8.10.2021

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts




The news broke a decade ago that the Aggies might be headed to the SEC.   

  • The troubles of the Decatur ISD school board have made the home page of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this morning. The article also reproduced all 123 pages of the records obtained from the ISD through an open records request -- with the most relevant ones so far being withheld by the school because they would be "embarrassing".

  • I'm hearing a worker was killed on the premises of Martin-Marietta in Chico last week in the morning hours after he was hit by an 18 wheeler which allegedly did not stop. (In looking at the jail list this morning, I saw a Fort Worth man was booked in yesterday afternoon for "Accident Involving Death" for an offense on 8/3/21. I'm not sure if it is related.)
  • COVID quick hits:
    • New number for August 9th is 9,462. No signs of slowing down. 

    • Dallas ISD thumbs its nose at Gov. Abbott.

    • As does Austin ISD. 

    • Dallas County challenges him in court. 

    • He thought this would be a good idea to post on Friday. He literally fiddles while Texas burns. 

    • They always told us this is exactly what one of the consequences would be. 

    • It was a making of his own device.

    • Crazy football coach Lane Kiffin, of all people, is now leading the way.

    • What's the term? "Snowflakes"?

       
  • This is the third arrest in Tarrant County this year for this strange phenomenon after having a couple of very high profile cases involving it during the last couple of years. Weird. 
  • The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Bill will pass the Senate today with John Cornyn voting for it and Ted Cruz, assuming he's not in Cancun, voting against it. You don't see that very often. (Side note: I bet Cornyn can't stand Cruz.) 

  • They should give me a nicely framed certificate for propping up their brand over all these years. Or a least a Dilly Bar. 

  • Legal nerd stuff out of the Fifth Circuit yesterday: Things like this makes civil lawyers break out into a cold sweat.

  • Very nerdy legal stuff: I stumbled upon the fact that in Georgia, a criminal defense lawyer can't talk about the burden of proof or presumption of innocense in voir dire. That's absolutely insane to me.  How many states are like that? 

  • Also insane: The Ticket had a segment this morning on whether Tony Romo should be in the Hall of Fame now that he is eligible.  The answer is absolutely "no", and it's not even a close call. I wouldn't even put him in the Cowboys' Ring of Honor. 


at 8:29 AM

8.09.2021

Random Monday Morning Thoughts




This was the forecast for the week of August 7th in 2011. If it had come true, we would have broken the 1980 record for most consecutive days of 100 degrees or over which stood at 42 days. (I don't remember it being that hot.)  But turns out something went really amiss on Thursday -- a bizarre thunderstorm blew through -- and we topped out at 99 degrees ending the streak at 41. 

  • I had to get my graphics department to modify the chart because the source hasn't been updated with the most recent data.

    • It's a full scale outbreak and emergency situation, but this week Decatur schools open back up while the State of Texas has banned any school district from taking any action to prevent the spread. People are going to die. 
    • Gov. Abbott's transformation is mind blowing. He didn't go from a Mask Mandate guy to Neutral Opting For Local Control guy. Nope, he went from Mask Mandate, blew by Neutral, and went right to State Edicts Upon High guy.  The far right beat him senseless after the Shelly Luther fiasco, and he turned into a pile of mush. 
    • But some conservatives understand conservatism.

    • Meanwhile, in Sturgis. This should be the first panel in a "How it started" meme. 

    • Remember the vocal Texas GOP anti-vaxxing official who died last week from COVID? He has a GoFundMe page for funeral and medical expenses. Someone dug up this from him:


  • Trump asking the Justice Department to steal the election after he lost -- and the Justice Department telling him to take a hike --  is the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen testified about it all last Thursday. And he didn't wait for a book deal or a subpoena to do it. This should be front page news across the country. And remember that we had an acting AG in the first place because Bill Barr abruptly quit in the middle of this attempted coup.



  • Told ya. When the New York Times reached out to the Sheriff's department, it said the two deputies involved were on "vacation." Riiiggght. 

  • I can't let this item from the Update on Friday going by without pointing it out. That's throwing some fire! 

  • I bought into this yesterday (listen as it happened), but I'm really tapping the brakes now. The Rockies mascot is named "Dinger", and I think they guy was yelling at him.  And video evidence backs that up. 

