Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts

• On this day in 1962: 
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• In 2012, Joe Biden was refused service in a restaurant because the owner disagreed with him politically. The GOP then brought the restaurant owner to speak at a campaign rally. 
  
• There is one NFL player, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, who has graduated from med school and still on a current roster. The NFL, in a massive blown PR opportunity, has denied his request to have "M.D." on the back of his jersey after his name. 
• There's a lot going on here: 
  
• Again? Someone might want to get this girl some help:
  
• Yesterday Mrs. LL told me "Happy Anniversary" which prompted me to reply, "It's tomorrow." At dinner, candles are out. I didn't say a word. She later hands me a gift, and I say, "Seriously, it's tomorrow." She pulls up a calendar, does some calculations, and then takes the gift back.
• Last week, Clarence Thomas was invited to the Oval Office on his birthday. Here is a picture including his four clerks. I'm not saying a word.
  
• I've heard there is Pittsburgh at one end and Philadelphia on the other and the equivalent of the Deep South is in between.
  
  
• Harley-Davidson, in light of Trump's Trade War, is laying people off and moving plants overseas. In the last 15 hours, Trump has attacked the company four times. 
• We've not had a "Decatur Beggar" sighting in quite some time. (He used to be spotted off FM 51 in Decatur and, oddly, off of 377 in Keller.) A faithful reader thinks he spotted him in Oklahoma City yesterday. Heck, why not up your game and run for judge?
  
• Why would anyone ever buy a Time Share?
• Still a great time waste: Can you ID the 50 states.
• Weird: "At 12:15 a.m. Sunday, the temperature was 85 degrees [in Breckenridge, Texas]. By 1:35 a.m., it had soared to 99 degrees, according to the National Weather Service."

Random Monday Morning Thoughts

• Mike Huckabee has apparently joined the White Nationalist club. (And he might have stolen the pic from Richard Spencer who posted it on his Nazi website in 2013.)
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• And his daughter, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, was denied service in a restaurant in Kentucky. Once again, it's kind of like not making a cake for a gay couple (which she 100% supported.)  Amazingly, she then used her official government Twitter account to shame a private business. 
• Trump to the rescue!:
  
  
  
  
• Former mayor pro-tem of Dallas, John Loza, who was two years younger than me, died after vomiting blood.
• Williamson County was busy. If I'm reading this correctly, they seized $80,000 out of one vehicle and $39,000 out of another last week. Always remember: In America, if you have large amounts of cash in your car and are committing no crime, the government will assume you are a criminal and try to take it.
• Conservative columnist George Will urges America to vote for Democrats in the mid-terms. \
• A Fort Worth lawyer was sentenced to five years in prison for trying to bilk insurance companies out $300,000. That seems a little harsh, but I'm all for it.
  
• The Democrats in Texas showed out in force on Friday for their state convention.
  
• Bridgeport old-timers like me can name another place: 
  
• UT released a weird one minute promotional video which is nothing more than the team jacking around in a pool. The name: "This is how we do it at UT."
• Shout out to a stranger who contacted me about my complaints about Windows 10. He pointed out that you can install a "shell" which makes Windows 10 look and act like the old classical Windows. Works like a charm. 
• We've got a new Internet star from over the weekend: "Permit Patty." She called the cops (captured on video) on a little black girl for selling water without a permit.
• This is great: Fox News brings on a couple of panelist to talk about Trump being branded a racist and the Trump supporter, and former employee, tells the black guy he is out of his "cotton-pickin' mind." He and Fox News later apologized.
  
  
• The 10 days leading UP TO the 4th of July. Ugh.: 
  
• Trump, on Sunday, acted once again like the Mad King with no regard for the Constitution. Everyone knows (See Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202  (1982); Zadvydas v. Davis,533 U.S. 678  (2001))  that once a person crosses the border, either legally or illegally, they have all the constitutional protections of a citizen. That includes the right to have the government follow all laws even if it requires a judge or a court case. 
  
• And I'm not going to even mention Trump's weird Sunday evening tweet attacking Jimmy Fallon, or that he accidentally endorsed a college student for Congress.
• Wise County Messenger: Above the fold.

It's Friday. Let's Get Out Of Here.

 Anyone else thinking: "That guy is weird"?

 Tiger Woods' first wife?

 The way I picture North Korea's military.

 I'm not laughing at this Millennial. I'm not laughing. 

 Credit to the little tyke. That would have freaked me out.

Now here's a man dedicated to traffic enforcement.

Random Friday Morning Thoughts

• I didn't know she was a tone-deaf as her husband. (That's her, obviously, on the left. The photo on the right is a stock photo from the site where you can buy the jacket for $39 from Zara.) It took the public quite a while yesterday to believe she actually wore it on the way to Texas because it was so unthinkable and outrageous. 
  
• Trump's explanation was soooooooo believable.  (Did he not know that the spokesman said there was "no hidden message?")
  
• It was a bad day (all day) in Dallas traffic yesterday when a tanker overturned on the High Five. 
  
• I haven't made a Dennis Prager post in quite awhile because I never listen to him. I tuned in for five minutes yesterday and he didn't disappoint. He had a caller on who called Trump a "Nazi." (Honestly, that's a little harsh. He's a White Nationalist but probably not a Nazi.) Anyway, Prager, in a strange bit of logic, told the caller he must be a Holocaust Denier. "Huh?" I thought. Prager's logic: Trump hasn't killed anyone, so if you believe he is a Nazi, you must believe the Nazis didn't kill Jews.  My head was spinning by the psuedo-intellectualism on full display again.
• The Mavs drafted Luka Doncic. I'm a big fan. 
  
