A "rape train" on GTA Online (Screen shot via)

Controversy in gaming never flies into the mainstream with as much ferocity as it does when Grand Theft Auto’s involved. Rockstar’s celebrated series’ latest instalment – the fifth GTA "proper" – and its companion GTA Online multiplayer experience is the fastest-selling entertainment product in history. But that's not because it’s an absolute ball to play. No – clearly we’re all at it because we love torture, the objectification and discrimination of women, and kicking pets to death (or watching them hump each other when we’re gracious enough to let them live).

Read the news – both in the games press and the mainstream – and you might believe that Rockstar has reached a new low, a more appalling depth of wretchedness than the whole Hot Coffee thing, which was at least consensual sex. “Players are having their characters tormented and ‘raped’ by online trolls,” shouted a Metro headline this week.

This story ran on the 14th of August. Six days before that, Kotaku reported on this threat to GTA Online players, again putting that R-word in quotation marks. It’s some pretty important punctuation. Nobody is raping anybody. All that’s happening is some not-even-smartass mods have mucked about with the game’s code enough so as to indulge in, as Kotaku phrases it, “naughty stuff”. They’re creating some pretty shitty-looking animations where one character model thrusts their hips at another.

They annoy in other ways, too, taking control of players and making them dance stupidly, or blow themselves up – game-breaking intrusions for the affected. And until Rockstar patch the problem, there's no way of escaping, bar quitting the game altogether and playing a private online session, which kind of defeats the point of online play.

This is rightly pissing people off. The modders, the trolls, the hackers – whatever we’re calling people with enough time on their hands to bother winding up strangers on the internet instead of doing something productive – are using invincibility so as to wreak the most havoc possible. Rockstar will clamp down on them eventually, but it's previously been slow to combat players cheating in other aspects of GTA Online. So, for now, it’s a case of grimace and bear it. Besides, this is nothing new.

An extended "rape train"

It’s not so much the suggestion of a virtual sex act that’s the problem here – most gamers appreciate that the modern industry is geared towards the adult market, and grown-ups who play GTA know that they're going to be presented with adult material and situations. Nobody’s getting scarred for life from seeing this. It’s puerile and represents a backward somersault in the promotion of online gaming as the fantastic shared experience that it can, and should, be. But I'd wager it’s not going to haunt anyone’s dreams.

As for the other, really quite graphic content in the regular (offline) game: if you’re a primary school kid playing GTA V, your parents are idiots and you’ve got my permission to follow the examples set by Trevor et al. Steal their money, load up on drugs (or, like, Haribo, or something), murder their friends and set fire to the family home.

For most players of the game, the problem will be less to do with morality than practical annoyance. "Griefing" is where players intentionally irritate other players with, say, deliberate friendly fire or harassment over in-game text or voice channels. It's this aspect of the GTA Online mod that burns the most; all you want to do is log on, buy a couple of combat pistols and shoot up a corner shop, but you're robbed of that simple pleasure by people who'd rather see you bent over while their avatar rubs its crotch against yours.

This griefing thing is nothing new – it's been around for ages, be it sexually explicit or otherwise. "A Rape In Cyberspace" was written over 20 years ago. A 2013 Edge article investigating the winners and, more often, losers of this phenomenon reads: “Griefing: it comes in many forms, but any online game with a population of more than five will see its share. Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit.”

"Leeroy Jenkins" is perhaps the best known example of "griefing"

In GTA Online’s case, modders are turning to "rape" just to annoy. There’s no deep agenda here. Some people simply find this kind of thing funny. And while it's a bit weird that they do find it funny, GTA doesn't dictate its players senses of humour. These are “opportunists”, as Edge calls them, who “kill, steal, smash people’s stuff… Think cockroach, with the emphasis on the first syllable.”

Plenty of massively popular titles have witnessed griefing – but still the players come, and the money rolls in, which is why Rockstar is likely to take a pretty reserved stance on the "rape" mods. Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and Bohemia Interactive’s DayZ have been playgrounds for code-crunching piss-takers, but the latter’s status as a full game born from a mod in the first place – adapted, as it was, from the relatively dry military sim ARMA II – goes to show that, in the right hands, this practice of getting beneath the skin of a game to exploit its hidden mechanics can produce brilliant new ways to have fun online.

It’s not all about making Lara Croft naked – something that smart alecks have (kinda) done for the series’ 2013 reboot. Done right, modding can produce fantastic, standalone experiences that show say, the mocking up of Mario as a member of the KKK for what it is: a waste of everyone’s time. Better to focus on compelling vapourware like Black Mesa, a mod remake of Half-Life that, in some ways, even improved on its source material; or the maniacal Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod, which cocks a snoot at GTA Online’s paltry 16-simultaneous players by allowing over 1,000 to tear it up at the same time. Sure, it’s got its share of griefing going on, but it’s ludicrously joyous. And who can’t laugh at Thomas the Tank Engine showing up in Skyrim, both dead-eyed and deadly?

For the people who are actually playing the game, the main problem with the GTA Online rapists isn’t that they’re "raping" other players at all. The problem is that one person's hobby is ruining other people's hobbies. But they’ll probably get bored before long, so the best thing to do is just look away. Turn off, go outside for a walk, maybe even have an ice cream, and restart.

Games are great, but sometimes gamers are pricks. It’s always been that way and that’s how it’ll always be. And where GTA is concerned, the slightest whiff of strife is enough to get keyboards chattering (hi!). Modders practically turned Mass Effect into porn, and Metro never showed up to the provocation party over that, waving its red rag to a gaggle of comment-posting know-nothings eager to point out that all video games are like this, and that people who play them are immediately transformed into rapist scum. 

@MikeDiver

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Photo via Facebook

I wanted to believe in the Pussy Lips Challenge.

I wanted to believe so much. You might think it's crass, idiotic, and a bad parody of the Ice Bucket Challenge. You'd be right, and yet, when was the last time a woman was allowed to feel of sense a pride about the size of her pussy lips? Why not the Pussy Lips Challenge? Obviously, there are a million reasons why not, most of them related to good taste, and preventing the collective lizard brain of the internet from completely annihilating our sense of good taste.

Which might be why, as quickly as the Pussy Lips Challenge appeared, it vanished into the oblivion of the online scrap heap.

For those who are not privy to such things, on August 11th, the profile of someone named Khari Baldwin (one of those Facebook pages that ejaculates boner memes and photos of expensive shoes every 20 minutes) posted the above photos of two ladies showing off their ice cream sandwiches to inaugurate the Pussy Lips Challenge.

Four days later, the post was deleted. Was the Pussy Lips Challenge over? Did we crown a champion? I was determined to find out.

The Challenge arrived like a bolt of lighting. No rules were given. No explanations were offered. Just a bunch of fire emojis and a call to #DoTheChallenge. The image blew up on social media, spreading across Instagram and Twitter like wildfire emojis. The mystery inspired such classic tweets as, "damn that monkey fat," "Bruh this is real==> #PussyLipsChallenge," and "Fuck the other challenges this the real #Challenge.. this the #NewChallenge.. the #PussyLipsChallenge." 

Looking further into the origins of the challenge, what I found shocked me. The whole thing was completely fake. Neither of the girls were actual participants in the Challenge. The blonde on the left appears to be a Czech porn star named Nella, while the girl on the right is just someone who's main claim to fame seems to be appearing on WorldStarHipHop a lot. The Challenge that inspired a nation was just a joke. I tried to get in touch with Khari Baldwin, the originator of the challenge, but he's disabled messages on Facebook, likely due to how incredibly popular he is.

Even if it was a hoax, 20,000 people shared his post on their Facebook timelines. Presumably men who hoped the Challenge might take off in the same way as other online challenges. Can you believe it? Finally, someone created a challenge to see who has the heaviest vagina! 

