Austin / Travis County (Texas) Democratic voters gave a big margin of victory (65-35%) to the District Attorney candidate endorsed by retiring DA Ronnie Earle.

First Assistant DA Rosemary Lehmberg gave Earle credit for her win  following her Tuesday trouncing of fellow assistant district attorney Mindy Montford.

Doubts about Montford's independence also were raised by bloggers who tied her to lobbyists, politicians and other special interests - including Karl Rove - in the days before Tuesday's runoff vote.

Republicans could not find anyone to run for the job, so Lehmberg will face no opponent in the general election, barring a write-in candidacy by someone as yet unknown.  She would be the first female DA in Travis County history.

In Austin, TX, District Attorney Ronnie Earle is warning that a narrow Texas appeals court majority is about to create two classes of felony crime through a ruling that would let Tom DeLay escape trial for conspiracy to violate the Texas Election Code.

If he can’t persuade them to reconsider, police and prosecutors would be powerless to bring conspiracy charges in a wide variety of felony crimes, perhaps including the next pair of Columbine-style killers who plot to bring their guns to a Texas school.

Four dissenting judges on the nine-member Court of Criminal Appeals agree that the court is about to make bad law and bad public policy in the course of throwing out a conspiracy charge against DeLay and two accused co-conspirators.  Earle is trying, with a motion for rehearing filed Thursday, to persuade at least one more justice to reconsider.

He's asked for a rehearing after a bare majority of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out conspiracy charges against Tom DeLay and two other defendants.  
(crossposted in part in comments at Burnt Orange Report)

Despite DeLay's loud declarations of victory, Earle's request for rehearing and reconsideration is not a vain one.  The Court of Crims - the highest court for criminal cases in Texas' split system, has been known to change its mind.  And in this ruling, says the author of the minority's dissent, they've created bad public policy and defied common sense in letting DeLay rely on a suspect ruling in a 30-year old drug case to skate around conspiracy charges.

Earle called the majority's reasoning "tortured."

I cannot believe that Ronnie Earle would just let Tom DeLay leave Texas and move to Virginia as he suggested he will do.  

I'm pleased to announce that at the Yearly Kos convention, Brave New films will host the West Coast grassroots premiere of The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress and a workshop beforehand on film as a tool for activists.  

Texas filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck have been following hero Ronnie Earle for years and have provided an exclusive backstage pass to all the drama leading to DeLay's fall.  The film chronicles a great victory, but it's also a warning on the corrosive effect of dirty money in politics.  

The Texas Third Court of Appeals in Austin just ruled on the State's appeal of the district court's order dismissing the indictment for conspiracy to violate the Texas Election Code.  The appellate court upheld the trial court's dismissal of the indictment.

Juanita says Tom is having a bad day.

Okay, after Tom DeLay told Chris Matthews last night that his golf outing in Scotland was paid for by a "legitimate conservative organization," Ronnie Earle has issued new subpoenas. Bunches of them.   (These official actual subpoenas will open in PDF format.)  Hey, just like DeLay, Abramoff may be conservative but he ain't legitimate.

more on the flip...

One investigation feeds off the other:

The prosecutor in the Texas money laundering case against Rep. Tom DeLay issued subpoenas today looking for links between lobbyist Jack Abramoff and fundraising by the former majority leader.

District Attorney Ronnie Earle issued the subpoenas in Austin the same day that Abramoff pleaded guilty in Washington to federal charges of conspiracy, tax evasion and mail fraud.

Abramoff's plea came in a wide-ranging corruption investigation that is believed to be focusing on as many as 20 members of Congress and congressional aides, including DeLay and one of his former aides. Investigators allege Abramoff and his ex-partner Michael Scanlon defrauded several Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars in a lobbying scheme that also involved bribery of public officials.

In the Texas case, Earle sought records from Abramoff's former employers, legal firms Greenberg Traurig LLP and Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, LLP. He also subpoenaed records from a lawyer for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a former Abramoff client, and from a representative for the Barona Band of Mission Indians, a California tribe.

Update: Not directly related to this post, but related tangentially nevertheless, Think Progress has CNN's video of DeLay and Abramoff getting all cuddly together.

When will Texas reporters learn that DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden can't be trusted to tell the truth?

Media reports that U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay had convinced the state's highest court to hear his appeal were as widely circulated as they were, well, wrong.

Justices for the Texas Court Criminal Appeals agreed merely to consider hearing DeLay's money laundering case. They never said they would accept the case, said Edward Marty, the court's general counsel.

