Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts

• "What To Do When You Get Pulled Over - Coffey Anderson PSA"  He sure makes it sound like we should be on pins and needles when we see a cop walking up during a traffic stop. (Admission: I've never heard of Coffey Anderson.) 
• President Obama heads to Dallas today. History will treat him well. There will always be a segment of the population which is on the wrong side of history. Remember that ad in the Dallas paper and the handbill before JFK's fatal visit?:
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• Photo in Star-Telegram accompanying a story on Open Carry makes me believe that shorts and a handgun is a bad look:
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• In reading the Killing Reagan book, I had completely confused my memory about the Falkland Islands and Grenada. (Quickly: Which one did the U.S invade? Which one did Great Britain invade? Fun fact: Both are off the coast of South America yet are over 4,300 miles apart.)
• And I had no idea that Fox News head, and possible Gretchen Carlson predator, Roger Ailes came up with Reagan's line of, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." (The book said, however, that Reagan was coached to use a Bob Hope-like pause when delivering it. He didn't.)
• Trump this morning: "Crime is out of control, and rapidly getting worse." Does he just makes stuff up on the fly?
• From the Washington Post: "The new ads . . .  are being launched by the pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA, and combine footage of Trump [in his own words] with animation and a [literal] 'WTF' theme, which suggest a particular focus on young voters." Here they are: Chauvinist, Choice, Deportation Force, Climate Change, and Minimum Wage.
• If Trump picks Newt as VP they, in combination with their wives and ex-wives, will be one short of fielding a baseball team. 
• A phrase you don't hear any longer: "Just rub some monkey blood on it."
• I had to take two links out of a new watch and couldn't do it to say my life. (A youtube clip demo'd doing it with a regular hammer and a paperclip. Sheesh.) I finally bought a $6.99 "Watch Band Link Pin Tool Kit" and the job was done in three minutes. A buddy once told me: 90% of any project is having the right tools. True that.
• "Not enough mental health funding, let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding, let’s give it to the cops. Here in Dallas we have a loose dog problem. Let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, give it to the cops. 70 percent of the African-American community is being raised by single women, let’s give it to the cops to solve as well. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems." -- Dallas Police Chief Brown who is spot on. 
• Random stat: This is my 19,121 post. (Not bullet points but total posts.) I'm either disciplined or OCD.

Two Bailiffs Killed

Story.

Edit: Oh, and for those wondering what the alleged killer looked like, here ya go . . .

Death and Politics

Highway traffic in Dallas comes to a halt as police escort the body of slain DART officer Brent Thompsonhttps://t.co/bNIgHWr6mg

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 10, 2016

Reese Witherspoon Cloned Herself

Or has a daughter.

The 10,000 Hour Rule?*

Edit: From the same game . . .

Tragedy strikes lunch, beer https://t.co/MOxiAI7IB1 pic.twitter.com/uFFwuHXFsS

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) July 11, 2016

_______
*The "10,000 Hour Rule" principle holds that 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" are needed to become world-class in any field.

From The Official Twitter Account of the Texas Prosecutors Association

Someone explain this to me.

Open carry = Legal. Argue with police = Legal.  Yet no matter what the police do, "no jury" will disapprove?

Random Monday Morning Thoughts

• Dan Patrick wasted no time in embarrassing us all on Friday by calling the Black Lives Matter protesters in Dallas "hypocrites".  (Patrick's son is a judge in Houston and faces re-election from some guy named Robert Johnson. I don't know if the son is a good or bad judge, but I'd be concerned that he grew up with Dan Patrick as a role model.)
• Radio talk show host Mark Davis continues his disturbing trend to the very, very far right. His contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement is over the top even going so far as to tweet, "'Peaceful' rallies spewing hatred of blacks, Jews, Muslims would be condemned for their content. Yet #BLM rallies are coddled, encouraged."
• At Northpark Mall yesterday, some anti-Black Lives Matters protesters showed up. They looked like the "Git-Er-Done" movement. 
  
• I don't exactly know what Pokeman Go is but it sounds like that strange game of geocache that Mrs. LL has been playing for years. 
• The Baton Rouge police might want to throttle back a bit.
  
  
• Lost in the Dallas tragedy: They still haven't found the SMU officer who reportedly drowned in Turtle Creek. 
• "Chewbacca mom sings Michael Jackson’s ‘Heal the World’ in wake of shootings."  There have been a lot of tributes to the fallen Dallas officers but many are getting perilously close to "look at me". 
• This is pretty amazing - Parker County inmates "break" out of their cell to help a jailer who looked as if he was suffering a heart attack. Video. 
  
