3.23.2018

Random Friday Morning Thoughts


  • Jenny Anchondo quit Fox 4 "effective immediately." That seems very abrupt and very strange. I looked at her Twitter feed and she was working hard up until the day before. What happened?
  • What a day for Trump.
    • John Dowd, Trump's lead lawyer in the Mueller investigation, quit in the morning.  The Washington Post on Monday said there was trouble brewing but Dowd denied it.
    • Trump, late in the afternoon, then fired the National Security Adviser who was big on compromise and negotiations. The "lame stream media" said the departure was coming for the last two weeks, but the White House lied and said it wouldn't happen.  
    •  And the replacement, John Bolton, is likely to get us all killed if Trump listens to him. (By the way, this will be Trump's third one.)
    • Bolton on Fox News an hour after the announcement of his new job: "I didn't really expect that announcement" today.  Good, lord. 
    • Oh, and after Trump signed a "memo" adding tariffs for imports from China, the stock market lost 724 points yesterday.  
  • McLennan County commissioners invoked a provision in state law to place a limit on how much outgoing District Attorney Abel "Let's Indict All Twin Peaks Bikers" Reyna can spend before the end of his term Dec. 31.  I'll be honest, I didn't know such a law existed.
  • My one and only administrative assistant is in Manhatten. There was 8.4 inches of snow in Central Park on the day she arrived. 
  • This week I was walking out of a grocery store and a girl, wearing sunglasses, flirting with young guys on a  work break, and who kind of looked like a stoner, said to me, "Hey, Barr" as I walked by. It stopped me down and I gave her a "Do you know me?" look. She said, "It's on your shirt." I was wearing a Baylor shirt that had "BEARS" in the biggest letters.
  • KXAS  (Channel 5) had a 15 second "news segment" about a Starbucks promotion at the end of their 5:00 p.m. broadcast yesterday. Obviously, that couldn't be a paid ad disguised as news, right? And you guys have laughed at me for years. 
  • Remember one of those "winter parks" coming to Fort Worth where you could snowboard indoors? It was a scam. The promoter was just sentenced to 10 years in prison. 
  • Oh, and yesterday:
  • If you want political entertainment, watch the Fox 4 morning hosts struggle to not laugh out loud as they interview Mark Davis for five minutes every Thursday. 
  • There's a wild Houston murder for hire case going on, but I find this very disturbing journalism from the Houston Chronicle:. In reporting about the trial they wrote: "The officer, whom the Chronicle is not identifying at the request of the Harris County district attorney’s office, testified Wednesday for more than five hours . . . . " You kidding me? It's a public trial and you won't name him because the DA tells you not to? Who is running the press? You or the government?
  • Yesterday, a $1.3 trillion spending bill was approved by the Republican controlled House with strong support from the Democrats. It was 2,232 pages long and passed less than 17 hours after it was released. It's filled with pork.  Actual photo
  • If you haven't seen the police murder of an unarmed black man in Sacramento in his grandmother's back yard, you need to. Twenty shots fired. An officer then says "mute" and the audio "mysteriously" goes off on the body cams. This link will take you to a helicopter video and body cam video.
  • The Bridgeport Volunteer Fire Department received a million dollar grant?