Befitting the fact that this is fake, no one is doing the Challenge, save for one very notable exception:

#pussylipschallenge ;) pic.twitter.com/lJDtO1YxHU

— Official_Fat_Pussy™ (@Super_Soaker69) August 14, 2014

@Super_Soaker69—better known as Official_Fat_Pussy™—has claimed the throne (#ClaimTheThrone) of the Pussy Lips Challenge Champion purely by default. She watermarks all photos of her fat pussy to thwart dastardly identity thieves who want to pass her pussy off as their own, which is a fantastic way to brand her labia, but still raises one very specific question:

Why is her pussy official?

All we can know for sure is that her Twitter profile bio lists her location as "on your dick" and contains a link to her Amazon Wish List registry. On that list, you can buy Official_Fat_Pussy™ workout gear, a pair of wireless headphones, and some pink Uggs (kids' size). My guess is the spandex workout pants are for cultivating a fatter cameltoe, the pink Uggs are for her child, and the headphones... well, those are for listening to music, of course.

I realize now that I might have inadvertently helped to further the cause of the Pussy Lips Challenge, and also give Official_Fat_Pussy™ way more Twitter followers (and possibly helped her get a pair of pink Uggs for her daughter). The more people who know about the existence of the Pussy Lips Challenge increases the possibility that it will actually catch on in the mainstream, and women will commence posting photos of their vaginas all over the internet. I suppose I, too, have been duped by the siren song of the prospect of women competing to see who has the superior genitals. 

I think all we can do is try to retroactively slap a good cause onto this meme, in the hopes that we can collectively raise a bunch of money. That's why people were so into the Ice Bucket Challenge, right? Might I suggest a college tuition charity?

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter

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Kids protest the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo by Alice Speri, courtesy of VICE News

Have you read Nietzsche? Teens love the guy. I'm not super well versed in the German philosopher’s books, but I have read a few graphic tees with his picture on them, and from what I've picked up, the gist is that everything is inherently meaningless. So it goes with This Week in Teens, in which our only respite from the constant suffering around us is the comforting knowledge that life doesn't have a purpose.

–America invented teenagers and apparently reserves the right to kill them, too. The biggest news this week—teen or otherwise—has been the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed, black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri. Police were quick to defend the act, while witnesses say that Brown didn't do anything to provoke police, and was shot multiple times “until he just dropped down to the ground and his face just smacks the concrete." Protests over the killing were countered by a militarized police force, complete with SWAT gear and armored vehicles. The incident has been covered from every angle: how Ferguson is America's latest racial hotspot; how this represents a sort of Chekhov's (military-grade machine) gun and the inevitable conclusion of post-9/11 defense spending; how eight unarmed teens are still at large; and how white people in suburban St. Louis don't give a shit.

It took a bunch of protests for Ferguson police to name Darren Wilson as the officer who killed Michael Brown, which they finally did Friday morning. Police also released a report saying that Brown was a suspect in a “strong-arm robbery” of a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, and that Wilson was responding to the crime when Brown was killed. Whether Brown actually shoplifted is unknown at this point, not that it would in any way justify his death. All that’s clear is that we're in a pretty terrible place right now, and there is no obvious path for things to get much better.

–There’s a perception out there that teens are adults in training, but they’re more like children and adults at the same time. With their baby fat and spindly legs and acne and scumstaches, teens are an already human manifestation of the uncanny valley—the idea that when robots start to look too human they stop being cute and start being scary. Similarly, their brains just aren’t all the way there. They’re confused. Sometimes they don’t even know why they do what they do, so it’s no wonder their actions can be completely confounding and horrifying to others. A particularly gruesome example of this occurred this week in Frisco, Texas, where a 16-year-old boy taped a flashlight to a gun and murdered his parents. When police arrived, they overheard the boy’s sister asking, "What do you mean you did it?" and him responding, “I did it.” When she asked if it was his plan, he didn’t answer. News reports note that his motive is unclear, but they’ve all focused on the idea that the boy was “sheltered”—he was homeschooled by his strict parents, who wouldn’t let him watch violent movies or drink soda. While it’s entirely possible that this fueled his crimes, lots of people have strict parents whom they don’t kill. This sort of tabloid speculation doesn’t help anyone; besides serving as another example of the dangers of widespread gun ownership, there’s probably not a lesson here.

This guy has probably never smoked pot. Photo via Flickr user katieandtommy 

–One bright spot in this bleak week (just like Shark Week but instead of forcing memes we're just sitting in our rooms and don't want to talk about what's wrong) is that teens in Colorado are smoking less pot. On the surface this seems pretty neutral—teens are hard to deal with whether they're on pot or not—but it's actually a net positive, because it means that the alarmists about marijuana legalization will have one less talking point. The "won't somebody think of the children?" crowd has long argued that legal weed will lead to an explosion of bong hits among teens, but it’s safe to say at this point that the fear was misguided and silly. As the slow march of legalization continues, this will only help speed things up.

–Speaking of high teenagers, have you ever tried having sex stoned before? It's one of the grossest things you can do, maybe only slightly less disgusting than taking a hot afternoon nap with jeans on. You start to feel like you're really connecting in ways that you never have before, and then you realize that you have slobber on your face (but whose slobber is it?) and you both still have clothes on and you've spent 25 minutes just grinding really hard. That said, the fact that you'll probably fall asleep well before anyone achieves anything approaching an orgasm makes stoned sex a less-than-terrible method of birth control. If you're looking for a more effective and less heebie-jeebie-inducing way to prevent pregnancy, though, go with an intrauterine device, or IUD. That's what Colorado has used to lower the teen pregnancy rate by 40 percent since 2009. As part of a program created by an anonymous (and thus kinda creepy) $23 million donation, young women with low incomes have been given free or low-cost IUDs. Unsurprisingly, this provision of free birth control has resulted in fewer pregnant teenagers.

Superman-Jesus advocates ineffective public policy. Photo via Flickr user Ben Rollman

Not only is the pregnancy rate down, but the teen abortion rate also fell 35 percent. According to the Washington Post, "The state also spent less on food programs for low-income mothers and children; infant enrollment in WIC supplemental nutrition program declined 23 percent between 2008 and 2013. The governor’s office said the state saved $42.5 million in health-care expenditures associated with teen births. For every dollar spent on the contraceptives, the state saved $5.68 in Medicaid costs."

So, basically, this is a win-win-win. Teens stay baby-free, the government spends less money, and fewer abortions are performed. Even conservatives should be thrilled, right? Not quite: For one thing, if you think back many, many outrages ago to the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision, you'll remember that some Christians believe IUDs are themselves an abortifacient. Replacing abortions with different abortions is hardly progress in God's eyes. Plus, people like Focus on the Family director Carrie Gordon Earll don't buy that the decrease in pregnant people has anything to do with easy access to things that stop people from being pregnant. “What we have seen over many years is that access to contraception does not equal fewer unintended pregnancies and fewer abortions," she told the Denver Post. "Availability of contraception leads to increased sexual activity, which leads to unintended pregnancies and abortions.”

While this worldview might seem comical in Colorado, it's less funny in places where it shapes public policy. In Kansas, for example, parts of the state that focus on promoting abstinence see as many as 10 percent of teen girls become pregnant. Essentially, what all this means is that we can either have kids continue to get pregnant or give them the greenlight for consequence-free sex. That a huge part of the country wants teens to keep having babies brings the national divide into brutally sharp focus.

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December 25 holds a special place in my heart, mainly because it was the one day of the year when my drunken, abusive old man refrained from yelling or sending anyone to the hospital in a bloody heap. It’s from those warm memories of my youth that my adult obsession with Christmas has grown. To be clear, I don't care about any of the goodwill-toward-men-type stuff—my obsession is a completely commercial, superficial one. A Christmas tree stands in our living room year-round, stockings hung with care are always on the mantle, my kids believe that Santa brings their birthday and Easter presents, and the red-and-white candy-cane-themed lights on my roof stay turned on 12 months a year. (Unfortunately, as of last April I have to take all of the Griswold-style lawn decorations down due to receiving a citation from my township.)