  • A federal judge has ruled Baylor must hand-over the famous and secretive "Pepper-Hamilton report" because the school's lawyers screwed up. Baylor wanted to then amend its pleadings to fix the the blunder, but the judge said no.


  • The guy had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.075 at the time of the test.  The prosecutor finally got around to asking the chemist on the second day of trial if she could say the man was 0.08 or greater at the time of driving which is what the State has to prove. Side note: That's something you want to do before trial. The chemist told him he couldn't possibly do that with the information he had.  Story.

  • If you missed Rangers' Brock Holt throw a 31.1 mph strike over the weekend, here you go. You can watch all of his three outs here. 

  • If I have one more thing break this summer, I'm running off to the jungle in Costa Rica. Anyone got an extra brand new 3 ton a/c coil laying around? 



at 8:31 AM

8.06.2021

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

at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts




The video is still up, and it's still glorious.   

  • Add the new numbers for August 5th of 8,130. The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated is soaring.  

  • If you want an insight into the anti-vaxxers, just listen to a conservative locally based talk show on WBAP or 660 The Answer during the day when they take calls. It's insane. And the real crazies get absolutely no push back from the hosts. Heard one caller say yesterday that one co-worker got Bell's palsy from the vaccine and another got the shingles.
  • As I predicted, former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger's conviction was affirmed on appeal late yesterday. Quick observations:
    • Here's what I said in April after oral arguments: 

    • I was dead on. Of all the complicated issues in the case, it boiled down to this on appeal: The key is that the jury rejected the defense that Amber's use of deadly force was necessary even if the jury believed she actually thought she had entered her own apartment. Bottom line: The jury rejected self-defense  -- which means they found there were options she had other than killing him -- and the evidence supports that conclusion. 

    • I was always 100% right that this was not a criminal negligence case instead of a murder case, and the appellate court said the trial court was 100% right on not giving the jury that option. Amber intended to kill him (that's a murder charge) instead of accidentally killing him while doing something incredibly stupid (criminal negligence.)

    • I was always confused why some experts were calling the case a "mistake of fact" legal defense situation. It was not, and the court said so. Mistake of fact would be a situation where, say, you were on your ranch and fired your rifle into what you truly thought was a fallen tree trunk. Turns out, it was actually a person who had entered your land and was asleep. You were mistaken about a critical fact (you thought it was a log) and that mistake "negated your culpable mental state" (intent to kill a human being.) 
    • Now whether she was mistaken about being her apartment was relevant as to whether she reasonably thought she needed to used self-defense. And, if she was truly mistaken, it would have justified some use of self-defense. Once again, the jury just rejected her assertion of self-defense that the reasonable option for her was to kill him. 
    • Back when I read Amber's lawyer's brief when it was filed, I made fun of him spending multiple pages on some case he found from a court in England. It didn't escape the court's notice either, and they took a mild shot at it in a footnote. My flashback bullet point and the court's footnote: 


    • Legal nerd stuff: I went nuts about how the jury instructions were actually so wrongly worded in favor of Amber that I couldn't believe no on caught it at trial. On appeal, the State did catch it and tried to get the court to say the instruction shouldn't have been worded that way. My post about that is here.  The appellate court, as expected, didn't address the issue because they jury ignored the instruction and the State just doesn't get a free advisory appellate opinion on what is now an irrelevant matter. (Footnote 4.)
  • Here's a pretty good legal question for you: Is deadly force justified when someone who has stole beer from you is in the process of running away?

  • If you ever wanted to see what the inside of a "chop shop" looks like, we got pictures from one in Dallas County yesterday.

  • The No-Big-Government-Conservative-Republicans are very difficult to figure out. So not only do they not want local school district making the decisions, they don't even want the individual states to tell the districts what to do. No, they want the federal government to control local school districts. 

  • Back to COVID: Bexar County (San Antonio) has halted all jury trials. Jefferson County joined the halt as well.
  • Breaking: Unemployment rate drops from 5.9% in June to 5.4% in July.
  • I've got serious questions about this. It is 100% undisputed that Fentanyl overdose by exposure is a myth. He may have fainted, but it wasn't Fentanyl related.

  • It would be a perfect circle if these boys had been the ones who had written Idiocracy.

  • This would have been a fantastic picture last night but they had Jerry and Troy's trophies in the wrong places. 

  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 763 days.
  • Messenger: Above the Fold



at 8:33 AM
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