Random 4th of July Thoughts

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• Tonight marks the four year anniversary of Lauren's Whitener's death at her Lake Bridgeport home.  It didn't seem right to wait to acknowledge it until the normal Friday sign-off. 
  
  
  
• From the Wise County Messenger's two year anniversary story written by Brian Knox and published in July of 2021. 
  
  
  

Random Monday Morning Thoughts

The fast moving "Yarnell Hill Fire" that trapped and killed 19 specialized firefighters.

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• Israel bombed the West Bank overnight. Eight dead. The song remains the same. 
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
• Oh, man. Story published this morning. There's a nine second video in the story link that shows the crack expanding once the coaster goes by. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Quick hits on the You-Don't-Have-To-Design-A-Wedding-Website-For-Gay-People Supreme Court case.
• My legal analysis on the 6-3 decision:
  
• The issue of "standing" is a strange one. This might be the first time I've seen where someone was allowed to sue the state because they were "worried" about the state taking action against them if they went into business and if, once they did, someone would ask them to do something they found offensive. The majority just glosses over it:
  
• This case is sneaky weird. The would-be website designer said she would sell her skills, in a general sense, to same-sex couples, and the state mysteriously stipulated that fact to be true. So the issue was limited to whether the "compelled design" of same-sex wedding website, which she said she had religious objections to, violated her Free Speech rights. The dissent smoked that out with dripping sarcasm:
  
• In other Supreme Court news, they agreed on Friday to hear a Fifth Circuit case that struck down a Texas law that disarms people who have been subjected to a domestic violence protective order. Who knows what they'll do.  
  
• On the campaign trail: 
• Watching Sen. Lindsey getting booed in his home state at a Trump rally on Saturday was something. And entertaining. 
  
  
  
• This video is one of the strangest DeSantis ads you'll ever see as he tries to paint Trump as gay-friendly. It was released over the weekend. 
  
  
  
• What a train wreck: "SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter owner Elon Musk has limited the number of tweets that users can view each day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the social media platform." (However, some think it's because he refused to pay a third party hosting bill to Amazon web services.)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• And this comes on the heels of announcing you can no longer look at Twitter unless you have an account. 
  
  
  
• Fox4Terry was on the job this weekend. "A North Dallas crash leaves a family badly shaken & 2 men seriously injured. This when the [man's] Viper crashed into the family's Camaro." Check out the license plate. 
  
  
  
• The City of Southlake must have piles of cash laying around. 
  
  
  
• Last week I mentioned the story about Brookshire's expanding into DFW and how great their store was in Bridgeport. Well, my bad. I learned there are actually two Brookshire chains and the one in Bridgeport is not the chain that was part of the Dallas Morning News story. 
  
  
  
• I was tipped off once I looked the map accompanying the story which showed no store in Decatur.
  
  
  
• This photo of the quarterbacks on the roster for the Longhorns was floating around this weekend. The guy on the left, Maalik Murphy, makes the others looks like kids. And he actually played better than Ewers or Manning in the spring game. 
  
  
  
• As expected, Decatur's Bryce Elder was named to the All-Star game.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I fully support replacing fireworks shows with drone shows . . . 

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

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pic.twitter.com/mKLDIMmU6k

— No Context Chaos (@nocontextchaos_) June 9, 2023

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Dude hit everything imaginable but still held on for the catch pic.twitter.com/evIvei1azU

— Baseball Quotes (@BaseballQuotes1) June 29, 2023

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Outstanding. pic.twitter.com/0sBG802brF

— jamie (@gnuman1979) June 28, 2023

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Random Friday Morning Thoughts

Even shootouts at Texas courthouse squares get lost in time. 

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• You don't see this every day: Shaquille O'Neill showed up in Paradise, Texas.
  
  
  
• Affirmative Action was killed at the Supreme Court yesterday. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the decision, it is now clear that "constitutional law" is not law at all. It's politics and ideology.  
  
  
  
• The newspaper of record isn't wrong: 
  
  
  
• Justice Thomas, who is one strange guy, wrote a long concurrence.  But in trying to sound lofty, this a weird thing to say. Barriers don't matter? At all? 
  
  
  
• Thomas can't like there now being a black woman on the court to counter him. She wrote:  
  
  
  
• The satirical right wing site, the Babylon Bee, handled the decision with all the dignity you would expect. (Side note: The person retweeting it, Konni Burton, is a former elected -- and defeated -- Republican state senator from north Texas.)
  
