Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• Like it or not, a U.S. president has been impeached for only the third time in history. 
  
• The Impeachment of Trump has a weird twist to it when compared to Clinton. With Clinton, the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. Although the Senate didn't have enough votes to convict, the Republicans controlled the "hand off" of the Articles of Impeachment  from the House to the Senate.  That's not happening here. The House gave notice last night that they won't present the Articles to the Senate until there is some indication as to how the trial will be handled.  This is exactly like a DA getting an indictment from the grand jury but not "presenting" it to the District Clerk. Until he does, the indictment doesn't have a cause number and the court doesn't have jurisdiction. It doesn't happen very often, but it can happen. 
  
• Nancy Pelosi, quickly admonishing the few Democrats who cheered at the announcement of the vote on Trump's impeachment, reminded us all what if felt like to be a child:
  
• Trump blew off steam in Michigan last night. 
  
  
  
• Oh, I should have known. The government is not tracking your vehicle to bust you for having weed legally purchased in Colorado in your car -- it's all instead for the greater good. 
  
• Very random tangent:
• I mentioned Kidd Kraddick just the other day (after for some reason thinking about "Butterfly Kisses")  and now the headline below is on the home page of the Dallas Morning News.  This is happening more and more to me -- the random and obscure reference which then pops into my life in some way in the next few days. Seriously, after I wrote the Kraddick bullet point, even I thought it was extremely weird. And now the name is relevant.  (But I think this phenomenon has a name.)
  
• Speaking of that phenomenon to the extreme: I had a very weird experience earlier this year when I was cleaning out my office and made the decision to throw away an old 2014 issue of Texas Monthly. I had saved it because it had the story of former Montague County DA Tim Cole's reflections about the prosecution of the killers of an Oklahoma cheerleader.  I walked to the office kitchen and put the magazine in the trash. Less than fifteen minutes later, I met with a DWI client who, out of nowhere, brought up how he grew up "in that area where the Oklahoma cheerleader's body was found" and asked, "You ever hear about that?"   I went and dug the magazine out of the trash to show it to him in order to prove I was just thinking about a murder from 1996.
  
• The other weird experience this year was when an investigator up at the courthouse just casually asked me if I had ever heard of a "Ladybird Deed." (Nope. Never. I'm a criminal guy. Not a real estate guy.) The next morning, out of nowhere, my one and only assistant came in and asked me to look at a deed for a friend because of one particular paragraph. "I know you don't do this stuff, but could you look?"  She had never asked me to look at a deed before. I read it, Googled the deed provision's terms, and "Ladybird deed" popped up.  The two (the investigator's question and my assistant's question) were 100% unrelated.
• And if you want to see Mrs. LL go all slump shouldered on me, just watch me ask her, "Do you think it's possible we are all living in a computer simulation and there's now a glitch in my system?" You know, things I "think" affecting my "reality." 
• But it kind of freaked her out last September when I had a bullet point that I "had no idea who Hammurabi was" (I had read it in the book Texas) and then, two days later, she was watching Better Call Saul on Netflix. As she watched Season 1, Episode 2, she witnessed Saul defuse a situation by asking a potential killer if he was familiar with the "Code of Hammurabi."
  
• Unrelated, but I should have watched the Six Man football game I referenced yesterday. Sounds exciting. 
  
• This has not aged well.
  
• A Bowie City Councilman and the Mayor got all hot and bothered at each other in the office, and it's on tape with a grainy murky video.   It's about as entertaining as you would expect. (We even got the ol'  that's-not-a-threat-that's-promise thrown in.)