1.29.2020

Random Wednesday Morning Thought



  • Someone ask me what I thought about Bridgeport ISD's proposed $90 million bond election and my response was, "With schools building $60 million stadiums, I don't even know what's reasonable anymore."  But then I see that the Messenger is reporting that Northwest ISD is going to try and pass one that is almost one billion dollars.  I remember when the entire school was out on the prairie along Highway 114.
  • That's a little chilling. 
  • I know Trump won't be convicted in the Senate so the only possible interesting moment could be this: If three Republican senators defect and vote for hearing witnesses (Romney and Collins are leaning that way but don't hold your breath), then it appears Chief Justice John Roberts would have to break the tie. That would be delicious. 
    "Who? Me?" 
  • Trump has John Bolton, one of his "best people", in his cross-hairs this morning. Someone want to explain "World War Six" to me? World Wars III, IV and V sure would have been quick and non-destructive. 
  • I know nothing about this case, but it had to be a wild ride this week in Tarrant County. A guy charged with a first degree felony decided to represent himself, is appointed stand-by counsel (just to get help if he asked for it), and then negotiated himself a six year plea bargain. (For an entertaining memo I found where a bunch of Texas lawyers candidly chimed in on the experience of being stand-by counsel, see this.)
  • Coronavirus death count as of this morning: 132. The number of people who died in the U.S. by accidents in 2017: 169,936. By the flu/pneumonia: 55,672. By suicide: 47,173.  It's much ado about nothing. The only people who are panicking are those who are paid to panic. 
  • In related news: The Dallas homicide rate for 2020 reached 16 last night. 
  • Shoot your best shot. Story.
  • Very random person for Super Bowl week: Tommy Brooker. The Kansas Chiefs, for three seasons, played as the Dallas Texans. Their last game for Dallas was the AFL Championship game which went to double overtime and was won on a field goal by Mr. Brooker. Here's the post game pic. He died last September. 
  • Former Dallas Stars Eddie Belfour is in the news for being arrested for public intoxication. There's a lot of recalling when he was arrested in Dallas twenty years ago for the same thing and tried to bribe the officer for "$1 billion dollars." If I remember correctly, he actually started with a reasonable amount so he actually taught us how make a bribe while creating an "I was just kidding" defense at the same time in the event the officer happens to take offense. It would go something like this: "I'll give you $100 to let me go? No? How about $500 cash? No? Make it a $1,000. No? Really? $50,000? $100,000? How about a billion?!" And since your being arrested for being intoxicated anyway, it'll probably work.
  • Name a time your heart was broken when you didn't have any expectations. 
  • Legal stuff: In the world's worst magazine, the Texas Bar Journal, I just saw an article that began with this: "Can authorities compel a suspect to surrender the password to a protected device?" Three thoughts: (1) To my surprise, I learned something because I had never heard of the "foregone conclusion" exception to the Fifth Amendment before. But that simply reinforced my belief that appellate courts simply make stuff up, labeling them "exceptions", to help the State. (2) Let's get practical: How exactly is the government going to "compel" someone to give up their password? I guess you could threaten them with jail for contempt of a court order, but what if they are already in jail because they couldn't make bond?  (3) The article had to struggle to find any cases to even discuss the issue and had to resort to a Florida state court case and a Massachusetts state court case to fill out one single page in the magazine. One quick Google search revealed an uncited Pennsylvania Supreme Court case from November of last year which, in a 4-3 vote, discussed the issue extensively (and it even had an amicus brief which was available online.) The Bar Journal is the worst.
  • I tried to watch The Irishman and, while it was fun to see all those stars, it had the same feel and pace of every other mobster movie. I've never been a fan of the genre. I feel like I'm in the minority. 
  • I saw that BagOfNothing has "Kobe fatigue." I promise you I have a family member who said, "I think we're going to get tired of this." And that was said at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday.
  • Messenger: Above the Fold.