  
  
• Very legal nerdy stuff: The case was based on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause which certainly applies against the defendant University of North Carolina which is a public school. But how can the 14th Amendment apply against private defendant Harvard? We all know, for example, that First Amendment's free speech clause applies against the government and not private persons so why does the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause apply against Harvard here? The answer was buried in footnote 2.
• The deputy who failed to act in the Parkland mass shooting was acquitted yesterday afternoon. I don't know what I think about this. 
  
  
  
• I basically suffer vicarious trauma and anxiety whenever I watch any verdict being read, and the one in this case was really hard to take.  Video. But I really felt it for his lawyer. After the not guilty verdict on the first count, the defendant clearly thought he was going to also acquitted on all of the other counts. And he was right. But you can tell his lawyer knew that was not necessarily so, and he's riding that thing out with white knuckles as the other verdicts are read.
  
  
  
• Good. Let's see it all.  
  
  
  
• Sue the guy all you want, but this isn't a criminal matter. That being said, if you watch the documentary of his rise to fame, which was shot before the Astroworld concert, he certainly had been put on notice that his crowds tend to "surge forward" causing a dangerous situation. 
  
  
  
  
• Tiffany's in Manhattan caught on fire yesterday.
  
   
  
  
  
• I don't recall this happening as such a big level or at such speed: Overstock.com bought the name of Bed, Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million after the retailer went into bankruptcy, and now will simply change its own name.
  
  
  
• Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office, despite having a full male DNA profile, has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 3 years, 361 days.

Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

Ten years ago this week, the Obergefell same sex marriage decision was handed down by the Supreme Court. That was one of the last times we had the "running of the interns" -- the event where they had to physically rush the newly released printed opinion to their respect networks.  The court would shortly modernize its practice by releasing PDFs instantaneously. 

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• You probably seen it, but the Allen PD finally released the bodycam video of the (still unnamed) police officer who stopped the shooter in the outlaw mall mass shooting last May. It's really incredible. You need to watch the whole thing to feel it.  And, man, will you will feel it. 
  
  
  
• This is my own poor map of what I believe to be the officer's path of travel on foot in the heart of the video. He runs past the mass of dead bodies (in the area of the red circle) while pursuing the shooter. He turns the corner and finally gets a shot at the gunmen who is now way down in the area of the green circle. That's a heck of a kill shot.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• After watching the video, did anyone else think about the response in Uvalde?
• An emailer pointed out to me that in a recent Rhome City Council meeting the mayor wholeheartedly declined to join in a council/police officer group photo in celebration of a promotion of one of the Rhome officers to the position at sergeant. The moment is around the 26:00 minute mark, and I've got it cued up here. That's a bit odd.
  
  
  
• I've mentioned before that the Bruen gun rights case from last of year will eventually invalidate all sorts of current laws making gun possession illegal. Late yesterday we had a Mississippi federal district court use it to strike down a big one: The federal Felon in Possession law. Ruling. It will now go to the Trump constructed Fifth Circuit whose rulings bind Texas. 
  
  
  
• Legal nerdy stuff. This judge was appointed by President Obama and is not conservative. The opinion is really pretty fun. It basically says Bruen threw out all past jurisprudence, created an unworkable mess, and this is a consequence of that mess. 
• Most Texas prisons don't have air-conditioning. We are barbarians.
  
  
  
  
• Don't do that.
   
  
  
  
• We learned yesterday that Madonna was found unresponsive on Saturday. Her new world tour has been put on hold.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Madonna's camp's statement:
  
  
  
• The Dallas Morning News has a story today on how Brookshire's is positioning itself to be the new HEB. That one in Bridgeport, which recently went through a renovation to keep everything fresh looking, is a pretty, pretty good little store.
  

  

  That's the CEO of Brookshire's if you 
  ever wondered what he looked like.

  
  
  
  
• Legal nerdy in the weeds stuff: A while back I posted a lower court appellate opinion on a bail bond forfeiture case involving an archaic requirement of the bailiff, after a defendant has failed to show up for court, having to call out loud the defendant's name at the "courthouse door." In a Wichita Falls case, the name was called at the courtroom door instead of the courthouse door. The lower court said that wasn't sufficient.  Well, we have an update. The highest criminal court in the state got involved yesterday and said that what he bailiff did was good enough. (Side note: They normally rule that anything the prosecution or trial court's do is "good enough.")
• Messenger: Above the Fold