Years later, after driving the House Majority Leader out of office, and serving as key ammunition for democrats to use to overthrow the GOP majority in Congress with corruption charges, the last undismissed count of the contrived and partisan indictment of Tom Delay by radical Austin, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has been demolished by an Appeals Court ruling noting that the alleged illicit financial cooperation between two political entities involved checks, and the Texas statute applied only to cash.

The Austin American Statesman story does its best to give all possible credit to the theory that the contribution of money by one Republican political organization to another really was a form of money-laundering in a deliberate attempt to evade the law. The story fundamentally incorporates also the dubious premise that opportunistic interpretations of the the arcane technicalities of state campaign finance regulations really make the victims of their unique and partisan application genuinely culpable. And it fails to note the rather important point, that though Mr. Delay was nominally and formally involved with the Texas organizations, he was actually in Washington, DC, serving in the very active role of House Majority Leader, and obviously far too busy with Congressional leadership to be personally in charge of the financial operation and details of those local organizations.

It also fails to mention that a previous grand jury declined to find in favor of Earle’s proposed indictment, and that, in an unusual and highly controversial prosecutorial move, Earle empaneled another grand jury and tried again.

We win,” said Dick DeGuerin, DeLay’s lawyer. .. it means every crime Ronnie Earle indicted Tom DeLay for was not a crime.”

Where does Tom Delay go to get his reputation back?

Where does America go to get two years of a democrat majority in Congress back?

Previous postings.

Former State Representative (54th District Texas, R) Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp testifies before a Senate Committee including Chuck Schumer to her own tragic experience with the consequences of gun control restrictions on law-abiding citizens carrying concealed weapons, and concludes by identifying the most important basis for the Constitutional right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

5:23 video

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

Things went wrong for 19-year-old Cameron Sands of Fort Worth on Tuesday. Upon breaking into a house in Grand Prairie, Sands found himself confronted by the homeowner. News reports are conflicting. Some say that he fired unsuccessfully at the homeowner. Others say that he merely brandished a gun. In any case, either while drawing his pistol from the waistband of his trousers, or while holstering it after taking a pot shot at the robbery victim, Mr. Sands mishandled his weapon and shot himself in the lower abdomen. Police arrived to find Mr. Sands had succumbed to his injury just outside the house.

Dallas Morning News

Pegasus News

MyFox Dallas

Very bad teenage boys.

And she owes her victories to racists, Matthew Yglesias says accusingly. So there!

Or was it really the work of Rush Limbaugh?

Liza Abater thinks so, and she’s worried about next November.

Hugh Hewitt does not agree with El Rushbo’s strategy, and remarks bitterly.

If Hillary ekes out close wins, stays alive, gains the nomination and the White House, will Rush hold the Bible at her Inauguration?

My posting on Rush Limbaugh’s “vote for Hillary” strategy.

BBC:

US scientists say an animal found in Texas is not the chupacabra – or goat-sucker – of American myth, but a coyote with a hair loss problem.
DNA tests on the carcass found at a ranch south-east of San Antonio yielded a virtually identical match to coyote DNA, biologist Mike Forstner said.

The coyote was one of three found dead by rancher Phylis Canion this summer.

Central American myth has long spoken of a vampire-like creature that slays livestock by sucking out their blood.

The chupacabra is said to attack its victims at night, leaving a trail of carcasses with their throats torn out.

Mr Forstner said that he himself had assumed the creature brought in for testing at Texas State University was a domestic dog but “the DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote”.

Ms Canion and some of her neighbours discovered the 40-pound (18-kg) carcasses of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 90 miles (145km) south-east of San Antonio.

She said she had saved the head of one of them to get it properly tested.

Additional hide samples have been taken to try to determine the cause of the animal’s hair loss, Mr Forstner said.

Original story.

AP is reporting that a Cuero, Texas woman believes she has found a specimen of the legendary chupacabra in the form of roadkill.

It is one ugly creature,” (Phylis) Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.

“I’ve seen a lot of nasty stuff. I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren’t eaten or carried off — all the blood was drained from them, she said.

Chupacabra means “goat sucker” in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Canion thinks recent heavy rains ran them right out of their dens.

This legendary monster of the Hispanic New World must have arisen in recent stories as the result of vague memories, featuring only the name itself, of medieval legends of the Caprimulgidae, i.e. “goatsuckers”, birds of the category including Whip-Poor-Wills, Nightjars, and Nighthawks, nocturnal insectivores with wide and hairy mouths, supposedly making nightly visits to drink surreptitiously the milk of farmers’ goats. The modern Spanish goatsucker is a more alarming creature, not merely an economic menace stealing milk, but a vampiric drinker of blood.

Follow-up (11/6): DNA Testing Shows That It Was a Coyote.

At Maggie’s Farm.

They look like Western Diamondbacks (Crotalus atrox) to me.

I ran over a pretty large snakeskin when I was mowing yesterday. I expect I have my own rattlesnakes right here atop the Blue Ridge.

Urban prosecutors and police departments ignoring state law in Texas has led to the unlikely alliance of the NRA and ACLU, reports the New York Times.

Like many other states, Texas bans the carrying of concealed handguns without a license. Obtaining a license requires a background check and a gun-safety course. By long-established law, however, Texans can cite “traveling” as a defense to possession of an unlicensed handgun. But while traveling was widely understood to denote a journey of some distance, it was never defined. (Travel on planes and other interstate conveyances banning weapons falls under federal jurisdiction.)

In 1997, the State Legislature tried to clarify the law by removing unlicensed carrying of a weapon as an offense while traveling. But it left unresolved whether traveling required making an overnight stop, crossing county lines or other conditions.

In 2005, lawmakers sought to remove the ambiguity by declaring that anyone in a private vehicle who was not engaged in criminal activity or otherwise barred from possessing a firearm was “presumed to be traveling,” and thus exempt from restrictions on concealed handguns.

Terry Keel, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives who sponsored the bill, explained its intent in a statement entered into the record: “In plain terms, a law-abiding person should not fear arrest if they are transporting a concealed pistol in a motor vehicle.”

But the measure hardly ended the controversy.

Almost as soon as it became law in September 2005, the Texas District and County Attorneys Association signaled its displeasure by advising members that the act did not rule out arrests of otherwise law-abiding drivers carrying weapons. The association said it was up to the courts to determine whether a person was, in fact, traveling. “Therefore,” it declared, “officers are still acting within their lawful discretion if they arrest a person who might qualify for the traveling defense or the new traveling presumption.”

Or, as Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, which includes Houston, argued, “The presumption of innocence does not make the person innocent.”