at 8:31 AM

1.28.2020

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts



  • The fog lasted a long time yesterday and heard some horror stories. One of them concerned the I-35 tollway near Basswood. And I heard 114 into the metroplex was a white knuckle ride.
  • Here's my expert driving tip: Your automatic headlights very likely don't come on in foggy conditions during the day.  (Actually, Mrs. LL told me that, but I told her I'd steal it.)
  • How right wing darling John Bolton has suddenly become Enemy #1 of State TV is something to behold.
  • Shout out to the boys at Karl Klement's Body Shop. It's always weird to walk into a room of strangers and hear, "Don't put me on that Liberally Lean!" (Seriously, the process of getting an estimate from them was about as smooth as can possibly be imagined.)
  • Hey, do you teachers feel pretty good about those who are running your retirement plan? The Austin American Statesman uncovered that the administrators of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas have leased three floors of a new Austin high rise called Indeed Tower at a cost of at least $326,000 a month.
  • Two a week.
  • I've mentioned before that a Decatur law firm won a $98 million dollar verdict several months back in a Dallas banking/lending case, and it is on appeal. Today, January 28, 2020, oral arguments will be held in the case before the Dallas Court of Appeals.  I don't want to pick on anyone, but just glancing at the documents recently filed in the appeal, I think I see an error from one of the parties.
  • Ken Starr made his presentation against impeachment yesterday while somehow forgotting he was Ken Starr.  And how did he think this was a good look? I actually had that same overcoat in 1989. When I entered a room once at the law firm I was with, one of the firm's partners actually pulled me aside and said, "Lose the coat." I never wore it again. And I've never forgotten the moment.
  • Uh, oh. Trump got mad at CNN's Don Lemon last night once he found out Lemon got tickled by a guest saying that "Donald Trump couldn't find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter 'U' and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it." 
  • I was watching MSNBC moments after the Kobe Bryant news broke. I heard what she is talking about, and it certainly caused me to have a "Whoa!" moment. (Video.) I feel sorry for her for getting tongue-tied, but I'm not sure it was "Nakers" that she said. 
  • An ironic malpractice tip this morning.
  • There's a lot of talk about the utility of the iPad on it's 10 year anniversary. I'm a huge, huge fan. And a few months back I broke down and bought and Apple Pencil. I may never use a legal pad again. 
  • Craig Miller on The Ticket had a segment about Jim Lehrer's quote below. He, like most folks it seems, interprets it to mean "A reporter should never publish information unless he also sites the person from whom he obtained it." I don't think that's what Lehrer meant at all. Confidential sources are a critical aspect of journalism. "Anonymous" means "of unknown name or origin." So isn't he admonishing the reporter about using information from an unknown person to that reporter instead of using information whose source is an unknown person to the reader? (A quick search didn't give me an answer.) And, as support of my position, isn't admonishing about using a "blind quote" mean using a quote that the reporter himself doesn't even know the source of?
  • I think Decatur has an inordinate amount of hotels (many built during the natural gas boom.) And although I'm not sure how all of them are going, the parking lot of the Marriott based hotel out by the Decatur Convention Center is always packed. 

at 8:33 AM

1.27.2020

Random Monday Morning Thoughts


  • Here's what Kobe Bryant's helicopter looked like. 
  • ABC News' reporter Matt Gutman rocked everyone when the news first broke of the helicopter crash with this statement on the air:  “The fact that four of his children are believed to be on that helicopter with him, all daughters, one of them a newborn . . . . " Obviously, that turned out not to be correct. ABC News put Gutman back on the air for the evening news and made him say the following. Heck, they even made him post the video of the retraction of Twitter. That boy might get fired. 
  • Maybe I'm an NBA idiot, but doesn't winning the spare Slam Dunk Contest seem extremely out of place on this list? 
  • Wichita Falls sure is producing a lot of criminal justice news these days. And not in a good way. 
  • That was some serious fog this morning. That's Reunion Tower.