• And I had no idea, based upon the players suits, that I'll need to get new ones which are skin tight and which expose my sockless ankles.
  
• By all accounts, this happened yesterday in the Collin County Courthouse parking lot. 
  
• A former Baylor student was acquitted Wednesday of sexual assault of a coed. I thought the defense had a pretty good case when the prosecutor told the jury that alleged victim didn't remember anything that happened that night because she was too drunk. 
• Watch Channel 8's sport coverage of 18 year old David Clyde pitching debut in 1973. It's about the pre-game sales with footage of people coming up to the box office. (You have to see the buyers as well as how the tickets are sold -- "You take a personal check?") It also shows how the tracking of tickets sold and their locations was done by hand in a log book.
• Chico ISD's school board voted to allow "certain" employees to carry guns on campus. Look out!
• A guy has been arrested in the murder of a woman found in a high tone area of Fort Worth. An ex-boyfriend is the accused. They seem like an unlikely couple.  (She was allegedly in involved in "bringing" In And Out Burgers to Texas. Fox News reported a while back that even the manager of one of those restaurants makes $160k.)
• The NSA has quietly moved all of its data (and that's a ton of data created by the surveillance of your phone calls, emails and texts) to a "secret" cloud based storage. What could possible go wrong? 
• A Wise County case involving a life sentence was affirmed yesterday by the Fort Worth Court of Appeals. (The text of the opinion had not been released as I write this although it should have been.)

That's A Heck Of A 180!

From the Washington Post.

Correction: U.S. Border Patrol will stop referring migrant parents who cross border with children for prosecution, official says https://t.co/pkW0CkWCoO

We've deleted an earlier tweet stating the Trump administration was suspending prosecutions for parents of migrant children. pic.twitter.com/wonj50xVvy

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 21, 2018

Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• ABC had a graphics screw-up. (But Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager who is sitting in jail, would probably take those charges.) 
  
• I missed my Tech over Arkansas upset prediction although Tech did make a run at them in the end. 7-4. (That one day rain delay complicated my hundreds of pages of research I used to make my initial prediction.) 
• TxDOT has put up signs that read: "“AWWWW SNAP YOUR SEAT BELT”.  I saw one and it gave me Slumped Shoulders. 
• As we move towards Idiocracy, expect to see more and more graphics like this. And have you noticed that some stations, instead of using the "Heat Index" temperature, have gone to using the "Feels Like" temperature. 
  
• Trump seemed to like being part of The Swamp in Minnesota last night: 
  
• Trump is a walking cluster but there has been no bigger cluster than this "Family Separation" cluster. From the White House saying (1) It's the law -- It's not. (2) Only Congress can fix it -- Not true. (3) It was not White House policy -- It was, and (4)  It can't be fixed by Executive Order -- It was. 
• And when the White House web site officially released the text of the ambiguous executive order they had to take it down. Why? They misspelled "separation".
  
• The dumbest DA in the State, Abel "Let's Indict Every Twin Peaks Biker" Reyna, went off the rails again this week when he fired one of his prosecutors for providing information to the FBI about alleged corruption in his office. Dear McLennan County: I'd have my lawyers start researching Whistleblower law. 
  
• My interest in the NBA Draft on a scale of 1 to 10: 1. My interest in the NHL Draft: -1.
• I finally was forced to start using Windows 10. Who designed that thing? Even finding the "restart" button or the "control panel" button is a battle.
• The modern day Klan of White Nationalists continue to come out into the light with tentative approval to hold a rally across from the White House. #BloodAndSoil #Trump:FinePeopleOnBothSides
  
• Dirk turned 40 this week, and someone dug up this. (Sefko now works for the Dallas Morning News.) 
  
• Welcome to the longest day of the year.
• The head of Intel resigned this morning after revealing he had a consensual relationship with an employee. He had a salary of $6.5 million a year. Don't feel bad for him. In 2017, he sold some of his Intel stock for $24 million, and he still holds 250,000 shares. 

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts

• Trump will have a MAGA rally today in Minnesota. He does this whenever he feels he needs to feel loved. And he definitely is not feeling loved these days. 
• Wanna see a brawl of of white, redneck, and overweight parents at a Tennessee girls' softball game? Here ya go:
  
• DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who lied through her teeth about the "Separation of Families" at a White House briefing, decided it would be a good idea to eat at an upscale Mexican restaurant last night. Hecklers caused her to leave. "Shame!"
• My Sports Expert Prediction is halfway home. Yesterday at predicted UT would be eliminated at the College World Series. It happened. I also predicted Tech would upset Arkansas. We have to wait on that one because the game was postponed until today. 
• General Electric was booted off the DOW yesterday. It had been listed since 1896 making it the longest resident on the DOW until Tuesday.  It will be replaced by Walgreens. 
• Want to be disgusted by Fox News again? Let's look at their political analyst and former Trump campaign manager's comments from last night.
  
• After a Senate vote yesterday in Canada, recreational marijuana possession across that nation will become legal. 
• With the child immigration crisis at fever pitch (we've now created "tender age shelters" for babies and toddlers), the U.S. announced yesterday that we would withdraw from the Human Rights Council at the U.N.  And it was on Juneteenth. Our timing is impeccable. 
• Second year OU coach, Lincoln Riley, received a new contract yesterday which will pay him $4.8 million a year through 2023.  He is 34.
• These guys on the clock? Fort Worth taxpayer dollars being used on bits? 
  
• Let's check in on the pulse of West Texas:
  
• Wise County Messenger: Above the Fold