Sunday Funnies

Morning-after fallout from the Perry indictment

-- CultureMap Houston:

If found guilty, Perry could be face up to 109 years in prison. He'll surrender to the Travis County Jail where he will be fingerprinted and have a mugshot taken. According to the Associated Press, his defense attorney David L. Botsford is being paid $450 per hour with state funds.

-- Socratic Gadfly:

...(I)f convicted, Tricky Ricky will have to give up that beloved hogleg that he allegedly uses for killing coyotes. It's not just the concealed weapons angle; convicted felons in Texas can't own firearms for five years, and they can't ever have concealed carry permits. That, and many other, restrictions he would face are here. (It's also a great way to do voter suppression, because a felonious Trickster can't vote until he's done with sentence and parole!)

No pistole and no voting; that's about the most fun parts of this.

Beyond that, this has been coming for 20-plus years.

At my first newspaper, I had a set of investigative journalism stories connected to his race against Jim Hightower for Ag Commissioner. Hightower's department was investigating an agrichemical company legally incorporated as a co-op. One of his agents accidentally went from adjoining private ranchland onto the company's site. Perry reportedly told the company to use this as an excuse to stall, stall, stall until after the election, which he, of course won in 1990.  Given the bribery cases against Hightower's aides (to which he was in no way personally connected), Perry had a good chance of winning.

Assuming what I heard as rumor is true, nobody should underestimate Tricky Ricky's legal elbows.

-- Real-time reactions from the Texas Politics blog at the HouChron, "need-to-knows" from Talking Points Memo and the Texas Observer, and some gloating and more good links from Greg Mitchell and Juanita Jean.

I'm going to hold off on the chortling at least until I see a mugshot that's been Photoshopped.

Update: This Austin Chronicle piece has a good backgrounder on Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who brought the case to the grand jury that returned the indictments.  Kindly note that he was appointed by a Republican judge.