  • The Bridgeport Index will cease publication this week. The penultimate column of the editor on Thurday said he didn't have any "venom" for the local retailers because you could count the number of them in Bridgeport and Chico on two hands.  I'm not sure what he was getting at.
  • Parts of John Bolton's new book have leaked and it should come as no surprise, as seen and heard from a guy in the room, Trump specifically withheld Ukraine funds until Ukraine announced a Biden investigation.  That's John Bolton saying this.  Of course, Trump's reaction was predictable:
  • How his supporters just let him get away with lie after lie will always be a mystery to me. He's at it again this morning.
Trump this morning vs. the news from last October.

  • Speaking of. 

  • Mark my word, give it two weeks and you won't hear anything more about the coronavirus.
  • Whey was there a guy in skeleton makeup just casually sitting in the audience at the Grammy's last night?
  • This was a pretty wild video that hit the Internet over the weekend. Your taxpayer funded White House religious consultant has thrown some hot sermons out there in the past.
  • Pretty cool: The first game for both schools this fall is Southlake vs. Westlake. Son vs. Father. At Jerry World. 
  • Remember that plant explosion in Houston on Friday morning? Look what happened by that afternoon. Too many lawyers?
at 8:31 AM

1.24.2020

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







at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts



  • Another morning. Another Houston plant explosion. Here's a ring doorbell cam catching it happening. Here's the first pic at dawn:
  • He's all about ratings. You just know that in the back of his head he is thinking, "I don't care what anyone says, I outta go down Pennsylvania Avenue and defend myself in person! That would being in the eyeballs!" And, boy, would it. 
  • Here's a hot opinion: All the panic over the coronavirus is completely overblown. It causes flu-like symptoms but is only a fraction as deadly.  The death toll in China is at 26 for the coronavirus this morning . The last year of data collected by the CDC puts the death toll in the U.S. from the flu at 61,000.
  • Wait, there's more: Of "cases who died" (their words) from coronavirus, "many had significant underlying conditions" according to the World Health Organization's Emergency Committee two days ago.  Yes, there are "cases" of people who died from coronvirus without the underlying condition, but even the common flu killed a healthy 34 year old in Dallas a coupleof days ago.
  • Look out! There's an invasion of Dirty Libs occurring right before our eyes!
  • (I'm a little late on this but . . . . ) After that massive construction project on I-35/287 in North Fort Worth, I think they seriously screwed it up.  In all the myriad of lanes, the non-toll I-35 southbound briefly goes to only two lanes at Western Center creating a massive bottleneck. Live Google traffic provides the proof you need:
    Captured at 8:21 a.m. this morning.
    Here's where the cluster begins. 
  • I can't remember the last time I heard someone say they bought something off eBay. 
  • Someone needs to do a story of all the side businesses Jerry Jones has. They are many, they are big, and they are frequent:
    Last summer

    Last Fall

    Yesterday
  • On some "nostalgia TV" station last night, I stumbled across the Dick Cavett Show where he was interviewing the odd pair of Ann Margaret and Joe Namath. My curiosity piqued when they started talking about a new movie they were starring in together so I had to look it up: A 1970 film called C.C. and Company -- a movie which ended up bombing and being universally panned.  Cavett must have seen it coming. He brought the director up on stage and played a long clip from the film. Afterwards, Cavett asked, "That's the movie? [ Awkward pause.] You guys have a lot riding on this?"    And, as I went down the rabbit hole about the movie, I found this from the review of Gene Siskel: "Ann-Margret has a brief nude scene in which she proves that in addition to having a foul mouth she is fat." Good lord. 
  • The Alvord man accused of stabbing his ex-girlfriend to death in Denton County was indicted yesterday.  Side note: That's a heck of a neck tattoo for a 21 year old. And, maybe I'm wrong, I've never associated Alvord with tattoos. 
  • Speaking of I-35, I haven't been through Waco in a while. This looks like a nightmare . . . 


at 8:33 AM
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