Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• Wise County active cases: 30. Right after the outbreak occurred in the spring, we quickly hit a death toll of five people. That number hasn't changed in months. Anyone believe that?
• Texas: New cases are down, but we did set a new record high in deaths yesterday. It's so high that even I think there's something wonky with the number reporting. But a handful of other states had new death records as well yesterday.  
  
• I keep talking about how he speaks in code. It's not even code any longer. Good lord. I'll say it again: Is he trying to lose?
  
• My timeline just got flooded minutes ago with this economic news. We knew it was coming, and now we finally see it. 
  
• More breaking: Oh, my! Moments after the economic news came out, Trump tweeted this! Are there Vegas odds on whether the U.S. military will have to physically remove him from the White House in January of next year? 
  
• "Democracy Dies In Darkness" is not an exclusive method of demise. Trump just tried to kill it in broad daylight. At the very least, he has now become a clear and present danger to its continued existence. 
• The the Mayor of Simpleton, Louie Gohmert, got the COVID, and he thinks it's because he's been forced to wear a mask. "I can’t help but wonder if by keeping a mask on and keeping it in place, if I might have put some… of the virus on the mask and breathed it in.”
  
• Gohmert's district should have been mentioned as support of my belief that  East Texas is part of the South. 
  
  
  
• The Mavericks are in the news again. Compare and contrast what I wrote two weeks ago. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Three past presidents will attend the funeral of Rep. John Lewis today. One is missing because of health issues. One is missing because he doesn't care. 
  
• They've spent $1.2 million on that system in the last year. They also can afford gun boats on the Rio Grande. But heaven forbid you have to go down to the DPS office and talk to a human being.
  
• When you see a random real estate story from New York and immediately want to know the back story. 
  
• It's 2020 when you can glance up at the TV and even this doesn't cause you to blink an eye. 
  
• The ACC announced yesterday that it thinks they can pull off an 11 game schedule by making it conference only + 1. It's not exactly a bubble they'll be playing in. I just happen to have a map, such as: 
  
• I just mentioned yesterday that the University of Texas was planning on 50% capacity this fall, but  by the time I hit the publish button the Evil Empire threw me a curve ball: 
  
  
• I've got it on pretty good authority that because of a policy of the Wise County Jail during the pandemic -- a policy regarding who they will and will not accept -- that there are hundreds of Class A and Class B misdemeanor warrants that are being held by various Wise County towns which remain voluntarily unexecuted. The thinking is: Why arrest someone if there is no place to put them?

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts

• Wise County: 30 active cases
• Texas: Clearly headed downward (as is most of the nation.) Prediction: This downward trend will continue throughout August. Unknown: (1) How the opening of school and colleges in September will impact it. (2) Will there be a "second wave" which was already predicted.
  
• Anyone else curious why Trump is obsessed with hydroxychloroquine? It's flat out weird.
  
• Junior was the subject of discipline yesterday for the first time in his life. (I absolutely triple despise him.)
  
• Didn't expect "demon sperm" to be on my bingo card yesterday.
• So local school boards trump county officials in deciding if and when schools will open? AG Ken Paxton is a nutcase, but he's also a political genius.  Rumors are that he has his eyes on the governorship and, if true, what better plan that to issue a legal opinion that will get every single Texan to say his name yesterday.  No one will care about the fine print that the opinion, like all of his opinions, are not binding. 
  
• Senior-in-the-House to me last night: "Who is this Ken Paxton guy and what is the Tea Party?" Oh, my. Pull up a chair, darlin'. 
• I'll say it again, watch the documentary 13th and you'll know this is just a political code:
  
  
  
  
• I've never even been remotely tempted to open up a suspicious email link but, I've got to admit, I'd sit there and stare at these Chinese seeds a long time as I contemplated secretly planting them. 
  
• I'm very interested in how college football will handle their season. There was a pretty wild update yesterday: Ohio State will limit seating to 20% with no tailgating. (UT has announced it will be 50%.)
• Watch Luka almost get the business end of an automated moving camera.
  
• I read (the very short) story which was more than Fox 4's social media headline writer did.
  
  
• That was a wild video showing New York police abducting a person off a bicycle and throwing them in an unmarked car. Police actions look a lot different when they are stripped of their badges and uniforms. And all this was for damaging property? (And the cops weren't "assaulted with rocks and bottles.")
  
  
  
  
• The "Umbrella Man" who incited violence in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd  was a white supremacist. 
  
