Update: The punitive damage award was reduced to only $16 million (with an "m") by by the trial court, and then a court of appeals ordered a complete retrial. Upon that retrial in 2019, "a Florida state court jury needed less than two hours to reject the claim that nicotine addiction caused Michael Johnson’s lung cancer death." She ended up with nothing.
- The replacement of Kamala Harris of President Biden on the ticket has moved about as quickly and smoothly as anyone could have imagined.
- I'm not sure we've ever seen one candidate once donate to the other.
- She had a better weekend than Twisters.
- J.D. Vance has stepped in it.
- This quote from two years ago has been pulled out. Video.
- Also qualifying.
- Dateline Illinois. That wasn't necessary. Video.
- I don't understand Jerry not dropping the counter-suit against the lady. Side note: I guess the sub-headline is grammatically correct, but it sure can be read in a different way than intended.
- At least we now have this detail: "He is suing for $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees he spent defending himself against Alexandra Davis’ lawsuits."
- It sure did start out weird: "Cynthia Davis stepped down from the witness stand and embraced Jones in a hug. She then appeared to call Alexandra Davis over, but the younger Davis refused." Here's mom and daughter entering the courthouse:
- The hearing involving Kimberly Cheatle, the head of the Secret Service, went about as badly for her as anticipated, but I didn't expect Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas to pull out proof that he could have made the head shots. “I recreated the shot with an AR-15 with a 94% success rate — it’s a miracle Trump is still alive.” That's quite the bizarre brag. And he even brought out the used targets as proof.
- That should say "trial court system" because all thirty-six courthouses in Los Angeles county were shut down yesterday because of ransomware. They'll reopen today but the computer system is still down -- and probably will be until they pay up.
- Fox 4 changes. The very early 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. newscast will change with one of its two anchors being replaced with Paige Ellenberger (in pink). Current co-host Hanna Battah (in yellow) will move out (and up) as she is "helping launch a new 4 p.m. newscast alongside of Heather Hays."
- Ruidoso, NM, which suffered from two massive fires last month, is now being subjected to flooding.
.png)
- Even when the drum beats told you this was going to happen, it was shocking when it happened.
- I don't think we realize what we've seen in the last month: A debate which will be revisited for ages, an assassination attempt, and the first president to not seek re-election since 1968. Before that, throw in Trump's criminal convictions, Supreme Court immunity ruling, and the Florida district judge dismissing the federal documents case, and it's all off the charts.
- At 11:47 CST yesterday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer was enjoying his weekend.
- Later that afternoon after the Biden news broke:
- Everything has changed. But I'm not real sure how much. I don't think anyone was particularly fired up about Biden even in 2020, but they did show up in droves to vote against Trump. That will happen again, but with even greater numbers regardless of who the Democrat nominee is. But the far, far right will get a boost because, just like they turned out to vote against Hillary, they will come out of the woodwork to vote against a woman, especially a black one.
- Harris will be a million times more effective on messaging on abortion and insurrection than Biden was. Both are big issues.
- Hey, let's go full throttle and select George Clooney as her VP. He's actually on the betting odds chart but way, way down there:
- Trump is already waffling on debating Harris. He is also still crazy.
- Flashback from Trump's biggest competitor during the primaries:
- Ear Update. I'm now completely skeptical of the extent of Trump's ear injury. He showed up at a rally on Saturday with a smaller bandage:
- And the only medical report we have gotten on Trump came from crazy Ronny Jackson on Saturday who is no longer a doctor and basically admitted to practicing medicine without a license.
- But there was definitive proof that Jackson was involved in the treatment as the bandage gave way on Saturday:
- The big news today was going to be, before the Biden announcement derailed it, that the head of the Secret Service is going to get beaten up in front a Congressional Committee because of the Trump assassination attempt.
- And we got news on Saturday that the gunman had used a drone to survey the landscape before the rally.
- On Friday evening, the old sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Dallas was gutted in a dramatic fire in downtown Dallas.
- The devil started the fire?
- Four Dallas firefighters were hurt yesterday morning when their firetruck went off an overpass and onto a DART track.
- Legal nerdy stuff: Most lawyers don't even know how to create a PDF and now they have to learn how to bookmark them.
- The SEC preseason poll came out with Texas ranked much higher than OU. But look who Oklahoma plays (left) versus who Texas plays (right).
- My head is still spinning . . .
- Online chaos earlier this morning as the world suffered a tech outage. It's not a cyber-attack but instead a screwup of a security update for a legitimate firm called Crowdstrike which apparently has crippled Windows machines that use it. Our online world, which we now all depend on for the tiniest of things, seems like a ticking timebomb.
 |
| Excerpt from the story: |
- DPS driver's license offices just shut down for the day because of it. Of course.
- Crowdstrike's CEO even had to go on The Today Show this morning to do damage control:
- To add to the issue, there is/was another problem, perhaps related, with Microsoft's OneDrive which went down late yesterday. Editor's note: I store everything in OneDrive which is basically a remote hard drive that Windows rolled out a few years ago.
- Trump's Speech:
- He went full Elvis.
- In light of the assassination attempt, he had the opportunity for a fantastic introduction. Instead, they wheeled out the same old tired Lee Greenwood to whip us with "God Bless The USA." For a born showman, Trump desperately needs new material.
- Before that, we had full Idiocracy. This makes my head hurt.
- Trump started out OK by talking about the assassination attempt. But, to the surprise of no one, he said he was saved because "I had God on my side."
- There, of course, was a man who died at the rally -- apparently God wasn't on his side -- and Trump had his firefighter's uniform on stage. Oddly, the man's name was misspelled on the back of it, but this doesn't appear to be a Trump campaign mistake.
- The shooting is slowly morphing into a "shot to the head."
- But after talking about his near death experience, he resorted back to his normal rambling campaign speech of election denialism and demonizing illegal immigrants. Regarding the latter, he promised a "mass deportation" because they are "killing hundreds of thousands of people a year." That's a flat out lie. But I guess that lie is just a prelude for a justification for the upcoming concentration camps.
- And he used to say that just "some" of those crossing the border were "bad people." Now they all are and worse. And speaking of insane, we had this weird moment:
- He seemed very beaten down last night.
- The New York Times not only doesn't agree but also has apparently jumped the shark:
- I'm beginning to waffle on my believe that President Biden will not drop out of the race. If it weren't for the Trump's RNC speech last night, it would be the lead story.
- D Magazine lost a writer I really liked. "Zac Crain was 50 years old when he died Tuesday night. He’d had some kind of illness that kept him away from work, holed up at home, trying to ride it out. Coworkers had taken him food. He said Tuesday morning that he was feeling better. His ex-wife, Nikki, was the one who called police Wednesday for the welfare check. That an ex-wife would be so worried about him says something about the kind of man Zac became. "
- Lou Dobbs, who was fired from Fox as part of the Dominion $787 million fiasco, has died. He lost his ever-loving mind in his later years on the air.
- The Business Second™. "Plans call for roughly 6,000 single-family homes at the development’s completion. [It] will also hold more than 5 million square feet of commercial, mixed-use space and roughly 3,000 multifamily units fronting more than five miles near I-35W."
- 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: 5 years and 14 days.
.png)
.jpg)
.png)
.jpg)
.png)
.png)