11.29.2022

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts



This story got my attention because it involved DWI cops venturing off the streets and going into bars undercover. That's normally a job for TABC.  So what happened to the case against the 24 year old who got her picture plastered all over the news after police promoted the arrest? Not a single newspaper reported the disposition. I tracked it down in the records of the County Clerk of Montgomery County. After she demanded a jury trial, the case was dismissed because, as the prosecutor wrote, "Cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt." Document here. 

  • Remember this from August 2021?

    • Well, that man was sentenced to 7 years in prison yesterday after a sentencing hearing following a guilty plea.  I don't know much about it other than no alcohol or drugs were involved, and there wasn't a charge of recklessly or negligently killing the man. But the statute, Texas Transportation Code 550.021(c)(1)(A), carries up to a 20 year sentence for leaving the scene of an accident when a death is involved.  
  • In what I think is a first for the newspaper, almost all of the reporters at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram went on strike yesterday. They are asking for a wage floor of $57,500.  In response, the owners of the paper, McClatchy, notified the workers their health insurance coverage would end beginning tomorrow if the don't return to work.

  • This is a wild story. A sheriff's deputy (who was also a former trooper) traveled from Virginia to California in pursuit of a teenage girl he met online and promptly killed her grandparents and mother once he got there. He was then killed in a shootout with cops. All of the stories said that he "catfished" the girl, but none of them tell me how exactly he deceived her. 



  • This story out of Fort Worth where a woman is reunited with her family after being kidnapped as a baby is everywhere. The thing that sticks out to me is how quick and easy it is to find relatives from a sample of DNA sent in to sites like 23andMe. You don't need police. You don't need CODIS. You don't need to pay tens of thousands of dollars. It's amazing what you can do once you have a known DNA profile. 

  • If we've learned anything about Elon Musk and his insane purchase of Twitter, it's that the man is not the brightest bulb in the box.  Would you go up in one of his rockets now that you know how unstable he is?


  • Some of the families of the Uvalde Massacre sued various law enforcement agencies yesterday. Full lawsuit here. One thing I don't understand is governmental immunity in cases like this. Just when you think it has no chance, you'll see a settlement for a gazillion dollars. Remember that the United States paid $127.5 million for the school shooting in Santa Fe?

  • I'm not sure I had ever heard of the ongoing trial of a Border Patrol agent who is an accused serial killer on the streets of Laredo. Below is from front page of San Antonio Express-News. Click to enlarge.


  • I almost feel sorry for the primetime Fox News viewer.

  • Put the Filter Gal in the bucket of people who do not care about democracy. If they think there's a chance to get elected by any means, including force, they'll do it -- all the while invoking "God" and "patriot" along the way. Video.

  • Despite the strike, they were able to put a paper together. 


at 8:31 AM

11.28.2022

Random Monday Morning Thoughts




I don't know where I found this in 2012, but it got my attention enough to post it. Notably, an incident between biker groups at the event in 2014 was reported to have been a precursor to the Twin Peaks shootout in Waco in 2015.

  • Late yesterday a plane carrying a pilot and one passenger hit and got stuck in an electrical tower in Maryland. After seven hours, they were rescued.

  • The City of Houston (pop. 2.2 million) issued a boil water notice. In response, the Houston ISD (195,000 students and 250 campuses) shut down for Monday.


  • A chase of a motorcycle in White Settlement had the police mad that he got away. Video.

  • The Aaron Dean/Anatiana Jefferson police shooting trial is set to start today. I don't think they were expecting Jim Lane, who died yesterday, to do anything in the trial anyway since his health had been failing. If a continuance is granted this morning, it's out of respect for Lane in Fort Worth and not because the defense team has found itself in an unusual situation. 

  • Someone caught on video two deer swimming across Lake Bridgeport.

  • It turns out that I wasn't the only one disturbed with Trump meeting with White Supremacist's for Thanksgiving dinner. Even right wing Breitbart took notice.

    • Trump spent all weekend doing damage control but, as he has always refused to do, he never condemned the white supremacists.

  • He's a strange guy. 