• In a new interview, Trump says he hasn't confronted Putin about Russia paying bounties to the Taliban in exchange for the lives of U.S. soldiers despite having eight recent conversations with him. But he lets us know he's got it all figured out. 
  
• Where is Jerry Jones? 
• Messenger: Above the Fold 

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts

• Wise County active cases: 39 (-1 from Thursday).
• Texas: All we got yesterday were the lower weekend numbers, but the death numbers really plummeted even factoring that in. 
  
• This is consistent with the TEA guidelines issued in the first week of July, and all schools will require it. 
  
• But, man, the bigger news is that Decatur voted last night in a 4-3 vote to prohibit those kids who opt for virtual learning to participate in extracurricular activities. 
• Since the UIL has given all 4A schools and below the OK to play football beginning at the end of August, do they have to wear masks since they have to do so in the classroom? Anyone else see a little bit of a problem here? 
• None of the restrictions in Texas issued on July 2nd apply to counties with less than 20 active cases. Right now, there are 53 counties on the list (which includes bordering Jack and Montague counties.)
• After the PAC 10 and Big 10 rocked college football by announcing conference only football schedules, the Big 12, SEC, and ACC are still planning on playing full football schedules. Opening games are set for 30 days from now. Man, that's bold.
• Me to Mrs. LL this weekend: "This planet has too much gravity. It could be reduced by 50% and we'd be just fine and life would be more pleasant."  Think about it. 
• Trump quick hits:
• Is he trying to lose? 
  
• How many times do people in the West Wing look at each every day and utter the question, "He just said what?"
  
• No, in the America you want it to be illegal to say negative things about you. 
  
• There was a widely circulated false video claiming a cure for the coronavirus. It was so bad that even Facebook had to ban it. Then, last night, Trump found it and retweeted it on Twitter.  Twitter had to delete it from Trump's feed.   
  
• Look what I got in the mail! And please note the word "executive." (And that's some credit card quality plastic they used.)
  
  
• It's not for everyone, but CNN is doing a four part series on this last term at the Supreme Court with insider information. We are hearing stuff we normally don't. Remember we oddly just learned of Justice Roberts fall that put him in the hospital in June when it wasn't publicly released? Someone's talking.  Part 1. Part 2. 
• I finally watched the first Coen brothers film, Blood Simple, over the weekend. It's good stuff. It stars the very young Frances McDormand (the female cop from Fargo), Dan Hedaya (Mr. Butabi from A Night at the Roxbury ), and the great M. Emmet Walsh (who I will always remember from Raising Arizona with the line "No, not that mother-scratcher! Bill Parker!")
  
• I'm now into Season 3 of The Leftovers, and I'm waiting for the end before a give a smokin' hot TV opinion about it. But in the first episode of the season, it opened with an extended mysterious scene accompanied with the background song of I Wished We'd All Been Ready.  I was giddy. I was able to mouth every single word of one of the darkest, fear-jolting Christian songs I ever learned as a kid. 
• Below: Not surprisingly for that guy, but the Denton County Sheriff may not know how to run a jail. (Side note: Have we not had one reported case of the coronavirus at the Wise County Jail? If no one has asked, I'm asking.)

Random Monday Morning Thoughts

• Wise County: Who knows. It was 30 active cases the last time we got any numbers.
• Texas: 
• I'm pretty sure we've peaked with new cases this time around, but deaths are still at a new high. (Deaths always trail new cases so we should see those go down over the next two weeks at well.) 
• This decline all corresponds with the mask mandate on July 2nd: Wear a mask and close things like bars, and then the cases go down.  
• Even if we see a steady decrease in all of the charts over the next four weeks, every daily number dwarfs what was happening in April and May.
• If schools reopen, we'll find out pretty quickly if that was a good idea or not. 

• 

  Deaths

  
  

  

  Hospitalizations (probably 15% under-reported due to the new rules.)

  
  

  

  New cases.

• Breaking minutes ago: MLB's season is in big trouble after one week.  We've got a cancellation. (Maybe I was too optimistic.)  Uh, Canada, knew better after all. 
  
