Free Republic

Texas prosecutor Mike McCrum says the grand jury that indicted former Texas Governor Rick Perry has made two mutually exclusive factual findings. The grand jury, McCrum says, has alternately declared that Perry's public statement threatening to veto a spending bill was 1) An official act; and 2) Not an official act. The significance of this will be described below. First, though, recall that there are two Counts in the indictment against Perry: COUNT ONE: Abuse of Official Capicity. This count alleges that Perry abused the office of Governor by "misusing" government "property" (the veto is the item Perry allegedly misused)...

Wendy Davis, who lost the Nov. 4 gubernatorial election to Republican Greg Abbott, has won Texas Monthly magazine's coveted "Bum Steer of the Year" award for her "train wreck" of a campaign. The annual awards take a snarky jab at Texas politicians, odd news stories and personalities. Fromer winners include Anna Nicole Smith, Gov. Rick Perry, Lance Armstrong and Tom Delay. This year's cover depicts Davis stepping in a cow patty while wearing the bright pink Mizuno "Wave Rider" sneakers she donned during her 2013 filibuster against Texas' new abortion restrictions that brought her into the national spotlight. The magazine...

Tuesday night the Houston Chronicle published a story about the grand jury that indicted Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Those grand jurors who spoke with the Chronicle broke the law to do so, and they knew that they were breaking the law. They claimed that they were speaking to the newspaper to counter Gov. Perry’s “spin” on the case. That’s not the job of a grand jury, by the way. One of them is a woman named Rho Chalmers. Chalmers tried to get around her lawbreaking by attempting to build this wall of implausible deniability. Rho Chalmers, who name matches that...

A Texas judge opted Monday not to issue an arrest warrant against Gov. Rick Perry, but the Republican still faces the unflattering prospect of being booked, fingerprinted and having his mug shot taken — and has assembled a team of high-powered attorneys to fight the two felony counts of abuse of power against him. "This is nothing more than banana republic politics," Tony Buzbee a Houston-based defense attorney who will head a cadre of four lawyers from Texas and Washington defending Perry, said at a news conference. A grand jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise largely conservative Texas,...

Rick Perry’s potential 2016 GOP rivals on Saturday rushed to the Texas governor’s defense in the wake of his indictment on allegations of abusing his office. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush all came out in strong defense of Perry, who on Saturday said he would fight the “farce” indictment. Cruz, who previously served as a top lawyer for the Lone Star state, blasted the prosecution as “politically motivated” and lit into what he deemed as the “sad history” of the prosecutors, a reference to previous legal efforts aimed at Texas Republicans.

They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.

Chris Christie Rebuts Perry Comparison of Homosexuality To Alcoholism MARK Z. BARABAK, CHRIS MEGERIAN New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie takes questions at San Francisco flower shop GOP's Chris Christie pays a visit Facebook headquarters in California New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who signed legislation barring "gay conversion therapy" in his state, said Friday that Texas Gov. Rick Perry's comparison of homosexuality to alcoholism was wrong. "I disagree with him, and I don't believe that's an apt analogy," Christie said during a San Francisco appearance alongside Neel Kashkari, the GOP candidate for California governor. Christie was appearing with Kashkari in his...