- Wise County active cases: 24 (+7. Wacky.)
- Texas hospitalizations: -59.
- Apparently, some students really do need to get back in school. (It's like Hoover visiting a Hooverville and blaming Roosevelt.)
- The Don't-Mix-Sports-And-Politics crowd had a really tough day yesterday.
- America 2020: She'll be on Dancing With The Stars.
- I did not know this. Side note: I've never seen Citizen Kane.
- At some point, instead of Zoom conferences, we'll use virtual reality headsets where we are all represented in 3D images in the same fake room, right? And that can't be that far away. Heck, we could easily do what was in the old movie Disclosure right now. But I'm talking about something which would feel mind-bendingly real.
- Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago we had back-to-back stories of cars driving into back yard swimming pools in Arlington?
- Conservative Drudge remains ruthless.
- If you've regurgitated a particular "6%" figure in the last week, you probably struggled in Health class in high school.
- Fun little high school football fact:
- I couldn't help but look up Cotton Center High School which turned out to be a six-man football school in West Texas. The most amazing thing about it is the satellite view around it. Here (that's just the Google map view which lets you zoom in and out, but it's even wilder than the screenshot.)
- Shout out to the Wise County Auditor. I made an Open Records request, something I never do, and she responded to me within hours upon receiving it with the requested records.
- Messenger: Above the Fold
- Wise County active: 17 (the number has been cut in half since Thursday due to some type of Christmas miracle in August.)
- Texas hospitalizations: +31 (a rare stop of the downward decline)
- Remember the Baby Fern Theford case, one involving leaving a baby in a car, out of Collin County from two years ago? And remember how I constantly rant that no one in the criminal justice system understands the legal term "criminal negligence" and how people are prosecuted routinely prosecuted for tragic accidents? Well, the Dallas Court of Appeals reversed this conviction and entered and acquittal on Friday on basically that theory.
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2018
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From court opinion
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- Not only am I The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, but I'm pretty sure I'm the first Respected Media Outlet to report on this new development in the Thedford case. Look for it to be in the metroplex news today since I've given everyone the head's up. And Texas Monthly will be coming with an update shortly since they had a story on the case by the great Skip Hollandsworth shortly after the conviction.
- Funny line about the Trump Boat Parades: "You have to question their judgment because, after all, they are boat owners." (As a former boat owner, I can say that. And attest to its accuracy.)
- We've got two crazy Trump claims/statements from last night's interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham.
- First he compares cops shooting a black man in the back seven times to just making a mistake or "choking" in golf. Ingraham tries to save him by saying, "You're not comparing this to golf because that's what the media will say." Yes, the media will say it because he compared it to golf! Watch.
- And who knows what the heck he is talking about here. She asked him where this happened, and he said, "I'll tell you sometime." Watch.
- And Trump goes to Kenosha today after, as predicted, failing to condemn violence of all types yesterday and coming to the defense of Kyle Rittenhouse. No 17 year old needs to arm himself with an AR-15 and cross state lines to go looking for conflict. Be calm, people. Everyone be calm. Trump has the chance to say something absolutely bonkers while in the now-peaceful city today.
- I said from the beginning that Rittenhouse might have a legal self-defense claim for his second round of shooting. But legally defensible does not always equate to morally justified. And often it doesn't.
- The NBA announced that several arenas will be turned into massive voting centers this November. I may have missed it, but is this just going to magically happen somehow? I mean, the AAC is in predominately Democratic Dallas County and has mass transit to get thousands in an out of there. The Republicans at the state level are just going to sit back and allow that? Is this exclusively a county decision? (I should know this but I don't.)
- We are going to see a lot of this.
- Official Liberally Lean Triple Confirmed Forewarn Weather Forecast: The heavy rain will hit Decatur at 11:40 a.m. Edit: I obviously meant to say 10:15 a.m. Just a typo.
- "Confessing sins" is an odd headline, but those are her words from a Facebook post. She apparently committed suicide after posting about her five year relationship she entered into as a high school student with her band director.
- Here's a quick loading video of two women fighting on a skybridge at La Guardia in New York. Good morning.
- Students on the third and forth floors of a Baylor dorm are confined to their rooms right now (Saturday through Wednesday) after COVID cases spiked. Food is delivered to the rooms from the cafeteria although some kids are ordering delivery from outside restaurants and rigging up a system to get it through windows.
- Wise County active cases: 34 (but no update since last Thursday).
- Texas hospitalizations: -317 since Friday.