The erroneous media reports, which the San Antonio Express-News published in a wire story and displayed online, come from DeLay's spokesman, Kevin Madden, in an e-mail sent to reporters Tuesday evening, after courts had closed for the night.

"FYI-Breaking news out of Austin, TX," the e-mail stated. "The state Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to hear Mr. DeLay's habeas motion that was filed at the end of last week. The court has set a one-week deadline for briefs to be filed by the parties involved. The court could essentially decide to end Ronnie Earle's prosecution after hearing this motion and the facts presented."

Madden said this afternoon that he made an error and never intended to "spin" the story.

"In an effort to be instantaneous, I wasn't precise.....My understanding (of the decision) was correct. The way I relayed it wasn't," he said.

Approaching a new year tends to crystallize thinking. We all use the end of a calendar year to look back in review, and to make assessments, whether it's of our personal circumstances, our business or financial progress, goals achieved, modified, or missed, and, for most of us posting here, the national and international state of affairs.

The Headline:
Prosecutor Issues Subpoenas in DeLay Case

The lede:

By SUZANNE GAMBOA, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A Texas prosecutor has issued subpoenas for bank records and other information of a defense contractor involved in the bribery case of a California congressman as part of the investigation of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

District Attorney Ronnie Earle issued subpoenas late Monday afternoon for California businessmen Brent Wilkes and Max Gelwix, records of Perfect Wave Technologies LLC, Wilkes Corp. and ADCS Inc. in connection with a contribution to a fundraising committee at the center of the investigation that led to DeLay's indictment on money laundering charges.

1-2-3-jump!

An oil spill begins with a gash in a tanker's hull, a broken undersea pipeline, a storm-damaged oil rig. There is no off valve. Oil continues to leak until the aperture is sealed, or until the source is empty. While it leaks, the first job is containment, the second is damage repair; once stopped, the third task is remediation.

So it is with the slowly spreading oilslick that is the corruption, both legislative and electoral, of Rep Tom DeLay. Austin DA Ronnie Earle's indictments for criminal money laundering have stripped DeLay of his Republican House Leadership post, a small mercy at best. However, the poisonous ooze from DeLay was not confined to his direction of slightly-laundered corporate money to Texas Legislature races in order to gerrymander Congressional districts. No, DeLay is also mired in the Abramoff bribery scandal up to his ugly and ineffective toupee.

We all knew if DeLay were to go down he would inevitably take vast swaths of the shady money machine that fules the Republican Noise Machine with him. The flag ship is the K-Street Project, bringing together the criminal energy of DeLay, Grover "Bathtub" Norquist, and Rick "Man-on-dog" Santorum. DeLay and Norquist are already implicated in the Abramoff scandal. Now Delay's successor as House Majority Leader, Roy Blunt, is seemingly getting tangled up in Delay's trial. Per RawStory, prosecutor Ronnie Earle has subpoenaed communications between Delay's and Blunt's PACs. Quote below the flip.

This has to be one of the boniest of bonehead moves in all of Boneheadom.  Thanks to Tom Delay's own words, Ronnie Earle has an ace in the hole.  The Washington Post has the goods.

More on the flip...

I think it's a shame that old Tom has been a bit neglected lately amid all the other GOP scandals, but the Washington Post seeks to rectify that. According to this article in today's WaPo, Tom Delay may have Cheneyed himself big-time. Hasn't he ever watched any of those cop shows where the first thing the bad guy's lawyer does is tell him to keep his mouth shut?

(A Cautionary Tale)
As we all know, Tom Delay

is a bug exterminator driven to politics by his fury over environmental rules (he once called the EPA the Gestapo of government).

But what, exactly, has this meant (is this meaning) to the United States?

(From the diaries -- kos)

How anybody could vote Republican until they do a full fumigation to get rid of DeLay and Co. is beyond me.  Check out what (indicted) DeLay aide Mike Scanlon says here:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

The article explains the strategy we've come to know all too well:

Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

Well, here's their plan finally in black and white. This should piss off the wackos. It should anger the public.  We're already fuming. If this quote is run as a DNC ad in every district in the country, we win both chambers in a landslide.  

Update [2005-11-4 0:27:43 by VirginiaDem]: FOUND IT! Go to page 119 of this .pdf document

The AP wire reports that Texas Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, a Republican with integrity (imagine that), has chosen Judge Pat Priest to preside over the Tom DeLay trial.  I know that this has been mentioned elsewhere in the diaries, but I am writing separately because I deal with Judge Priest on an almost-daily basis.

More on the flip....