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• Read somewhere on Friday: "I don't want black men killed by cops. I don't want cops killed by black men. I don't want kids killed in schools." 

Sunday Morning

The Skies Opened Up Saturday Afternoon

Minutes later . . .

Above The Fold

Readable front page.

This Week Has Beaten All Of Us Down. Let's Get Out Of Here.

More Audio Than Visual -- But Disturbing

I am so scared. pic.twitter.com/jw88QnKGXG

— Allison (@allisongriz) July 8, 2016

We Have An ID

#Breaking: Dallas gunman is ID'ed as Micah X. Johnson, 25. No known criminal history or ties to terror groups. https://t.co/svut88i3A7

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 8, 2016

Side note: How does an LA paper find this out before anyone else?

Edit: May or may not be him depending on the source:

Edit:

A Wise County Case That Will Never End

If I remember correctly, it settled right before trial but then the settlement fell though.

Then this happened:

Yesterday this happened:

It has more lives than the Terminator.

Random Friday Morning Thoughts

• Latest Dallas update: Twelve officers shot. Five dead. Two civilians hit. One suspect dead after a bomb carried by a police robot detonated.
• I had a similar feeling after 9/11: I can't believe it was orchestrated and pulled off.
• Dallas Police Chief this morning: "We don't feel public support on most days."
• More: "Gunman was upset about police shootings, wanted to kill white people, especially white officers."
• Fox 4's Shaun Rabb was the first one to come out and say, without saying it,  there would be multiple fatalities. This was shortly before 10:00 p.m.  He kept citing "my sources". I later learned he is married to a Dallas police officer.
• The national Fox News inadvertently was the first one to report the shootings by showing footage of officers down in the street via split screen without knowing what they were broadcasting. (Video.)
• Fox News also had the bombastic "Sheriff Clarke" on this morning who blamed the President for the shootings. Incredible. 
• Texas AG Ken Paxton tried to capitalize on the tragedy by immediately issuing a press release saying his office would provide all needed support.  At that moment, officers were crouched behind police cars in downtown Dallas. And this morning he is at it again by showing up in Dallas and appearing on Fox and Friends. Buddy, there is nothing your office of spare lawyers in Austin has to offer. Not now. And not in the future.
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• Paxton, for some reason, pointed out that "I wasn't here when the Kennedy assassination happened in the sixties." He was 11 months old. 
• The most graphic video shows a shooter on the street and not elevated as many reports said. (The time stamp on the video was from around 11:50 last night and had a "courtesy of" banner. Was that live streamed by a private citizen and simultaneously broadcast by the local Fox 4 affiliate and others? If it was, we had the media broadcast a murder live.)
• Fox 4, for almost an hour, had a tip line phone number on its screen. Unfortunately, the number was preceded by the words "For Information:" The number was to receive information - not get it.
• The Fan was out of its league this morning. I flipped over during a Ticket commercial break and heard their soft piano return music. They said they weren't talking sports and opened up the phone lines. The first two callers said the Dallas shootings were in response to Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and many other police shootings. The host (who is black) basically remained silent. The other host (white) jumped in and said, "We are opening up the phones but his is not a day for platforms!" The black host said he was "torn" on the issue. A reporter from KRLD was invited on who basically said how can you talk about the shootings without bring race and retaliation into this.
• Dallas Police were irresponsible identifying someone as a "suspect" last night. (He was quickly cleared.) They didn't even utilize the useless "person of interest" term:
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• If the media ended up paying Richard Jewell for misidentifying him as the person responsible for the Atlanta Olympic bombing, this guy is going to be paid. (The tricky part is that the media should be able to rely upon the Dallas PD to have its facts correct before releasing a photo of a suspect.)
• He wasn't defamed? The Ticket's Corby Davidson called him a "killer" and a "murderer" on Twitter based upon the Dallas PD's information. (He later took the Tweet down).
• A former Congressman handled the whole situation maturely and with a measured response:
  
• The slain DART officer was the brother of the Navarro County DA.
• In other news, the U.S. Capitol was just placed on lock down.
• I still remember when a Dallas officer was shot and killed in downtown Dallas by a McDonalds in the late 1980s when racial strife was beginning to rise. If I remember that, I'll remember last night forever. And you will to. 

Become A DPS Trooper - Make Just South Of $90,000 + Benefits

Gun boat negotiable?

It's Been A While Since We've Had A Courtney Stodden Update: She's Pregnant

More.

Texas Drug War: The Cover Of The New York Times Magazine