As my boys get a bit older and better understand how awesome the marketing of Christmas is, our vacations and day trips have shifted from 9/11-airplane-themed  (my first born’s birthday) to more Santa Claus–themed. This year my wife found a campsite in Wilmington, New York (about five hours north of NYC) called the North Pole that was billed as being completely Christmas-themed.

Sadly, it was not.

My kitchen has more holiday fanfare than the North Pole campgrounds. The extent of their decking the halls consisted of one tree wrapped in holiday lights (which were never turned on), another decorated with large, faded holiday ornaments, and a Coca-Cola machine with the iconic painting of Santa drinking a bottle of Coke on the front. No reindeer, no sleighs, and not one of the miniature golf course’s 18 holes had so much as a tinsel. The only thing it had going for it was its proximity to America’s oldest amusement park, Santa’s Workshop.

Built just after World War II in 1949, Santa’s Workshop predates Disneyland by six years. And unlike the Disney parks, with their modern rides and attractions, Santa’s Workshop remains virtually untouched by time, right down to what seems like the original paint on the rides. It’s like stepping into a snow globe, and 65 years later it’s just as fun as ever!

At the low, low price of $23 (a quarter the cost of Disneyland’s admission) kids get the choice of nearly EIGHT different rides and a plethora of attractions, including two sets of bathrooms, a chapel, and an empty reindeer barn. And you should feel good in knowing that “Santa's mission is to reinvest every dollar so that Santa's Workshop, North Pole, New York will remain for generations to come.”

Despite our 35-year age gap, I could tell that the spirit of Christmas was just as strong in my first son, Christopher II (not to be confused with my other son, Christopher III, or my pending son, Christopher IV), as it is in me, like the Force in Luke Skywalker but with more ribbons and elves. As we approached the front entrance I could hear his imagination running wild as he asked in a deadpan voice, “This? This is it?”

“Yes, son. This is it. And I’m just as excited as you are!” As we passed through the front gates the boy began screaming and gushing tears of joy as a number of his favorite holiday characters walked by.

We must have hit the park at just the right time, because, despite opening hours earlier, we were literally the only ones there. We had the place to ourselves! Just like Wally World! The first stop was the bobsled, a merry-go-round-type ride that looked like a red dildo. Each sled was painted with a flag from a different country, I assume because the Olympics were held twice in nearby Lake Placid. Luckily my son got the sled with the Polish flag because, as the elf manning the ride told us, it was the only one able to go up in the air. My son climbed into the Polack mobile and buckled up as the elf lit some coal in the ride’s motor and stoked the fire with a bellow to get it moving. After four laps the Polish dildo carrying my son landed right back where it began. “Do you want to go again?” the elf working the coals asked. “There’s no one here, so you can ride it as many times as you like.” But the flurry of fun from one go-round was too much for my boy, and he opted instead to ride the mellower ten-foot-tall Ferris wheel.

The Ferris wheel was probably the most fun we had as a whole family, because we all had to pitch in to make it move. It reminded me of the big wheel on The Price Is Right, both because of its size and the fact that I, along with my wife, father-in-law, and an elf, had to spin it to give it the momentum to start moving on its own. As I watched my son float hundreds of millimeters overhead I wondered what kind of fantastic things he could see at that height and how his perspective on life might be changed.

After the ride I asked him what he saw.

“I saw a tree.”

“A Christmas tree? With lots of fantastic presents?” I asked.

“No, that tree. Right there. It blocked everything so I couldn’t see anything else.” So precious, I thought. I remember being blind with holiday joy at that age.

After the Ferris wheel we went to watch the live performance of the nativity scene. My kids are still young and don’t yet posses the logic required to understand religious beliefs.

Christopher II asked, “What’s going on here?”

I tried to explain: “That mommy and daddy had that baby in a barn. That baby saved the world.”

“But you always say the world is messed up and we’re all going to die. If he saved us, why is it all still a mess?” he asked.

“It’s complicated,” I said. “I think the deal is we get saved in the next life.”

“That’s weird. And why is the daddy wearing DC shoes?” he asked.

“There are some continuity issues here that will make sense when you’re older, Christopher II. Want to get a personalized Santa hat?”

“No, thank you.”

My son didn’t know what he was saying, drunk as he was on joy and yuletide spirit, so I took him to make a hat anyway.

After the hat shop, we headed to the crown jewel of the park, Santa’s house, so the boys could tell him what they wanted for their birthdays. Christopher II was so overcome with wonderment at seeing THE real Santa that he couldn’t compose himself enough to take a photo with him. Christopher III’s birthday was the next day, so he trotted right up to Old Saint Nick and said, “I want an Angry Birds present!”

Santa Claus’s best traits are his sense of humor and uncanny ability to stay abreast of the hottest trends in kid culture.

“A bird present? What kind of bird do you want?” Santa asked.

“NO! Angry birds!” Christopher III yelled.

“What’s that?” Santa joked.

“ANGRY BIRDS!” Christopher III again shouted.

Santa turned to me and asked, “What is he saying?”

I laughed and said, “Oh, Santa! You’re hilarious!”

“No, really? What is he saying?” Santa asked, still messing with us.

“Angry birds,” I replied. “A-N-G-R-Y B-I-R-D-S.”

Santa turned to Christopher III and said, “ You don’t want an angry bird. They’ll peck your eyes out. How about a candy cane instead?” Then, from his magic bag he pulled the world’s smallest candy cane and handed it to my son, who was so overcome with emotion that he began to cry tears of joy. I remember that feeling after meeting Santa; it’s a moment you remember for the rest of your life.

As we walked toward the exit Christopher II and Christopher III asked, “Is it time to go home now?” I looked at their innocent faces and felt awful. They didn’t want the day to end. “I don’t want to leave either, guys,” I told them. “But we’ve been here almost an hour! We’ve seen everything. If you want to stay, though, we can stay.”

I looked down at Christopher II as he played some skateboarding game on my wife’s phone, and watched as my boy became a man right before my eyes. Fighting every desire to stay and play at Santa’s Workshop for hours and hours, possibly even hiding in the bathroom until the park closed so we could stay there overnight and run around in the dark, he said, “No, Dad. Let’s go now.”

Out the door, past the floral Star of David he went. Off to become a man, never again to return to the happiest place on Earth until he becomes a daddy himself and shares the Christmas spirit with his boys.

The next day Christopher III unwrapped superhero present after superhero present for his birthday. I looked at his misty eyes, still buzzing from meeting Kris Kringle, as he said to me, “I told Santa Claus Angry Birds!”

His childish naivety melted my heart. “No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you said Spider-Man. Santa doesn’t make mistakes.”

Adventures with Chris Christmas Special 

Visit the North Pole!

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko.

Journalist James Risen making his case in Washington, DC. Photo by the author

It was one of those frequent but still oddly satisfying moments when the duplicity of the executive branch of the US government is on full display.

In a televised address from Martha’s Vineyard Thursday, President Obama declared that “police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs.” He was referring to the arrest of two reporters Wednesday night in Missouri by the paramilitary clown brigade known as the Ferguson Police Department.

At almost exactly the same moment as Obama’s address, embattled New York Times journalist James Risen and several leading press freedom groups were pleading with the Justice Department to drop its years-long crusade to force Risen to reveal his confidential sources under threat of jail time.

Speaking at the National Press Club in DC, Risen called on the Obama administration to drop its case against him— assuming it has any respect whatsoever for the First Amendment.

“The Justice Department and the Obama administration are the ones who turned this really into a fundamental fight over press freedom in their appeal to the Fourth Circuit,” Risen said. “I’m happy to carry on the fight, but it wasn’t really me who started it.”

A federal grand jury subpoenaed Risen in 2008, and then again in 2010, for allegedly incorporating classified information he received from former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling into a chapter of his 2006 book, State of War.

