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The felony prosecution of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry ended Wednesday when the state's highest criminal court dismissed an abuse-of-power indictment that the Republican says hampered his short-lived 2016 presidential bid.

The 6-2 decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is dominated by elected Republican judges, frees Perry from a long-running criminal case that blemished the exit of one of the most powerful Texas governors in history and hung over his second failed run for the White House.

A grand jury in liberal Austin had indicted Perry in 2014 for vetoing funding for a public corruption unit that Republicans have long accused of wielding a partisan ax. The unit worked under Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, an elected Democrat. Perry wanted her to resign after she was convicted of drunken driving.

It was Perry who led the U.S. delegation to Ukraine when newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was inaugurated back in May

The call triggered the whistleblower complaint from an intelligence officer and led to allegations that Trump abused his power for personal political gain.

Trumpism, Perry warned, was "a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued."

As South Korea’s national-security adviser told it on Thursday, Donald Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un this spring for one purpose only: to achieve the “permanent denuclearization” of North Korea. But according to one of the U.S. officials who came closest to striking that kind of deal, the president better lower his expectations. By a lot.

“I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons,” he added. “But even if they did … I have no idea how we could verify it.”

The years since have brought a series of nuclear agreements that at times froze the North Korean nuclear program, but over the long term failed to prevent the North from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The achilles heel of many of these accords was the Kim government’s refusal to disclose all its nuclear activities and permit outside monitors to verify that those activities had ceased.

Away from Fox News, Pearson Sharp, a host on the hard-right One America News Network (OANN), has been attempting to carve out his own niche of extremism. In late June, Sharp raised the unhinged and untrue theory that “tens of thousands” of people meddled in the election to prevent Trump winning, and went even further than Carlson in his comments.

“In the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution,” Sharp said.

Robert Herring, the CEO of OANN, said: “He was only telling what [sic] could happen if you try to over throw America ... He gave the laws that would apply.”

Five days after an explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled a wide swath of this town, Gov. Rick Perry tried to woo Illinois business officials by trumpeting his state’s low taxes and limited regulations. Asked about the disaster, Mr. Perry responded that more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the nation’s worst industrial accidents in decades.

Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.

Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

The Senate hasn’t formally rejected a Cabinet pick since it voted down President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower for defense secretary in 1989

Trump may have more luck with the Senate than his immediate predecessors, and he has Democrats to thank. When they held the majority in 2013, they changed the rules so that executive-branch nominations are no longer subject to the 60-vote threshold for filibusters. That means Trump could conceivably win Senate approval of his entire Cabinet without a single Democratic vote.

The Trump administration sent an all-star team of five Cabinet secretaries to a Senate hearing Wednesday to talk up its infrastructure proposals. But not even the combined talents of the secretaries of Transportation, Commerce, Labor, Agriculture and Energy seemed enough to move the ball on the $1.5 trillion plan, and it remains unclear whether the measure will ever find its way to a vote in the House or Senate.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said that with some estimates as high as $4 trillion to repair the nation's roads, bridges, ports and airports, "We cannot address a challenge of this magnitude with federal resources alone, or by borrowing." She said the administration was "agnostic" about where the state share of the funds would come from, but said the federal government only owns 10 percent of the nation's roads and bridges, implying it was up to state and local governments to figure out where to find the funds to finance their share of improvements.

One of the key principles for the administration, said Energy Secretary Rick Perry, was removing regulatory barriers to speed approval of construction projects. Perry called the current permitting process fractured and redundant, saying "it requires projects to navigate a huge maze of federal regulations." Perry said Trump wants to see the process streamlined and "substantially cut back."

“It’s the repositioning of every ethnic group when they come to America,” said Niall O’Dowd, the founder of Irish America magazine, the Irish Voice newspaper and IrishCentral.com

“But there’s a natural leaning of the Catholic Church being so far to the right on many issues in America that has taken many Irish Catholics with them, particularly on the issue of abortion.”

Caitriona Perry, an Irish journalist who crisscrossed the U.S. to write “The Tribe: The Inside Story of Irish Power and Influence in US Politics,” agreed that Mrs. Clinton paid insufficient attention to Irish-American communities

Newt Gingrich, who led the field of Republican presidential candidates last week, argued that the concept of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is “un-American.” His rival Rick Perry, who led the Republican pack in September, answered a question about taxes and inequality by saying “I don’t care about that.”

This indifference is grounded in a proposition that has for decades dominated American debate over redistributive policies like steeper taxes for the rich: that inequality is an expected outcome of economic growth, and that efforts to tamp down inequality would slow growth down

As Mr. Gingrich put it, “You are not going to get job creation when you engage in class warfare because you have to attack the very people you hope will create jobs.”