- There was a Trump Boat Parade at Lake Bridgeport on Saturday which started over by the old dam and then moved to the bridge over highway 380. It's hard to do it justice with photos, but I personally counted 297 boats, and I'm sure I missed a bunch.
- Wannabe State Senators showed up at the lake including hair-cutter and court order defier Shelly Luther.
- In other boating news:
- Elsewhere in Weatherford on Saturday, a Black Lives Matter rally wasn't going to happen without resistance and love of the Confederacy. Good thread with pics and photos here.
- High school football fired up on Friday. Not sure about the social distancing thing, and masks seemed to be non-existent. Here's a scene from Bridgeport. (Side note: It's really cool to be able to finally watch a UIL game on youtube. But trying to keep up with no announcers and no graphics is a bit of a challenge.)
- In Argyle, the Eagles faced off against Decatur Eagles with a very loosely enforced 50% capacity rule. The game started with a simple, yet clever, sign by the Argyle squad.
- Trump is headed to Kenosha on Tuesday. The odds of him somehow praising Kyle Rittenhouse while never mentioning Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times are quite high.
- A guy is dead in Portland after earlier in the evening MAGA groups entering the city clashed with Antifa groups. Extremists on both sides are going to keep dying unless someone (cough, cough) steps up to try and calm everyone down. The conservative Wall Street Journal said today that “Mr. Trump would help Portland and his own political cause more if he called for calm on all sides."
- A wrong way driver on loop 820 at around the 377 exit in Haltom City hit a BMW and killed three yesterday evening at around 8:30 p.m.
- I have no idea who Brook and Bailey are other than they are "influencers" who are going to Baylor. But they've made news because they've contracted COVID. I then I stumbled on this article about the oddity of Baylor actually paying the girls for social media posts (when paying athletes in college is 100% forbidden.) Kind of weird.
- It's probably a bad sign when the Desoto ISD school board has to have an emergency meeting on Sunday to accept the resignation of its superintendent right after the school year started.
- Random history: A Texas county collecting a poll tax as late as 1965. (If you say to yourself, "It's only $1.50 -- Who couldn't afford $1.50?" you are on the verge of figuring it all out.)
- How did we not know that Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman had been battling cancer for four years? When people close to you respect you, they keep your secrets.
- I just noticed that Boyd PD arrested at least two females out of Irving on prostitution charges in late July. That's weird. I'll find out what's going on.
- Wise County active: 34 (+3)
- Texas Hospitalizations: (-317)
- Here's a great collection of all the videos (quick loading) of the shootings by 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha. I could watch these things all day trying to break down what happened. So much happened in the street (after the first shooting a short distance away), and it all happened in the blink of an eye.
- Just look at this photo taken from across the street about two seconds later. The guy with the handgun in the above photo now has his hands up. About a second later he'll almost get his arm blown off (graphic video) as he makes a movement forward. The guy grimacing in the foreground with the skateboard will die from that wound. Such chaos.
- A guy who lives near Decatur has announced he is running for the open State Senate seat. His first tweet was to support carrying a handgun without a license. (h/t Bud Kennedy.) I saw on his website that he graduated from North Texas in 2000, but that "he skipped the graduation since Hillary Clinton was the key-note speaker." Did Hillary speak at the UNT graduation ceremony in 2000?
- The National Hurricane Center predicted where Laura would make landfall within 0.6 miles and the exact time it would hit and did so 87 hours in advance of it making landfall.
- That rain Wise County got briefly yesterday afternoon was from the outer ring of the fading hurricane. Decatur is the blue dot:
- A Wise County murder conviction was affirmed late yesterday by the Fort Worth court of appeals. The 87 page opinion is pretty boring although it names lots of people in the Sheriff's Office. And it did give us this excerpt from closing arguments which was the subject of a Point of Error. I think the defense lawyer in the Flintstones was actually Perry Masonry. Oh, and shout out to Fort Worth lawyer Christy Jack:
- Oh, that opinion does show an appellate court will bend over backwards to affirm criminal convictions. The court had to search the Internet so it could take "judicial notice" of what the cops were required to put in a search warrant affidavit, but didn't, in order to make it comply with the law. Shout out to Judge Cude, however.
- This Confederate monument in Lake Charles, which city leaders voted not to remove 10-5, was taken out instead by Hurricane Laura.
- That was one green dress last night. It also served as a "green screen" for Internet manipulation. You can search on your own -- it's overwhelming.
- "Good to see you, Ivanka." Funny.
- There was just a brief shot of Barron as he stood up when Mike Pence was introduced. Man, that kid is tall. I'm guessing 6'4" and I might be undershooting it.
- Messenger: Above the Fold
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