- Wise County active cases: 26 (+2)
- Texas hospitalizations: +5. It's way too early to tell, but that hard decline might possibly be ending. We've had two positive numbers in three days and that hadn't happened in weeks. Just a hunch.
- In case you missed it, Trump actually told voters in North Carolina to vote twice yesterday - once by mail and once in person. He wasn't kidding. Hours later, his lap dog AG told Wolf Blitzer he couldn't say that voting twice is illegal because it was somehow a very complicated legal question: "I don't know what the law in the particular state says." Good lord.
- The Rock and his entire family got the COVID. The only thing I think about when I hear his name is to remember that he actually played for the Miami Hurricanes. He was almost set to start his sophomore year until Warren Sapp came in.
- Didn't expect to see this in my news feed today.
- Nate Silver is a number crunching genius. And this is scary. We don't live in republic if the majority never seems to get to elect those to represent them at the highest levels.
- But speaking of the Electoral College, here's Fox and Friends this morning:
- The Ticket had the organist for the Texas Rangers on the radio a few weeks back and he's, uh, a little different. I noticed via his Twitter feed that he was in Arlington the other day (he lives in West Texas and provides his musical bits via recordings) and was looking for strangers to go to lunch with him. He even pointed out what location restaurant he had made it to. There is no way I'm having lunch with a stranger and no way I'm putting out an open invitation over the Internet.
- This won't interest anyone but me and a couple of people who will now have to scramble to fix it, but I noticed this plea bargain and sentence yesterday in a low level Wise County drug case. Two years is the maximum sentence for that offense. (Cause no. CR-22511). Edit: A faithful reader from the courthouse called and said the offense was actually enhanced because of the defendant's criminal history to make it a third degree felony. (That would make the sentence a legal one since if falls within the 2 to 10 year range.) For some reason the the official county database does not reflect the enhancement.
- I see that Nancy Pelosi is catching heat for getting an unauthorized haircut in a salon that wasn't supposed to be open.
- Total population of the Wise County Jail this morning: 209. If it has been higher than that over the last two years, I don't remember it. During the initial COVID lockdown in the spring, the number would average around 135.
- This is the front page of the city where we have another black man killed at the hands of police. They sure do love their front page ads in Rochester, NY:
- 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.
 |
2018
|
 |
From court opinion
|
- 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.
.jpg)
