Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• Yesterday a Wise County jury found a guy not guilty after an assault trial. You could see that verdict coming from a mile away. 
  
• There was a crash in Dallas last night. This Ferrari was driven by boxer Errol Spence Jr. who was not wearing a seatbelt. He's in ICU.
  
  
  
  
• Trump, you've got a problem. A new Fox News poll shows that the majority of Americans want you impeached and removed. And the rapid increase in those numbers is stunning. This is a big deal. 
  
• He just saw the poll! And he responds like a petulant child who is mad at his daddy. 
  
• These are predicted lows for Saturday. Caveat: These are Delkus predictions so they are likely wrong by a few degrees or more. 
  
• Liberally Lean Super Team Weather Center Guaranteed Forecast -- I've been studying the maps for a couple of hours:  The wind will turn and come out of the north at 8:00 p.m. tonight and wind speeds will peak at 1:30 a.m. Friday morning. But before the wind turns, we'll see storms. They'll move in around 4:30 p.m. this afternoon and taper off after midnight. We might hit 60 degrees on Friday. Plan accordingly. Set your clocks. 
• If you like politics, you've got to see this ad of a candidate for sheriff in South Carolina. He wants to confess some mistakes to get out in front of a story. Some of those things aren't like the others. 
  
• If you want, you can vote on a constitutional amendment in Texas preventing a personal income tax. But it's all for show. The Texas constitution already has a provision that prevents the legislature from imposing the tax without voter approval. Yet the true Texas Swamp takes offense when you point that out.
  
• Other Texas politics news: The morally challenged Michael Quinn Sullivan of PAC Empower Texans says he will release his secretly recorded conversation with house speaker Dennis Bonnen next week since he's received the "green light from [his] legal team." 
• I'm issuing a permanent traffic alert for Tin Top Highway and its cousin Lipan Drive in Granbury. I saw the blurb below on Sunday evening and thought it was weird. One of those crashes involved a fatality. Then I learned there was another head-on crash on Tin Top on Monday which also involved a fatality. 
  
  
• While Trump was doing his normal tweet storm yesterday morning, his Fox News buddies and even lapdog politicians were crucifying him about the Turks moving in to slaughter the Kurds:
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• Let's check in on what great humanitarian project the First Lady is working on.
  
  
  
  
• Wise County Jail population this morning: 170.

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts

• Well, the Trump administration has officially told Congress they won't cooperate at all with the Impeachment Inquiry. It's Game On. (I don't know who the president's lawyer is firing off this defiant shot, but I'm guessing he puts "Esquire" behind his name based upon his ridiculous signature.)
  
• The murder of the witness in the Amber Guyger has been solved with the ol' "drug deal gone bad" narrative. Observations: (1) When the first guy you arrest is a gunshot victim, his self-defense claim might work better than Guyger's defense, and (2) who in the world travels from another state to Dallas to buy weed?
  
  
• Goodbye, Allsups. They are all being sold to Yesway.  (What's a Yesway?)
  
• Layoffs in Bridgeport: "Other Stevens Tanker facilities closing in towns across Texas included Asherton (6 employees), Bridgeport (16 employees), Bryan (24 employees), Cresson (40 employees), Dilley (10 employees) Pleasanton (44 employees) and Waelder (8 employees)."
• A national writer (whose true crime stories often show up in Texas Monthly) questions the reliability of the confession of the United States' most prolific serial murderer (allegedly). 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I've failed to mention the goofy judge who sentenced a man to 10 days in jail and then a year of probation for oversleeping and missing his first day of jury duty (and then completely rescinding the sentence once public outrage caused him to then, and only then, realize how moronic that was). He was called out in The Hill in an article which pointed out that one our country's criminal justice problems is that many, many judges are former career prosecutors. And I love the title. We might as well face it . . . 
  
  
  
  
• On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether the Constitution requires individual states to have unanimous verdicts in criminal cases. At one point, they went down and interesting road: If you are a criminal defendant and forced to choose, would you rather be tried by a jury of six where the verdict must be unanimous, or a jury of 12 that requires at least 10 to agree to convict? I don't think that's an easy decision. 
• And in a bizarre moment in the Supreme Court yesterday, the character of "Pat" from Saturday Night Live came up during arguments in the gay discrimination case with Justice Alito saying he wasn't familiar with that reference. 
  
• I successfully replaced two of these in my Dell laptop, and I now feel qualified to perform brain surgery. (It took a while to get up to speed because I kept running into new precision tools I had to buy. I'm guessing most guys don't have, say, a T8 Torx screwdriver laying around.)
  
• Last year an assistant district attorney left our local DA's office to try her hand at high-tone civil law. That didn't last long as she's now the assistant felony chief of the "Special Victims Unit" at the Tarrant County DA's office. 
• The GOP lead Senate Intelligence Committee finally said yesterday what we all know: The Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election to help Trump get elected. 
  
  
• Flashback to Trump at Helsinki: "President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be." He'll be the last man on earth to believe it.
  
• For you Baker Mayfield haters who saw Nick Bosa mock Mayfield's "planting of the flag" on Monday Night Football, take a look at this quick loading split screen video of the two events. 
  
• There are new allegations against Matt Lauer being revealed in Ronan Farrow's new book. (The Today Show addressed it this morning.) His abrupt overnight firing from that morning show is still a very bizarre event in American pop culture. 
  
• This was Monday. A long time ago, perhaps three years ago, a blatant lie like this would destroy a presidency. Now you don't even hear about it because it is so common. (Side note: He lies all the time, but he'll actually signal he's lying whenever he uses "sir" in a story.)
  
• High school volleyball seems to have really upped its game over the last few years. And it might be the most entertaining high school sport of all. 
• The attack of the Kurds has officially started. Just now.
  