• It finally dawned on me what a bind parents are in if they have elementary school children if schools don't open up this Fall.  
• Financial: Let's face it, schools serve as daycare for elementary school kids. Two-earner families make up almost all of America. Those families with elementary age children get by with no school in the summer by forking over dollars they don't have for daycare and then relying upon camps and extended family for the other weeks. Then when school comes, they can get their feet back underneath them. That is, unless there is no in-person school.
• Practical: It's one thing to plop a high schooler in front of a computer to do their thing for online learning, but if you've seen the new expectations on elementary school kids for virtual learning, it's a whole different ballgame. At least one of the parents is going to have to go to computer school with them everyday.  This isn't the same virtual learning "program" that we had in the Spring when schools were caught off guard and just winged it for a couple of months. This will be a regimented schedule. So if the already financially strapped parent thought they had a work around by working from home, that idea just got harpooned. 
• I don't know if in-person school is a good health decision or not. I'm just saying we've got a ton of Americans who are going to be in dire straights if we don't go back, and we might have a ton of deaths if we do. We might want to cut those in responsible for having to make these decisions a bit of break. 
• A judge on the Dallas Court of Appeals was killed in a wrong way driver on I-30 east of Dallas. A car in front of him had a dashcam rolling. If you haven't seen it, it is chilling. 
  
  
• I've always thought the "open carry" guy with the itchy trigger finger is likely to kill someone one of these days, but I've never really thought about how that guy was putting his own life in danger, too. If he were to make an aggressive move towards someone, even if the gun remains at his side, and ends up dead,  the shooter is always going to have a pretty good "I felt my life was threatened" defense.
• That happened this week in Austin when a car first moved aggressively into a BLM protest and one of the marchers ended up dead as he quickly approached the vehicle while holding what he had called an "AK-47."  Video. (Everyone is analyzing it like the Zapruder film because you hear five shots, then a pause, then three shots.)
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of Zapruder films, a Weatherford "good old boy" slugged a BLM protester (video) in the streets near the courthouse but, as can be expected, it turned into a cesspool of "they started it!" online. Here another angle of it which, regardless of what happened before, sure looks like the implementation of the  ol' sucker-punch-and-run technique. The "counter-protesters" (I've never understood what they are counter-protesting) weren't exactly welcoming of people different than them. 

  

  The guy in yellow shirt is the center of controversy.

  
  

  

  Lots of Confederate flags showed up.

  
  

  

  We're all doomed.

• Seems like a good time to mention that the worst painter in the world released a new one last week. 
  
• Speaking of the Open Carry craze, take a look at it when a bunch of black guys figured out it was perfectly legal in Kentucky. It shouldn't make you feel one bit of difference if you're part of the Come and Take It crowd. 
  
• The Supreme Court on Friday, in a 5-4 vote, refused to strike down a Nevada coronavirus order  that was more restrictive of churches than casinos. I'm with the conservatives on this one. I've always thought, without any case to really back me up, that the the Free Exercise Clause was as about as close to an absolute right as anything we have. (That's my Libertarian streak coming out in me - "shall make no law respecting" seems pretty absolute to me.) Gorsuch, who I like, wrote his own dissent, but I thought he got a little petty. 
  
• Mike Huckabee wrote that Chief John Roberts should "repent" for being in the majority in that case.
• He's too busy.
  
• A crazy picture from the weekend. 
  
• The Messenger's  history columnist, Joy Burgess-Carrico,  focused last weekend on the Klan's activity in the 1920s in Wise County. Man, they were big players. She teased that her next column will concern Klan activity in the 1990s.  I can remember a Klan rally in Bridgeport around 1995, and then there was the Klan connection to bizarre bombing plot around the same time. Texas Monthly had a story about the the latter. 

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

Hold my beer while I do a flip.
(🎥 via @Dumbsheat ) pic.twitter.com/4SdqckwAfr

— Hold My Beer (@holdmyale) July 17, 2020

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Moment sunbathing mum narrowly escapes being crushed as tree collapses on her lounger pic.twitter.com/Fc1FmTC7gx

— The Sun (@TheSun) July 17, 2020

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Hold my beer while I ride this bike.
(🎥 via @HockeyCrazed11) pic.twitter.com/5xD131kdrf

— Hold My Beer (@holdmyale) July 17, 2020

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Because you want to see a dog eating a burrito on his human’s lap, who is also eating a burrito. pic.twitter.com/h6UCBMT5Bb

— Danny Deraney (@DannyDeraney) July 19, 2020

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Hold my beer while I show the kids this magic trick. 😂 pic.twitter.com/IDfjRzYBqA

— Hold My Beer (@holdmyale) July 21, 2020

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