Risen refused to testify, citing his right to protect his sources, also known as “reporter’s privilege.” A lower court initially sided with him, but the Justice Department won on appeal. The Supreme Court declined to hear Risen’s case in June, and he will do time or endure heavy fines for civil contempt of court if he continues to resist the subpoena.

After years of pursuing the case, the Obama administration is now faced with a dilemma of its own making: whether to continue its crackdown on unauthorized leaks and lose the respect of the press, or live up to its lip-service on press freedom and alienate the angry men who run the intelligence community.

Since President Obama took office, his White House has charged more people under the Espionage Act—eight—than all previous administrations combined. But forcing a prominent journalist to confront jail time would be a different move altogether.

“I don’t think the US wants to join Cuba in becoming the only countries in the western hemisphere to have a jailed journalist,” Courtney Radsch, advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said at the press conference.

Twenty Pulitzer-winning journalists issued statements of support for Risen this week, pointing out that he was just doing his job.

“As Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama classified more and more of the government’s actions over the last 14 years, denying the public critical information to judge how its democracy is faring, it has fallen to reporters like Risen to keep Americans informed and to question whether a gigantic government in the shadows is really even a good idea,” Washington Post reporter Dana Priest said in a statement. “We will all be worse off if this case proceeds.”

Risen’s supporters also delivered a petition Thursday morning to the Justice Department with 100,000 signatures.

“Your effort to compel New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources is an assault on freedom of the press,” the petition reads. “Without confidentiality, journalism would be reduced to official stories—a situation antithetical to the First Amendment. We urge you in the strongest terms to halt all legal action against Mr. Risen and to safeguard the freedom of journalists to maintain the confidentiality of their sources.”

Whichever choice the Obama administration makes will leave a lasting mark on its legacy. It will also have implications for a federal “shield law” bill currently moving through the US Senate.

The bill was revived last year after revelations that the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press in an attempt to root out leakers. It has passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee but has yet to make it to the floor for debate.

Facing intense backlash from the media after the AP scandal, the White House came out in support of the shield law bill, even as its Justice Department continued to press the Risen case.

Shield law advocates hope that, if Risen is held in contempt of court, it will at least give the Senate bill enough momentum to pass in the scant time before the current legislative session ends.

Although 48 states have enacted some kind of shield law protecting journalists from being compelled to reveal their sources in court, there is no such federal statute.

“My oldest son Tom is a journalist, and I want to make sure the same protections I had are still there for future journalists,” Risen said.

The Justice Department did not respond to calls and emails from VICE seeking comment. However, spokesman Brian Fallon did tweet his support for the two reporters arrested Wednesday, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly and Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery.

“DOJ is lucky to have a gutsy reporter like Ryan J. Reilly on our beat,” Fallon tweeted. “We knew that even before tonight. Glad he and Wesley Lowery are ok.”

“How do you distinguish between the ‘gutsy’ reporters and the one the administration is threatening to put in jail?” CNN’s Jake Tapper shot back in a tweet of his own.

Fallon did not respond.

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.

The Seven Lakes Country Club in Palm Springs, via Joe Wolf

My neighbor should not have a lush green lawn. I should not have to walk in the street to avoid sprinklers that primarily serve to water the cement sidewalk next to the lawn my neighbor shouldn't have. And I shouldn't have to wake up at dawn on a Saturday morning to the sound of that lawn being mowed. I believe this because I live in Los Angeles, which is a semi-arid city in Southern California experiencing its worst drought in a century.

I feel strongly about this—I want that lawn dead, salted, and replaced with rocks—so I was excited when the State of California announced this summer that it would finally begin cracking down on wasteful uses of water.

“With this regulation,” declared the State Water Resources Control Board, “all Californians are expected to stop: washing down driveways and sidewalks; watering of outdoor landscapes that cause excess runoff; using a hose to wash a motor vehicle, unless the hose is fitted with a shut-off nozzle; and using potable water in a fountain or decorative water feature, unless the water is recirculated.”

First-time violators of this emergency measure will be given a warning, followed by a fine up to $500, and I think that's just great. But there's a problem here, at least if one's seeking to save meaningful amounts of water and not just get a few more hours of sleep on the weekend. It's good and just to get upset when one sees a neighbor wasting water, and I stand in solidarity with those annoyed that a private company is installing a giant water slide in downtown Los Angeles, but let's be clear: In terms of saving significant amounts of water, shutting down that slide or my neighbor's sprinklers isn't going to do a damn bit of good.

If California were serious about conservation, it wouldn't be cracking down on homeowners washing their stupid cars—it would be closing down things like golf courses, of which there are nearly a thousand. When more than half the state is categorized as suffering the most severe form of drought, when groundwater reserves are being tapped to such an extent that it may actually cause earthquakes, old rich white men should not be driving little carts around on beautifully manicured green lawns in the middle of a fucking desert.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “[T]he average American family of four uses 400 gallons of water per day.” The average golf course uses 312,000 gallons of water, according to Audobon International, meaning each one uses as much water as 780 families of four. In Palm Springs—immediately adjacent to a place called Palm Desert—NPR reported that each of the city's 57 courses use about a million gallons a day, or about the same as 2,500 families of four.

Looking statewide, the numbers really get fun. California is second only to Florida in the number of golf courses it has: 921. Together, those courses use as much water as 2.8 million people, or about 7 percent of the state's population. While middle-class homeowners risk fines for watering their lawns, millions upon millions of gallons of water are wasted every day on a boring leisure sport for the wealthy.

“Golf courses are a huge problem,” said Adam Keats of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group. And part of that huge problem is the people who play it. “They're a wealthy elite that have no connection to want or lack,” Keats, head of the center's California Water Law Project, told me over the phone. “Golfers live in a world of excess.”

Even amid a record drought, the affluent expect their world to persist as it always did. Cutting back is for the poor, just as “austerity” meant slashing social programs, not CEO salaries. But compared to me, Keats is a moderate: he thinks California can keep its golf courses, but only if they start looking like they are actually in California.

“It's irresponsible for golf courses to be as green as they are in California,” said Keats. Instead of dark green fairways, “we could have California brownways, with rock and with dirt and with scrub—the kind of vegetation that naturally grows here. We're not in Scotland. Why are we pretending that we are?”

But Keats told me that while I was absolutely right to criticize California's conservation measures to-date as misguided and generally aimed at the wrong people, he pointed out that I too was obsessing over a relatively small part of the picture. The water golf courses use is considered part of “urban” use, which collectively accounts for just two out of every ten gallons of water used in the state. If California wants to address the drought, it needs to address agriculture and take on the “very large multinational corporations that are sucking up water with abandon.”

But isn't watering plants that people eat better than watering lawns or golf courses? Sure, but Keats pointed out that the type of plants corporate agriculture grows these days are big moneymakers that aren't well suited to California's erratic climate, where a drought is often followed by a downpour followed by another drought. If a farmer is planting grains—or marijuana, as many do in the north of the state—that farmer will not usually be bankrupted by one bad year; he can just plant his crops again and hope it rains next season. But corporate agriculture, the state's largest water user, prefers to grow things like almonds and pistachios, which come from trees that require around seven years to mature. One year without water and seven years of investment goes down the drain, so the companies investing in those crops see to it that the state gives them their water.

Satisfying corporate greed is why the state's response to a drought is handing a fine to a guy washing a 2003 Toyota Corolla with a hose, not reforming a sector of the economy that sucks up 80 percent of the state's water and counting. Sure, fine the bourgeois for all I care. Take shorter showers and don't run the water when you brush your teeth. But the individuals the state ought to be cracking down all have “LLC” after their name.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter.