• Messenger: Above the Fold

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts

• Most people laughed at him for the "in my great and unmatched wisdom" part. I'm disturbed by the "I will destroy" part. His belief that he has some kind of autocratic power and doesn't think twice before he says it.
  
• Man, Trump took it from all sides because of his abandonment of the Kurds yesterday.  He'll probably just change his mind (it happens all the time), but even if he doesn't, we are at the point now where the military will simply refuse to obey him. 
• I'll be. They did transfer her. (Don't read anything into the "projected release date".)
  
   
• Big case(s) being argued at the Supreme Court today. Simplified, does the federal law which prevents someone from being fired because of their sex also prevent someone from being fired for being gay? More specifically, that federal law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, makes it unlawful for an employer “to discriminate against any individual … because of such individual’s … sex.” So this is a case of statutory interpretation -- what does the statute mean?  At its core, one side says, "Hey, firing a gay person has nothing to do with firing someone because of their 'sex'. So long as gay men and gay women are fired equally for being gay, they aren't being fired due to their sex at all."  Counterpoint: "If you fire someone for being gay, aren't you by definition considering their sex in the decision?"  
  
• Lots of questions about this one. 
  
• Wise County's Texas Ranger was featured on 60 Minutes. All this press he is getting is based upon his interrogation techniques. Several years back I was appointed to a juvenile who he wanted to talk to for the sole purpose of building a murder case against an adult. After talking to the Ranger and having him give me his word (which was completely legally unenforceable but was practically more binding than any contract), I let him talk to him. And I got to watch the two hour interview. As expected, everything worked out, and I learned a lot.
  
• This is a screenshot of a bulletpoint from May. Yesterday the grand jury (with the urging of the DA) declined to indict her. How do I know the DA urged the grand jury to no-bill her? The case is a misdemeanor. Misdemeanors don't have to go through a grand jury before being filed in court. The DA is using the grand jury for political cover. 
  
• Say what? Out of Burnet, Texas? 
  
• This probably won't interest many of you, but here's a map of Wise County schools in 1930. Look at all them. I'm guessing most of them were nothing other than one building structures that had grades 1 through 12.  You can see photos of many of them at the great site of wiscountytexas.info. For example, here is a page for Grubb Hill (which was between Bridgeport and Paradise.) 
  
• Impeachment news this morning. Trump and the State Department are telling Gordon Sondland not to meet with Congress today for a deposition in the Impeachment Inquiry. Sondland's attorney says he has no choice but to comply with The Party's command. Who is Sondland? He's the guy who, in a text exchange about the Ukraine shakedown, acted like Lance in Pulp Fiction as he urgently said, "Crank call! Crank call!" to Vincent Vega. Trump is telling a favorable witness not to appear? Something's up. And this is about to get ramped up. 
  
• That pilot on this front page below sure has a lot of Sully-like self-promotion . . . .   

Random Monday Morning Thoughts

• Ellen and George W. at the Cowboy game caused a tad bit of confusion. And why did they cut out Portia de Rossi (in the yellow).
  
• And I'm not sure I knew Rupert Murdoch was married to Jerry Hall. (Notable on this weekend of the Joker's debut: She played the love interest of Jack Nicholson's Joker character in the the 1989 Batman film.)
  
• I don't know what to make of a witness in the Amber Guyger trial being murdered this weekend. But, despite multiple conspiracy theories, he was far from a "key" witness. (We were talking about him last week in the courthouse but not because of his testimony. Unlike witnesses like a 911 dispatcher who came all dolled up for the cameras, that guy wore a Dragonball Z t-shirt.)
  
• Yes, I'm being nit-picky, but someone needs to tell Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins that the county has no jurisdiction in the investigation of crimes within the city of Dallas.  Nor does he speak for the "City of Dallas." 
  
• WBAP reported on Saturday morning that Amber Guyger had been moved to Huntsville. I find that hard to believe. Even a routine post-trial motion hearing will require her presence in the Dallas courtroom so it would be surprising to see her shipped by now. 
• Trump announced late last night that the U.S. is pulling out of northern Syria. Fox and Friends Brian Kilmeade ranted this morning that Trump is holding the Kurds out for slaughter by the Turks as they will now move into that area. Kilmeade is 100% right. 
  
• Holy crap. Trump's lapdog just weighed in and he's not pleased either: 
  
  
• Flashback: 
  
• This legal proceedings behind this case are a little hard to follow (it deals with waiver in habeas proceedings) but the dissent in the case last week was beyond harsh as it criticized two prosecutors and decided to put their bar card numbers in footnotes. 
  
• Talk about an easy job. 
  
  
  
• Remember how I've told you how part of this charlatan's bit is to pretend to know secrets like a sorcerer? He's still at it. 
  
• It's the first Monday in October the Supreme Court's term officially begins. On Friday, they decided to hear an abortion case out of Louisiana.  The law is identical to that in a Texas case that the court struck down three years ago. 
• Trump got mad at a fellow Republican over the weekend. (Someone needs to tell him that Senators can't be impeached.) 
  
• In a weird moment in the heartland, the University of Kansas opened its basketball season with "midnight madness" on Friday night with Snoop Dogg and stripper poles. (Video.)
  
• Ran across a reference to the first lawyer ever in Wise County as I was skimming the 1907 book, Pioneer History in Wise County. This was about as much as I could find on him: 
• I didn't know about "the new policy went into effect last month, and requires DPS troopers to have a waist circumference of 40 inches for men, and 35 inches for women." The troopers aren't pleased.
  
• Troy Aikman always looks hungover on the Fox broadcasts. 
• Messenger: Above the Fold