Rick Perry

AUSTIN — The Texas House has preliminarily passed a plan revamping the state’s economic incentive programs, including dissolving a pet fund of Rick Perry that funneled $200 million in taxpayer dollars to startups.

Lawmakers used a simple voice vote Thursday to advance the measure, which Perry’s successor, Gov. Greg Abbott, has prioritized. It eliminates the Emerging Technology Fund. Perry said the fund had spurred Texas’ economy, but critics note it funded some firms that didn’t create jobs or went bankrupt.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Before he became immortalized as the Lone Survivor, a Navy SEAL who escaped a 2005 Taliban ambush on a mountain slope in Afghanistan, Marcus Luttrell was a broken man in search of a haven. 

He found it one day in the spring of 2007 when, struggling to recover his body and mind and with the horrors of war still raw, he showed up unannounced at the Texas governor’s mansion and asked to see Rick Perry. 

Over the ensuing months, a virtual father-son relationship blossomed, the two men said. The governor and his wife, Anita, helped bring Luttrell back to health. Perry used the power of his office to find Luttrell a spine surgeon to fix his back.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The parade of potential Republican presidential candidates speaking at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention isn’t one to make waves with the powerful gun-rights group. The contenders are sitting pretty in NRA ratings of their positions on gun issues, with scores ranging from A to A-minus.

The speakers get 10 minutes each on Friday to preach to the choir on their pro-gun bona fides. “This is the ultimate choir,” said Chip Saltsman, who ran the 2008 presidential campaign of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, among the speakers at the event. “Any time you get 70,000 pro-Second Amendment people in one place, it’s a good opportunity for anybody running on the Republican side.”

AUSTIN — Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began dismantling a flagship initiative of his predecessor Thursday, saying he will abolish Rick Perry’s pet program that gave $200 million in taxpayer dollars to Texas startups and was beset by bankruptcies and questionable claims of success.

The decision was not surprising. Abbott signaled throughout his campaign that the Texas Emerging Technology Fund troubled him ideologically, but problems with the decade-old program ran deeper than new Republican distaste for governments “picking winners and losers” in the private sector.