentally appointed to head up the Fed by George W. Bush — for taking actions intended to boost the economy out the worst recession since the Great Depression.

"If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y'all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion," Perry said when asked about his views on the Federal Reserve. 

Bernanke, CBS points out, "has lowered interest rates and overseen a host of extraordinary measures to revive the U.S. economy which was officially in recession from December 2007 through June 2009."