Your No-Big-Government-State-Rights-Loving Politicians Are Grandstanding Again

Current law in Texas: The killer of a police officer in the line of duty may be prosecuted by your local DA who may seek the death penalty in your state funded district court in your county seat presided over by a locally elected judge with county residents serving as jurors. Any appeal goes to state elected judges and then, and only then, to the federal courts.

The proposal: Make the killing of any police officer (heck, they are all "federally-funded" in some way) a federal crime to be tried by an appointed federal prosecutor in front of a life-time appointed judge in a federal courthouse in the metroplex with jurors coming from any county within the federal district. Appeals would go directly to the federal courts bypassing any state courts.

So . . .  what is the purpose of this proposed law?

Above The Fold

Readable full page.

Pokeman Go (One Last Time)

Yesterday at the courthouse I heard someone say: "How can you see those things through your phone but not in real life?"  After pausing, smiling, smirking, and then giving that sweet friend of mine a ton of grief (in Christian love), this shows up in real life yesterday afternoon:

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts

• The silly tweeting Texas Supreme Court judge lets his interns play Pokeman Go in the supreme court building.
• "Auschwitz: Please stop playing Pokemon Go at our death camp memorial."  
• "Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions." - George W. Bush yesterday delivering a really great line. (Edit: Just checked BagOfNothing.com. He really liked that line.)
• Cool photo: Air Force One and Air Force Two at Love Field:
  
• New Quinnipiac University Poll (which is pretty reliable): "[Trump] is [now] on the upside of too-close to call races in Florida and Pennsylvania and is locked in a dead heat in Ohio." Good lord. Those states are the election.
• 538.com still has Hillary with a 77.4% chance of winning, but I bet that should be skewed down somewhat once they factor in the new polling numbers. By how much depends on whether other data shows similar movement.
• Random bullet point: (1) Someone sent me a link back in May on Twitter to a country music video featuring "local guys", (2) I actually watched it and came to the conclusion that for some reason I'm always jazzed by a female fiddle player, (3) For some reason the tweet was "liked" by two hookers.
• Speaking of (hot fiddle player - not hooker):
• 
• Is this a killer robot reference with a Banksy flowers-not-violence influence? . . .
• 
• Note to self: I need a haircut.
• I've always said Wall-E was a rip off of the Short Circuit robot (but this important cause never gained traction.)
  
• 
  
• 107 degrees predicted in Amarillo and Dalhart today.
• Mark Cuban on the new "deliberate foul" rule: ""Rewarding incompetence is never a good business strategy." Someone on Twitter added for him, "Now excuse me. I've got to go give Harrison Barnes $95 million."
• Shout out to Craig Miller on The Ticket today going off on Chewbacca Mom's new music video that I went off on two days ago. 
• Thirty-three people had to be hospitalized in Brooklyn after a bad batch of K2 got out there. That's the direct result of making illegal a plant which grows in dirt. 
• The body of the SMU officer who reportedly drowned in Turtle Creek has still not been found.
• "Texas Congressman Ted Poe announces he’s been diagnosed with leukemia." I presume there are varying degrees of leukemia.
• Have we heard what type of gun was used in the Dallas shooting?

Dallas Service For Fallen Officers

Texas Attorney General @KenPaxtonTX sitting with Patrick. pic.twitter.com/vrXVxyDgb9

— Jason Whitely (@JasonWhitely) July 12, 2016

Texas AG Paxton sitting with Lt. Gov. Patrick. Paxton brought iPad.

CNN Going All Hipster On Us

tfw your former rival endorses you https://t.co/OMmZFJIIOU pic.twitter.com/hjLnBx4r9L

— CNN (@CNN) July 12, 2016

Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary this morning.

For all you non-cool kids out there, "tfw" stands for "The feeling when".

Great Moments In Tour De France

Chris Froome punches fan during Stage 8 of #TDF2016 https://t.co/7xxDR8ESoX

— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) July 9, 2016

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?:
• 
• Photo in Star-Telegram accompanying a story on Open Carry makes me believe that shorts and a handgun is a bad look:
• 
• 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. 
  
• 
  
• 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.