So we did this series of photos and poems based on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. It was JANE’s concept, but I actually shot the pictures and he wrote the poems. He got all the credit of course, and they ended up selling for $15,000 each. He sold a bunch. But we got slayed by the critics. They were ready to kill, I swear. Since JANE was known for his music and the TV show, the art world didn’t want him coming around. It was like they were crouched in the shadows, waiting for him to step into their world with their old lady teeth bared and witchy claws raised. A bunch of bitter toothed cunts, full of venom, stagnant bile, old ideas bit down as hard as they could to make him bleed and hurt and hopefully die before he got too big. 

They did it because they knew. They knew he would expand. He wouldn’t stop growing. He wouldn’t cease becoming. He was a birth of not only himself, but his wicked ideas. He was a nihilistic piper, who saw the hidden death drive pulsing in every young heart, like little red lights going on/off, on/off. He, like Emerson’s genius, said to them what they had all been thinking, but this time, coated it in the elegant sadness of his magic touch. 

Look at these photos, and read, and think about him riding me on a motorcycle through the desert outskirts of Los Angeles, a hero and a heroine, listening only to the language of art. He had dared to enter the art world and dance with ideas of one of its reigning queens. And they punished him for it.

But was her work not the same? Did she not enter the film world and play a few jokes with her film stills? We don’t want people to go the other way? Why? Because art is more prestigious? More serious? While film is for the kiddies and money-men? Well, fuck you, we did it. You say that Cindy disappeared into her photos, and JANE was ever present, as if that were a criticism. Don’t you see that today it’s not about the character. It's all about the player? It’s the mind behind the puppets, not the little puppets themselves. That’s what JANE is, the puppet master, the showman, the ringmaster: dancing, and laughing, and pulling all the strings, out there in the dark, behind the thousand screens and projections of his personality. A thousand faces, a million songs, a billion reverberations in all the heads of all the children who listen to the messages woven like music in the air. We ride. My face pressed against the back of the blond wig, arms around his zipped-in leather chest, and forward facing, his great façade of glasses, too handsome face, and coolness, holding in all the ideas. Behind us, the red light of our tail, the only beacon of our zip around flight though the deserts of the night.

"Untitled Film Still #52"

I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. I won’t
Allow him to do it again, I will
Not put up with this anymore
I will leave if it ever happens

Again, and if he ever does that
Again, I will shoot the mother.
I’d like to stick a blade through
His thing and let his balls fall

Out; I’d cook ‘em in oil and eat ‘em.
The morning of March 23rd
They found her body spread eagle
On the bed, her abdomen stabbed

Twenty-six times, part of her entrails
Were pushed out through her
Vagina, and there was a furry white
Bear stuffed into her mouth, suffused

With blood; it was her son’s bear.

"Untitled Film Still #51"

The architecture and plants
Are gorgeous in the half light,
The foregrounded twisty stair
Emphasizes the potential energy

Of the descent into the lower darkness.
There is a Matisse-like block painting
Of an elephant on the wall just below
Her, the whole scene feels like the corner

Of an atrium in a museum or aquarium
At night, when only the guards and fishes
Fill the space with their silence.
But instead it’s a house at night.

And she stands in the upper light,
Her face half lit, half darkened
As she contemplates the sounds
Emanating from her kitchen.

"Untitled Film Still #50"

On the modernist couch in all black
A hat on her head and a drink in her hand
Three ashtrays on the low coffee table
And an African statue in the back

Reminiscent of the racist depictions
In Antonioni when Monica Vitti dances
In blackface with a spear; and the same thing
In Fellini in the club with Mastroianni.

But here the scene is more like The Big Sleep
– yeah, this bitch is in a 1940s scene,
She’s about to get popped.
There’s a scary, hairy guy

Off screen; he’s gonna stick it to her,
And leave her body hanging half off the couch,
Feeding blood into the white carpet

"Untitled Film Still #42"

For Phillip Marlow to find.
An old Mexican church, all white
With the lady in black out front;
Two lampposts as sentinels,
And three crosses on top.

Perhaps this is New Mexico,
Taos, or the road to Taos,
Where a church just like this one
Sits next to the road and a bookstore.

We passed it on the way
To the town where D.H. Lawrence
Is supposed to be buried.
But the story goes that his ashes were tossed

In the ocean and replaced by other ashes.
During Easy Rider Jack and Dennis went
To his grave to be blessed, they took acid
And knew that humans were just insects.

The next day they made history on film.

"Untitled Film Still #36"

It’s bright outside
Behind the curtains
And I want to think
Los Angeles in the day.

Her angular figure in white
Underclothes, or maybe
It’s a dress, it’s hard to tell,
She’s in silhouette

Against the glowing backlight.
How many times have you laid
On a bed and watched such a
Beauty dress in the morning

And thought you were blessed,
As if the sun were conspiring
With you and all these affairs
Were scenes in the movie of your life.

"Untitled Film Still #64"

She worked as a nanny until 1980,
More like a maid, for a well-off family
On the upper west side.
The son had pinned his younger sister,

Age fifteen, in the park one night,
Held her screams and raped her.
Later, the mother didn’t listen
To the story, the daughter was ostracized.

She became a writer for children.
The maid stayed on
For one more dark year.
The son killed himself,

The other daughter became a hooker.
The maid lived near the Brooklyn Bridge;
For six months she met a man each Monday
At lunch in a stone park; her day off.

 "Untitled Film Still #63"

What? The boys from her youth
Had become silly, or faded into jail,
Or death from needle drugs – two
To suicide – but she kept the boots

That she wore in high school
The nine-holed ones she bought
In a period of rebellion and self
Definition that she still held onto

As a solid point of reference for who
She might still be, albeit one that was fading
Amidst the tall architecture of New York
And the featureless avenues

Of her working-girl life. She looked back,
The boy with the Mohawk had called
To her, it sounded like “Samson showser.”
“What?” but the group he was with laughed

And moved on, leaving her on the cement stair.

"Untitled Film Still #32"

Like one of the whores
From Nights of Cabiria,
Obviously not Fellini’s wife
The lovely clown,

But one of the others
Whose story isn’t told,
Who fades into the dark
After Juliet Massina goes off

With the handsome guy
And sneaks around the mansion
With the stairwell
Full of dogs.

Whores are romanticized
But what we should really see
Is how many men they are with
Each night; follow just one of them

Through the eight men at a go.

"Untitled Film Still #31"

This is my Nina baby,
In her busty t-shirt,
Her pale Bosnian skin
Bursting from the blackness

Of her hair and surroundings,
Her mouth slightly slack
To let us know that she knows
She is young, sexy and hungry;

But also vulnerable as a retard,
Dependent on the guidance
Of her guardian, me.
She is both vamp and idiot,

Loud and soft, a crying simpleton
That can turn into a raging gibbon;
There is nothing better than cradling
Her solid Mediterranean breasts

And knowing she could eat my soul

"Untitled Film Stills #30"

I’m not leaving, there’s nothing wrong.
I slipped and hit a doorknob, I swear.
Jim? He didn’t do anything, I bruise
Easily and we were having sex

And you know how it is
When you’re passionate,
Well Jim is passionate
And I’m his only source of pleasure.

It gets so damn hard working
At the factory, how can you blame
Him for coming home and wanting
More than just me and television?

Jim had big plans for life, I know
And I know me and the baby
Were not exactly part of those plans
So I can’t blame him for anything, really.

"Untitled Film Still #34"

What the fuck is she reading
While lying on those black sheets?
Mia Wallace with her pulp fiction
Fifteen years before Pulp Fiction.

She’s got nothing on but a white shirt
And panties so we can see the whole leg.
On the book there is a black haired vamp
In a nightgown, which is this girl all dressed up.

Maybe this is where she gets her style.
Her head is cocked away from us
So it’s hard to connect intellectually.
Instead the picture is all ass;

Everything from the contrast of the light body
On dark sheets to her positioning at the center
Of the photo make us focus on the spot
Where leg meets leg meets vag.

