3.04.2025

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts



It really was the Church of Bits for a streak back then.

  • This is a little abbreviated today due to the wind storm causing a power outage, and then locking myself out of my office while collecting trash bins off the courthouse square. 
  • Trump has shockingly stopped all aid to Ukraine. Now we know why the staged blow-up happened in the Oval Office on Friday -- it was a pretext to do this all along. 

    • And "quick end to the war" means a Ukraine surrender.  
    • So what's it going to take to get Trump and Zelensky back together again? Trump says that he needs Zelensky to apologize.  Sheesh. For what? And why does Trump sound like an ex-high school girlfriend?

  • A 25% tariff went into effect at midnight on Canada and Mexico as well as an extra 20% tariff on China. Why? Who knows. If you complained about the price of groceries before, get ready.  


    • The Wall Street Journal's reaction:

  • New this morning.  This is pure fascism. And "illegal" is doing a lot of work in his post below. It will mean whatever Trump and MAGA doesn't like - First Amendment be damned. It's over. 

    • And something very similar is already starting locally involving Wise County's state representative:. Texas government is coming after if you dare say that genocide has been committed in Gaza (even if 50,000 are dead.) 

  • Elon Musk called social security a "Ponzi scheme."

    • And his DOGE cuts via chainsaw may very well cause the current social security system to stop functioning even if nothing is cut.

  • I meant to post these headlines about Gaza yesterday -- an area and subject which is being buried in all the other news.  Maybe starving the people to death will facilitate Trump Tower Gaza construction:

  • What in the world is up with Forest Hill?
    • This happened yesterday morning in broad daylight:

    • This from late February:

    • And this was the next day: 

  • Do not forget that school vouchers have yet to be voted on in the House. Tell Wise County Rep. Andy Hopper that as a rural representative, he should not gut our hometown schools. Email him online or call (512) 463-0582  or find him on Twitter @RepHopper. And you might want to ask him to have a townhall and face the fire like one of his compadres did of Friday. 

at 8:30 AM

3.03.2025

Random Monday Morning Thoughts




And look at that date.

  • Friday's spectacle in the Oval Office was an historic, shameful, and sad day for the United States.  It's over.  We are now officially aligned with Russia and not Europe. It's was already bad enough beforehand when Trump called Zelensky a dictator, or when he said that Ukraine started the war, or (especially) when the U.S. voted with Russia at the U.N. earlier in the week, but now we have embarrassed an ally for all the world to see. An event which be remembered for decades and more.



    • Yesterday, Russia officially (and correctly) acknowledged the U.S. has changed sides.  I cannot believe what I'm seeing. 

    • By the way, this "deal" Trump is proposing for Ukraine is no deal at all. It's just a cease fire where, at the very least, Russia concedes nothing and keeps the land they've already taken. And with no promise from us for future defense, Ukraine would become a sitting duck for later Russian advances. And Trump wants $500 billion in minerals for being a real estate broker.

    • Vance's interruption in the Oval Office, which started it all with a demand that Zelensky grovel, was a preplanned setup.  From there, on cue, we saw two people bully and berate an ally who is fighting for his life and the very existence of his country. It was staged theater. 
    • The conservative Wall Street Journal's editorial board: 

    • And we had this very weird rant from Trump at the end of the Oval Office confrontation -- he managed to horseshoe in Hunter Biden's laptop.


    • Of course. You don't spy on your friend.  
    • And there it was late Saturday night. It's a Russian dream.

    • He might as well do this before we switch to Russian. 

  • The country's whole problem is that the public is so gullible that it can't discern what is true.  No one seems to have an internal radar that says, "Man, that sounds sketchy" whenever some "news" comes across their timeline.  Case in point, after the Oval Office blow-up, a lie from some spare person who admits to just "speculating" made it's way all the way to a U.S. Attorney who treated it as if it were true.


  • Barely noticed was another Five Questions email was sent out on Friday with an instruction to repeat the task every week. 


  • After the catastrophe in the Oval Office, Trump went to Florida to golf and then joined Musk at Mar-a-Lago. They returned together to the White House last night as Musk was seen exiting Marine One.  J.D. Vance, meanwhile, went skiing where he was met with hundreds of protestors. 


  • I can't think of a worse place to have a panic break out than where thousands of hyped up cheerleaders and their parents are gathered.  Here's a pretty good overhead video of people running away outside as the crowd feared that gunshots had been heard. It was actually just a fight between parents. Video.
  • "Farmers Branch PD confirmed that a man attending the NTR volleyball tournament, which was held at the RYSE Energy StarCenter Multisport gym, accidentally discharged a gun that was in his back pocket and shot himself on Saturday."

  • An engine on a FedEx plane got fire on Saturday causing it to return to Newark, NJ. Video.

  • Anti-vax update.

  • Local sports: The Decatur Lady Eagles won the state championship in basketball, but I also noticed these bizarrely low scores by the Bridgeport golf team. 

  • Europe embraces Ukraine . . . .
at 8:30 AM

2.28.2025

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

at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts





They still had that thing a couple of years ago, but it may be gone. 

  • Gene Hackman update: . It looks like his wife was found lying on the bathroom floor, and he was found in what appeared to be a mud room near the kitchen. But police don't seem to think the deaths were do to a carbon monoxide leak. Rank Speculation: She had a fatal medical issue, and the 92 year old Hackman fell after finding her? 


  • After dramatically promising the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files on Fox News on Wednesday night, AG Pam Bondi released 200 pages of redacted information yesterday. .And, since everything is a show, she first released the pages in a binder to 15 right wing "influencers" at the White House.  The problem is that those documents had already been on the Internet for years. After extreme blowback from the base and conspiracy theorists everywhere, she blamed the FBI for not giving her everything, and wrote a sternly worded letter to FBI Director Kash Patel. It's a clown show.


    • Compare and contrast:
      Page from yesterday's release by Bondi.

      Same page that has been on the Internet for years

  • Here's the story on these guys for those unfamiliar. I'm confused as to how those two meatheads became famous in the first place.   


  • Now Elon's in charge of hiring? 

  • When you've lost the Barstool Sports guy . . . 

  • One dead. Two arrested. All 15 years old.

  • Update on the Southlake Town Square cartel hit that occurred in 2013.


  • Dateline Cleveland. All 15 students got out safely of this bus on fire in a residential neighborhood. (The video is even wilder.) 

  • Your lawmakers hard at work.

     

  • These two posts came across my Twitter feed yesterday from the official account of the Texas District and County Attorney's Association. They might want to clarify that the guy in the photo is neither a drug user or child abuse defendant. He's the Collin County sheriff.


  • Extremely nerdy legal stuff: Yesterday the Fort Worth Court of Appeals reversed a criminal conviction -- a rarity these days -- and felt so bad about it that they basically apologized to the prosecutor and the judge (who were, in fact, the cause of the error). See footnote 55 on the last page.
  • Lauren Whitener Clock: 5 years and 240 days. 



at 8:30 AM
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