To many, the costumes at the "Stop the Steal" riot seem ridiculous. "We spend $750 billion annually on 'defense' and the center of American government fell in two hours to the duck dynasty and the guy in the Chewbacca bikini,"

But when we actually read the T-shirt slogans and interpret the symbols — especially given the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan — what the Capitol insurrectionists wore becomes more consequential and a lot more menacing.

When the Ku Klux Klan started in the mid-1860s, Klansmen did not wear the white hoods and robes we imagine them in now. They had no uniform. As historian Elaine Frantz explains in her essay "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan," the early Klansmen wore something far more similar to the hodgepodge we saw on display at the Capitol last week: animal horns, fur, fake beards, homemade costumes that drew on traditions of carnival or Mardi Gras, masks, pointy hats, polka dots.

Wrapping up another day of he-said-and-then-denied-he-said in Washington, here’s today’s updated politics news summary:

here was a political quid pro quo involved in the delay of military aid to Ukraine, contradicting the president’s repeated denials

Mulvaney attempted to walk his comments back

Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president on the oft-repeated pledge to “drain the swamp,” initially favored charismatic former politicians with a flair for the dramatic, like Mr. Perry; or former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a former member of the Navy SEALs who arrived to work on horseback; his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, a bellicose Oklahoma attorney general; or his first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, a former Marine Corps general whom Mr. Trump introduced as “Mad Dog.”

A ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis this week found Mr. Trump brought in 281 former lobbyists since the start of the administration. His cabinet now includes a former coal lobbyist running the Environmental Protection Agency, a former oil and gas lobbyist in charge of the Department of Interior, a top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon leading the Defense Department — and, if he is confirmed, an automobile lobbyist at the Energy Department.

That might seem like business as usual for Americans who accepted candidate Trump’s description of Washington as rife with influence peddlers and profiteers. But it might actually be worse than usual. Because of the extraordinarily high rate of turnover that is a hallmark of the Trump administration, the White House’s human resources professionals have had little time to come up with outside-the-Beltway replacements for the constant stream of openings, Mr. LaPira said.

But those plans, experts say, may be just that – plans and proposals, many of which need unlikely approval by an uncooperative Congress or are subject to the whims of hostile foreign leaders, unpredictable markets or other forces beyond any president's control.

"Did you anticipate that the closure of the Abbott facility, because it was not producing the quality that was necessary, that it would have this profound effect immediately, or did it take a little time?" Biden asked. The question appeared directed at criticisms that the administration did not work better, earlier, to head off shortages when Abbott was forced to recall contaminated formula.The public relations effort, however, may not be enough to boost Biden's low approval ratings in time to help Democrats in a challenging midterm election season this fall. And in many cases, Biden's ability to fix the problems bedeviling the administration is limited.

On COVID-19, Biden has indeed ramped up testing and vaccinations during his term, Perry says. But he can't fight Mother Nature and human nature, she adds, noting that public impatience with masking and the virus's mutations aren't things he can control.On Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly noted his success in strengthening the NATO alliance. But "has he ended the war? No. That's something a president can't do," Perry adds. Aside from the threat of the war itself, the ongoing Russian invasion means higher gas prices as well, since the U.S. and its allies have imposed embargoes on Russian energy.

It was a playing field on which we were expected to pay the North Koreans not to do dangerous things, and that is not a sound basis for a policy.

When Bush won the presidency, talks [with North Korea] ceased immediately. The criticism that comes from the Clinton camp is that there was no continuity in policy.

I honestly don't see how, looking back, the architects of that agreement can hold the Bush administration culpable for behavior that, in retrospect, should make us reconsider whether the original Framework Agreement was a sensible idea.

Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News

The Army and local police are investigating the deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers who have died on and off the large Texas base in the past three months under mysterious circumstances, according to reports.

“At this point in the investigative process we do not suspect foul play, but have not completely ruled it out while we conduct a complete and thorough death investigation,” Criminal Investigations spokesman Christopher Grey told the paper.

Scott Pruitt confirmed to EPA

The Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency Republicans desperately want to rein in after what they charge was eight years of dangerous activism under the Obama administration that hurt businesses, jobs and the economy.

Next up will be Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross, Interior nominee Ryan ZInke, Housing and Urban Development nominee Dr. Ben Carson, and Energy nominee Rick Perry.

in the Republican Party for the past half century. Over these decades, one pattern has been constant: Wingers fight to take over the party, mainstream Republicans bob and weave to keep their seats.

Republicans on the extreme ferociously attack their fellow party members. Those in the middle backpedal to avoid conflict. Republicans on the extreme are willing to lose elections in order to promote their principles. Those in the mainstream are quick to fudge their principles if it will help them get a short-term win.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates.

The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never

On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.

Kickstarter’s founders hardly imagined that a situation like this would arise. Neither was a technologist — Perry Chen, now 38, was an artist and gallerist, and Yancey Strickler, 36, was a music journalist — and although several of their recent hires have engineering backgrounds, they continue to see Kickstarter as something of an arts institution