"Untitled Film Still #35"

 . . .Wanna call me trash!
Oh, I see. G’wan ahead
I dun worked for my bread
Fur my house, fur my kids.

If you think thas easy
Or fun or anything glam’rus,
Ya’ll is wrong. But if ya’ll
Think I’z just anotha

Loafin’ welfare thang,
Feedin’ dem kids wif food-
Stamps an’ scraps
Ya’ll wrong. Dem kids

Is well brought up,
Healty and happy.
My boy ain’t raped ‘n’ killed
No twelve year old, he ain’t

But fifteen hisself, sheeeit.

"United Film Stills #24"

I come out to the docks,
It’s where the fags hang out
And fuck each other and tan.
It’s where Gordon Matta-Clark

Cut that crescent in the side
Of that building. The boards
Were loose on the docks
And people would fall through.

Sometimes bodies bobbed
Along the surface;
It’s where HIV festered
And spread and gay love

Died. Sometimes I think
I’d be happier as a man,
It’d be nice to go to a club
Where everyone was on the same team

And you could fuck all comers.

"Untitled Film Still #26"

The basement, O the basement
Of grandmother’s old Ohio mansion,
The mansion with the small statues
Out front: red lion and a white dog.

It was three stories;
When he was young my uncle
Burned it half down when he
Threw a book of lit matches

In a closet and shut the door.
In the basement cellar the dankness
Was earthy, the washing machine
And dryer kept things musty.

There was a pool table
With tons of tears in the felt;
We’d play and drink root beers.
When my parents were young,

Their cat, Stoney, got lost down there.

"Untitled Film Still #27"

Okay, this is it. Fine.
I knew it was coming,
Like a hurricane warning,
Your temper was boiling

On the horizon, even when I met you.
Clouds behind the sun.
See, I’m the star of a one woman,
Multi-man variety show:

A clown show with drama,
Laughs, and a lot of action.
Because I always pick wrong
–Or they pick me, like a casting call
Gone to shit. It always happens.

So, I’ll just sit here; no more
Trying to weather the storm;
I’ll close my eyes
And make a wish,

One, two, three.

"Untitled Film Still #27b"

Insane asylum, fire bucket, woman
In white. We had to send her away
Because she was doing bad things
To herself, sticking barrettes inside . . .

She got shock therapy at a young
Young age and it drove her deeper
Inside, a voice within an echo chamber
– Goddamn, it must be miserable

Living inside one’s skull and body
Unable to communicate with the outside.
Are we all artists or is a bunch just
Crazy and another bunch just boring?

Tennessee Williams’s sister Rose
Went nuts and was lobotomized
And Tenn put such material into his work.
Did he disrespect her or help us all

By giving us The Glass Menagerie?

"Untitled Film Still #28"

I think we’re starting to repeat.
The sex-crazed madwoman
Has escaped from the asylum
And she is standing in the hall.

She holds herself a bit like Nina,
My actress friend from NYU
Whose parents escaped from Bosnia
To Windsor, Canada and paid

For her school by working hard.
Nina has the spirit of a crazy girl
Trapped in a shell of a shy girl.
This is her if she was pushed beyond

Her limits, if she didn’t get everything
Her pop culture, neo riot girl, punk rocker
Sensibility desired and demanded.
She wants to be Meryl Streep, Patti Smith,

Marlon Brando, Kurt Cobain, Marina Abromavic. 

"Untitled Film Still #19"

Passing in front of the factory
She felt a shudder and thought
Maybe that was a message
Meant just for her, that her life

Was meant to make a mark
On this earth. But she was a girl
In the factory, the biggest mark
She might make would be love

With the boss’s son, or a son
Of her own, who would grow.
She always wore colorful prints
Because it allowed her to stand apart

From the drab brick fronts
And the factory dust
And the smoke from the chimneys
And the other women

Who all gave in to their lots in life.

"Untitled Film Still #20"

As if on a stroll and we’re watching her.
The house is large with a majestic
Door, not seen anymore, embedded
In a brutish brick wall hedged

By manicured bushes, which frame
And mirror her stiff and finicky
Deportments. Where is she off to
In that headscarf and perfect neck-bow?

The way it’s all set up makes us aware
Of a pursuer. Like Laura Mulvey said,
We’re all looking with the gaze,
The male gazeand it’s whipping me up

Into a fucking frenzy, and there is a lot
To think about in prison. But I think Cindy
Just ran in front of an old house and snapped
The pic, dressed up like an old fashioned gal.

I wonder if she was ever stalked.

"Untitled Film Still #21"

Working girl in New York City,
I’ve come here from my Midwest
Heartland town; stalks of wheat
And rows of corn were my back

Yards and the single stop light
On Main Street became a familiar
Friend. There was a boy but he
Didn’t come and now he’s gone.

In New York every corner
Has a stoplight and every bar
Has a guy. I work long hours
Typing up memos and numbers

But I think I might make something
Of myself. At least I’m living
In the big city. And on the side
I have plans to start a business.

"Untitled Film Still #22"

Run, run, down the steps.
Are you in Paris? At the Palais
Royal perhaps. I remember
Being out there once, about 2am,

In a bit of rain; I was spending
The summer trying to learn French
Before moving to New York
And I had spent the night

With a young student who was
The friend of my girlfriend’s sister
And I rushed her to the metro –
Those art neuveau signs, like H.R. Giger’s

Design for Alien. Once I was alone and walking,
I got a text from a Stanford Professor,
A man who had taught my father
Back when he wanted to be a poet,

“Jack Scofield is dead, I know he loved you.”

"Untitled Film Stills #23"

She walked by the dog park
Every morning on her way
To the subway to go uptown
For her secretarial job

At Simon and Schuster.
For the past three months,
Since spring really started
To bloom, she saw the man

With the grey hat and brown
Terrier. And starting two months
Ago, he started to doff his hat
To her, his hair black-slicked,

As if a layer of lacquer had been set,
And his smile, a razor edged hole
Ringed with juicy redness.
A month ago he said hello,

And yesterday he got her information.

"Untitled Film Still #2"

What do you think? Still got it.
I got raped when I was thirteen,
By my boyfriend in Oklahoma,
But I never told anyone,

And then we moved away,
So I never saw him again.
But that action stays
With me, right here,

On my neck where he kissed
Me while he held me down.
Does he care?
Is he alive? What’s he done

With his life? Probably nothing.
He did nothing of note but injure
A young girl; he’s a virus
That infected and effaced and was effaced.

But I take showers and get clean.

"Untitled Film Still #13"

She pulled a book from the shelf,
She all in white, like I like;
It was back when her face
Was young and her straight nose

Stood out strong and innocent
On her smooth face.
The book she took,
Near the Maxfield Parish,

To the Right of American Art
Since 1900, was something
About a dialogue, but I couldn’t quite see
What. The book that stood out

Was Crimes of Horror: The Movies, ­
Just to her left – the title of her own life.
She knew she was in my bad books,
And thought she was being stealthy.

Untitled Film Still #16

She looks so heavy in this one,
Mediterranean – is that also her dressed
As FDR in the picture frame behind?
She’s a big momma with a fringe,

Unapologetic, smoking her cigarette
Like The Real Housewives of Sicily,
Or maybe it’s that show Mob Wives.
That’s real shit, right? Funny,

The way we accept crime
Within our midst. Mobsters
Are entertainment and the mobsters
Model themselves after entertainment.

I bet you five hundred bucks
That every east coast gangster
Watched the Sopranos, every episode.
The Godfather is the godfather is the Godfather.

"Untitled Film Still #17"

There is something so Roman about her,
Something that reeks of Anna Magnani
From Rome Open City and Mamma Roma
When she played a whore

Who tries to get her handsome son
To put his life in order. Or maybe it’s Magnani
From the Brando film, The Fugitive Kind,
When he played a man named Xavier
In another story by Tennessee.