    • Unrelated but over the weekend we learned Musk wasn't familiar with the 2018 event of conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group forcing all of its affiliates to ironically read a script railing against "Fake News." (Deadspin created a viral video synching up all the affiliates reading the script word for word which the New York Times profiled.) 
  • The new Twitter is getting spammed by the Chinese right now to prevent news about the civil uprising against new COVID lockdowns.   

  • Kevin McCarthy, who may or may not be the next Speaker of the Republican controlled House, declared this over the holidays:

    • Someone quickly made a counter-point. I wonder who will be selected to read this provision?

  • This case is setting up to be one of the all time great mysteries.

  • So why did ESPN pay Joe Buck, $65 million over five years, and (especially) Troy Aikman, $95 million over the same period, all that money? It didn't matter one iota that they weren't there on Fox on Thanksgiving.

  • College football:
    • TCU went unbeaten and that's hard to do, and they are the favorite over K-State in the championship game on Saturday. And I think they need to win to get in the playoffs. It will be the most consequential game in the history of TCU.

    • Texas Tech fun fact:

    • Not fun fact: This fine event happened when Baylor was an its own 18 yard line, and triggered me to have an extreme case of Slumped Shoulders. UT scored in two plays and went up 14-9.

  • No one talking about gas being around $2.75?


at 8:31 AM

11.25.2022

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out of Here

at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts




I had forgotten about Obama and McKayla Maroney.

  • All county offices are closed, the courthouse is closed, the Messenger is closed, but here I am. THWMISB™.
  • The Washington Post has a long article (link here as my gift to you since I have a subscription) about Jerry Jones and race, but most of the attention is about a photograph it included. It shows a 14 year old Jerry in a crowd blocking a small group of young black men trying to go to school at North Little Rock High School in 1957.  From my sense of the current reaction, it sounds like the vast majority of people are cutting him a break on this. After all, he was a white kid raised in the South in the 1950s. 

  • Now this kid, on the other hand, makes you want to punch him regardless of his circumstances. 

  • Oh, hell no.

  • Didn't see this on any of the local news channels.

  • This really is incredible. 

  • Senator John Cornyn had a very odd sign-off to a tweet last night. 

  • The team's protest was in response to the "One Love" rainbow armbands being prohibit. I respect the gesture, but then they went out and were upset by Japan 2-1. You gotta win after something like that.

  • In crazy Kanye news, he posted a video last night saying that Trump yelled at him at Mar-a-Lago during dinner. But, more importantly to me, he also said Trump was "most impressed" with Nick Fuentes who also dined with them. (Fuentes is a neo-Nazi and is a Holocaust denier and marched in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. It's 1930s Germany all over again, folks.)

  • OK, that's funny.

  • An image captured by Fox yesterday showed that Dak's phone has an image of himself for the wallpaper. I think I would, too. 


  • Very, very legal nerdy alert: The Court of Criminal Appeals gave the defense bar a rare victory on Wednesday on an issue which comes up quite a bit. It decided that a consensual encounter morphed into an investigative detention.   And they also did something in the opinion which I've started doing in recent years in motions -- including video screenshots. 

    • But it wasn't a total win -- they didn't rule on whether there was no reasonable suspicion to justify the detention. That would make the stop illegal. Instead they remanded the case back to the lower court to make that determination.
    • And I always shake my head when the facts laid out by a court include a description of an area as they did here: "an area of southwest Houston purportedly associated with gang violence and narcotics trafficking" in describing where the cops stopped someone walking down the street. Whenever you see words like "a high crime neighborhood", it's just coded language.
  • World Cup: In the group that the U.S. is in, Iran upset Wales by a score of 2-0 early this morning with two goals after the 8th minute of added time (something I have never understood.). That first goal was even appreciated by my untrained eyes. Video. England (1-0) and the U.S. (0-0-1) play at 1:00 p.m. today although, hopefully, I'll still be interested in Baylor vs. The Evil Empire at that point. That game starts at 11:00 a.m. 

    • Jared Kushner looked on. I'm sure he is not talking about how a Qatar firm bailed out his $1.8 billion troubled investment in his 666 5th Avenue property, or discussing how to invest  the $2 billion he got from the Saudis after he left his White House job. 
      "Hey, have you heard about crooked Hunter Biden?"

  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office, despite having a full male DNA profile, has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 3 years, 143 days.
  • Messenger - Above the Fold

at 8:26 AM
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