Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• I would like to withdraw my prediction that Michael Bloomberg would make a surge for the Democratic nomination. Elizabeth Warren murdered him last night. 
  
• New prediction: Now watch Trump start the attacks on Warren this week and start throwing veiled support at Bernie or Pete. He wants no part of Warren on a debate stage. 
• Today Roger Stone will be sentenced -- and possibly pardoned -- all in the same morning.
  
• Side note about the location of Stone's sentencing: I walked right past that federal courthouse in December and didn't really realize it. It's right there between the Capitol and the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue. I remember looking at the statue in front of it, though. I've talked to one Wise County attorney who has actually been in one of the courtrooms. "They take themselves very seriously in there," he told me. 
  
• Legal nerd stuff I thought about while in D.C.: Who prosecutes things like DWI and shoplifting? D.C. isn't a state with counties, so is every little crime a federal crime? The U.S. Attorney can't be in charge of those minor prosecutions, right? The answer turned out to be pretty interesting and kind of wild. 
• I saw this photo of LBJ yesterday leaning in towards Kennedy while at the breakfast in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963.  I'm not sure I'd seen it before. Compare it to the photo of him leaning into Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas (which I have framed in my office.) 
  
  
  
  
• As expected, Brandon McCall was convicted of capital murder in Collin County yesterday. Is it politically incorrect to admit that I wonder if he was normal based upon the same of his skull? 
  
• The NFL Player's Union and owners are about to reach a new deal on their collective bargaining contract. The weakest union in America is about to become weaker. And as soon as it is signed, the owners will turn around and put the screws to the networks for new TV deals which are already earning them $5 billion a year. 
• I previously offered a shout out to the boys at Karl Klement's body shop, but I failed to mention a very sweet lady at the counter. She pointed that out to me yesterday as she told me she had also been reading Liberally Lean for years. I apologize. For both. (Although she did laugh a little too hard when I said, "Oh, I write it all in good fun. That's until, as my mom used to say, 'Someone's gonna whip you one of these days, boy'.") 
• Other than gas isn't that cheap anywhere, property taxes are killings me, straw decisions aren't a big player in my life, I don't want to carry a 45, Whataburger is owned by a Chicago investment firm, and our governor is a shameless panderer to the masses, I'm good.
  
  
• Heard a branch banking discussion this morning: "Since the peak of more than 1,800 North Texas branches in 2010, almost 200 local banking outlets have closed their doors."  Trivia: Most people don't realize that branch banking in Texas was illegal up until around 1986.
• Random Helen Hunt note:
  
• In watching any TV or or movie drama made before 2000, it just jumps out at you that a character's problem-of-the-moment could be solved today by just pulling out their phone. (I thought about this yesterday when watching a simple scene in The West Wing where Josh was on a pay phone trying to convince the operator to look up the name of a big law firm in a city which he couldn't remember.)