Brando in the snakeskin jacket in New Orleans;
And that monologue in the beginning – wow –
About his guitar in hock, and a party on Bourbon Street
That he busted up because he wanted to puke

His life up. But no, it’s a young Magnani here,
Not the old one with experience who could look back
On a career and say, “Actors might be crazy,
Self-centered and very hard to deal with,

But I’d hate to live in a world without them.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, protests erupt in Ferguson, Missouri, anti-government protesters demonstrate in Pakistan, and Thailand crackdowns on fertility tourism.

John Varvatos jacket, Wood Wood shirt, Barbour pants, Kenzo shoes, Frescobol Carioca hat, vintage sunglasses

PHOTOGRAPHER: TOM JOHNSON
STYLIST: PHOEBE HAINES
Makeup: Nicola Moores
Photo Assistant: Thurstan Redding
Stylist's Assistant: Emily Avery
Models: Dennis, Troy, Junior and Yemi, all at AMCK

Dent De Man suit and shirt, Kickers shoes

Christopher Shannon sweater and pants, Timberland shirt

James Long jacket, Natural Selection shirt, Hentsch Man pants

Suit and shirt from Dent De Men, Item M6 socks, Kickers shoes; Tiger of Sweden blazer, Kaushal Niraula shirt, Krisvanassche pants, Louis Leeman shoes, Duchamp pocket square and tie; Natural Selection suit and shirt, John Varvatos shoes, Wood Wood hat

Christopher Shannon sweater, Frescobol Carioca shirt, Soulland pants

Barbour shirt, Original Penguin pants, Peckham Rye bow tie; Christopher Shannon sweater, Frescobol Carioca shirt; Kenzo T-shirt and shirt, The Kooples pants

Tiger of Sweden coat, John Varvatos shirt, Peter Jensen pants; Natural Selection jacket, John Varvatos shirt, Topman shorts, Richard James pocket square; Wood Wood jacket, Barbour shirt, Peter Jensen pants

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A grand jury indicted Texas governor Rick Perry late yesterday on two felony charges alleging that he had abused his public office and engaged in the coercion of another public official—a district attorney who was investigating Perry’s administration and political backers.

The criminal charges stem from Perry using the official powers of his office as governor to attempt to remove Rosemary Lehmberg, a Travis County district attorney, from office, while Lehmberg was investigating allegations that Perry’s political allies and campaign contributors had received preferential treatment while obtaining grants from a Texas state cancer-fighting agency.

After Lehmberg pleaded guilty to drunk driving charges last year, Perry vetoed a $7.5 million appropriation by the state legislature to fund the Travis County Public Integrity Unit of the district attorney’s office. Perry said he vetoed the funding for the anti-corruption unit because the drunk driving charges proved that Lehmberg was unfit for office—while others viewed the governor’s actions as an attempt to stymie and defund an investigation of many of Perry’s closest political associates as Perry himself was preparing his second run for the presidency.

There was nothing illegal in and of itself with Perry vetoing funding for the anti-corruption unit. Perry's attorneys and backers weren't the only people arguing that Perry was acting within his proper constitutional authority. Most outside legal experts and scholars have agreed that was the case. For that reason, most of the state's political establishment expected that the grand jury would complete its work without charging Perry.

But the grand jury alleged that Perry had committed two felonies. And the charges were not brought solely because of Perry's veto, but because Perry had told Lehmberg through intermediaries that he would refrain from the veto in the first place if Lehmberg resigned, and when that did not work, he offered to restore the funding if she resigned.

The indictment stunned both Perry and his top aides.  As a reporter for VICE last week questioned senior aides to the governor for a story that was to detail their testimony before the grand jury, suggesting that Perry might be charged, the aides said none of them had been contacted again since their grand jury testimony. The aides also said that the special prosecutor investigating the matter had given no indication to Perry or his legal counsel that any charges might be brought.

Despite the widespread belief that Perry would not be charged, Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who led the grand jury investigation, previously said in an interview with VICE, posted on July 17, that even though the grand jurors hearing the evidence had made, as of that time, no decision as to whether or not to charge the governor, they had heard “crucial testimony that could be a cause of serious concern.”

“I’m investigating the circumstances surrounding the veto and whether the governor’s actions were appropriate or not under the law,” McCrum said during the interview. “My duty is to look at all of the laws and determine whether any were broken by the governor or anyone else.”

Yesterday, McCrum surprised seemingly everyone, disclosing that the grand jury had decided to charge Perry with two felonies: “I looked at the law and looked at the facts, and I presented everything possible to the grand jury,” he said. “In this case, the grand jury has spoken and I am going forward with the duty bestowed upon me.”

In its first felony charge, the grand jury alleged that Perry abused his official authority as related to Perry’s vetoing the funding for the anti-government unit. (The indictment can be read in its entirety here.)

The second charge related to coercion of a public official, which, as McCrum explained, involved Perry “threatening Rosemary Lehmberg in her capacity as a public servant to resign or otherwise he would veto” funding for her Public Integrity Unit. 

News Distribution Network's footage of Special Prosecutor Michael McCrum announcing the indictment 

“Like many schemes, it started with vodka,” Christopher Hooks, a blogger and columnist for the Texas Observer, commented.

In April 2013, Lehmberg was arrested on drunk driving charges after authorities found her with an open vodka bottle in the front seat of her car, while she was parked in a church parking lot. Lehmberg pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a 45-day jail term, and served about half her sentence—and then she successfully deflected calls from Perry and others for her resignation.

At the time of Lehmberg’s arrest, virtually everyone knew that she would plead guilty to misdemeanor charges. Nobody foresaw the governor later being indicted by a grand jury on two felonies.

When Lehmberg refused to resign, Perry threatened to veto funding of her Public Integrity Unit—which investigates corruption of local, state, and federal public officials. Sources close to the investigation told me that Perry’s threat happened as the unit’s prosecutors were investigating whether Perry’s political backers and campaign contributors had received preferential and improper treatment in receiving grants from an anti-cancer state agency, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is now running to be Rick Perry’s Republican successor as governor, sat on the CPRIT’s governing board. Abbott’s largest campaign contributors also allegedly benefited from preferential treatment and received grants.

Last December, a grand jury indicted Jerald Cobbs, a senior executive of CPRIT, on charges that he allegedly violated the law while awarding an $11 million grant to Peloton Therapeutics, a Dallas, Texas-based biotech company. A major investor in the firm had earlier made more than $440,000 in campaign contributions to Perry and his Lieutenant Governor, David Dewhurst.

And as he prepared for a suspected second presidential run, Perry obviously didn’t want to be diminished. Only last week, apparently unaware that the Travis County grand jury would indict him, Perry returned triumphantly from a four-day trip to Iowa, which holds the first presidential caucus. Perry was also readying to go to New Hampshire and South Carolina, the two states that hold the first and second presidential primaries. Frustrated statehouse Texas newspaper reporters complain that they can go months and months without being able to ask the governor a single question while Perry has eagerly made himself available to any obscure radio station or small Iowa weekly paper that wishes to speak to him.

Had Perry simply vetoed funding for the anti-corruption unit, he probably wouldn’t be facing criminal charges today. But before the veto, Perry, through intermediaries, said he would not veto the funds if Lehmberg resigned. After the veto, he then offered to restore the funding if she resigned from office. Sources close to the investigation say that the Travis County grand jury, which indicted Perry, heard testimony from at least four of Perry’s senior aides. They allegedly described to the grand jury Perry’s strategy to remove Lehmberg. Two other people testified in detail about how they had served as intermediaries in an effort to convince Lehmberg to leave. 

The grand jury indictment of Perry is further complicated by VICE’s recent disclosures that over a decade ago Perry’s own defense attorney, David Botsford, brought evidence of alleged wrongdoing to the FBI in an unsuccessful effort to initiate a federal criminal investigation of Perry.

The man entrusted with defending Perry before a jury of his peers and keeping him from going to prison once worked just as hard to put Perry in jail.

So far, Texas taxpayers have been footing the bill to pay Botsford to defend Perry. According to state records, the defense attorney has received more than $80,000 to date. Now that a criminal indictment has been brought, the price tag will almost certainly increase by hundreds of thousands of dollars and possibly millions. Some in the Texas state legislature have also questioned whether public funds should be used to pay for Perry’s legal defense. The issue will almost certainly intensify in coming days, a senior legislative staffer told me yesterday.

In a statement last night, Botsford said: “The facts of the case conclude that the governor’s veto was lawful, appropriate, and well within the authority of the office of the governor. Today’s action... is nothing more than an effort to weaken the constitutional authority granted to the office of Texas governor, and sets a dangerous precedent by allowing a grand jury to punish the exercise of a lawful and constitutional authority afforded to the Texas governor.”

Conservative backers of the governor and a news article in the Washington Post last night also questioned the validity of the prosecution, pointing out that Perry’s veto was carried out as part of his constitutional responsibilities. But the grand jurors alleged in their indictment that Perry’s threats to Lehmberg and pressure to have her resign, coupled with the veto, led to the criminal charges.

The Washington Post’s article and many conservative blogs suggested that the criminal justice process might have been politicized because the grand jury that indicted Perry was empanelled in progressive Travis County. Botsford echoed these beliefs, alleging that his client’s indictment was the result of politics. He said in his statement yesterday: “This clearly represents political abuse of the court system.” 

As VICE first reported, however, Perry largely hired Botsford because he’s a progressive Democratic activist whom Perry believes can more effectively represent him because of his political connections.

“I think if Governor Perry had chosen a Republican lawyer from Houston or Dallas, that would have been a mistake,” Ben Florey, a former Travis County assistant district attorney, told me in an interview. “David knows the nuances and practices of law in Travis County.”

But the charges of partisanship appear not to stand up to scrutiny in this particular instance. McCrum is a former federal prosecutor and considered non-partisan. In 2009, both of Texas’s conservative Republican Senators, John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, recommended to President Obama that he nominate McCrum to be the United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas. San Antonio’s Democratic Congressman, Lloyd Doggett, initially held back his support for McCrum to be US Attorney because he was upset that the Obama administration was too deferential to Republicans when they made such appointments. Later he also supported McCrum.

Earlier, McCrum had been an assistant US attorney in the Western District of Texas for the better part of a decade. Solomon Wisenberg worked as a federal prosecutor alongside McCrum in San Antonio and considers McCrum a friend. He told VICE that McCrum is a measured and careful lawyer—“a stellar person and attorney in every sense of the word.”

Some news organizations and blogs also erroneously suggested that McCrum was associated with or had even been appointed by the Travis County’s district attorney’s office. In fact, McCrum was appointed as a special prosecutor in the case after having been appointed by a judge from a conservative county. The only role that the district attorney’s office had in the investigation was that Lehmberg and others were questioned as witnesses, sources close to the investigation told me.

Texas Republican and Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz went even further. In a Facebook post supporting Perry after his indictment, Cruz suggested to his 802,978 followers that Perry had actually been charged by the Travis County district attorney’s office: “Unfortunately, there has been a sad history of the Travis County district attorney’s Office engaging in politically-motivated prosecutions, and this latest indictment of the governor is extremely questionable,” Senator Cruz wrote. “Rick Perry is a friend, he’s a man of integrity—I am proud to stand with Rick Perry.”

Whether Cruz’s misinformation was intentional of not is unclear—his office was unavailable for comment as this article was posted—but 28,301 of his Facebook supporters liked his comment as of early Saturday evening.

Perry is the first governor of Texas to face criminal indictment while in office in nearly a hundred years. A Travis Country jury charged Governor James E. “Pa” Ferguson in 1917 with embezzlement and other alleged crimes. Facing impeachment, he resigned from office. Seven years later, however, Ferguson’s wife was elected governor, and he returned to help running the state—only for the couple to be turned out of office once again after facing new allegations of malfeasance.

Perry has also been the longest-serving governor of Texas—and one of the state’s most powerful governors in the modern era.

Unsurprisingly, much of the news coverage of Perry’s indictment last night, such as this Politico article, focused on how the criminal charges might affect his presidential bid.

But there is much more at stake for the governor. If convicted of the first felony count of abusing his office, Perry would face a penalty of between five and 99 years in prison. Perry also faces two to ten years in prison if he is convicted of the second charge of the indictment.

The governor is expected to be arraigned sometime next week in the Travis County courthouse, not too far from the governor’s mansion.

When at a press conference yesterday a reporter asked McCrum whether the governor will be fingerprinted and also have to endure his mugshot being taken, McCrum replied: “I imagine that’s included in that.”

Additional reporting by J.P. Olsen

Editing by Mitchell Sunderland

Murray Waas is an editor at VICE. He is a former investigative reporter for Reuters, and before that, a writer for National Journal and the Atlantic. 

Illustration by Sybil Lamb

Trans author and artist Sybil Lamb was living in George W. Bush’s version of The Hunger Games—also known as post-Katrina New Orleans—when two men beat her with an iron pipe, taking a chunk out of her skull, and then left her for dead in a rail yard. She received emergency surgery for over five hours, and the subsequent brain damage affected her balance, memory, and language abilities. 

Lamb has transformed this experience and her travels around America into a new book called I’ve Got a Time Bomb. Like her survival, the book is magical—and I don’t mean charming or full of glitter. (OK, maybe a little glitter.) I mean magical, as in a logic-defying story that deeply moves the reader. Interested in learning more about Lamb's novel, I spoke to her about her writing and survival. 

VICE: I loved the book. What motivated you to write it?
Sybil Lamb: I needed to list the [reasons why] my last five relationships went bad, [to discuss] my own ongoing mild flirtations with substances, and to talk about that one time I got my head bashed open. When I woke up, I had a plastic head that was missing a lot of cognitive functions, and I'm still just a little bit brain damaged. All the stuff was in other books, from five or seven different zines or short stories from the past ten years. “How to Kill Queer Scum Properly” was the original version of the bashing with a pipe story, but [Topside Press] got me to rewrite the whole thing in third person for the readers. 

How close is the story to your life?
That's a fun question. It's written in brain-damaged bits of punk rock, so I tried to get a sticker on the front that said 88 percent completely true. The bashing story was completely true though—100 fucking percent.

Are there any major differences between the book and your life?
The only real difference is Trifle and I never actually shot a girl in the leg. (I will totally put that out there right now: I never shot any girl in the leg.) There's a syringe fight story that's really cool that didn't get in the book, but that'll be in I've Got a Time Bomb Two, out in 2018. Also, I didn't just go around the complete North America once. I went around about three times. 

What’s your life like nowadays?
I am in Toronto—that's the other difference from the book. I'm no longer a crazy, homeless, wandering wreck. Look at this awesome studio I have. The whole building is intact; it's nuts. I'm still getting used to it. I've [lived in a house] for almost six years now—and I'm still freaked out—but I managed to sell all my old punk rock friends out, and I have cashed in. I got at least a steady supply of money, so I can drink and buy cheap dresses [when travelling] in Brooklyn. 

At one point, the protagonist helps another character with what she calls an “important downward spiral.” What is an “important downward spiral?”
I feel like so many people need to go test the worst waters—not just test the waters but test the rapids. It's like picking a scab; it's like pulling out your little hairs one at a time. You can think of it as a rite of passage, but a rite of passage for whom? Why do you have to keep proving you can take so much? If you can take more, and you're unbreakable, you've gotta just keep doing it—gotta keep building up your calluses until you're the toughest pile of calloused calluses, smoothed-over warts, and raw hardtack with feet. But you can never really know beauty and intimacy and the reassuring-ness of a touch until you've seen horror, hatred, and how not nice a touch can feel. That's an important downward spiral.

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