Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• The Board

  

  Total cases: 1,263,092

  
  

  

  Total deaths: 74,799

• Texas ("Move along. Nothing to see here."):
  
• Metro (lots of upticks):
  
• Wise County: 28 total. 4 active.  (An official at the highest super secret level of county government, speaking under the condition of anonymity, told me that none of the numbers are based on antibody testing like I speculated about yesterday.)
• A couple of months ago I declared my official position on how to handle the coronavirus is: I have no idea.  But, as someone said, we are kind of treating it like the Vietnam War. We just got tired of it, declared victory, and just pretended it never happened. 
• Both our Governor and our Texas Attorney General, who is still under indictment by the way, decided to stick their necks out for jailed salon owner Shelley Luther yesterday.  AG Paxton even wrote the judge directly.  Hey, I happen to personally know a few people who have been subject to abuse due to government overreach. How can I get those boys to intervene at the trial court level for them? (After Paxton wrote his letter, the twelve civil district judges in Dallas County wrote him back telling him he had violated ethics rules regarding ex parte communications.)
  
• These three Texas women are all beauticians which have been jailed in Texas. Two of them were arrested after offering their professional services in their respective homes and then getting busted in an undercover sting operation*. One flaunted her defiance in the media. Even without knowing any background, guess which one Paxton and Abbott decided to support? Take a wild guess. 
  
• (*Too many cops?)
• Luther apparently is available to sing at your next corporate event! (Youtube clip here.)  And she's pretty, pretty good. 
  
• They had revenues of $22.4 billion last year but somehow didn't have a rainy day fund.
  
  
• The Supreme Court has been audibly broadcasting its oral arguments live this week for the first time ever. Yesterday, a toilet could be heard flushing while one attorney addressed the Court.(Listen.) I'm guessing this will probably be the last week of live hearings.  Interestingly, the official audio posted on the court's website edited out the flushing sound.
  
• I think I like chubby Adele over anorexic Adele. Hello?
  
• Correction from yesterday: It was not Wings' original version of Live and Let Die that was playing while Trump was stumbling around without a mask but instead a cover version by Guns N' Roses.  I apologize for that error and for Axl Rose thinking he can improve on the great Paul McCartney.
• Speaking of, anyone have Axl Rose and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin getting into a Twitter fight yesterday on your bingo board? (To make it even more wheels off, Munchin originally mistakenly included a Liberian flag instead of U.S. flag in his first attack tweet.)
• Hey, look, a right wing former prosecutor doing a Wrongful Conviction standup routine. 
  
• There are more bad employment numbers released this morning (another 3.2 million sought unemployment benefits), and the photo below accompanied the story I saw.  That's a very clever callback during this moment of social-distancing.
  
  
  
  
• I was on to the Proud Boys almost from the beginning, but the highlighted portion of this story took me back a little. That development kind of snuck up on me.
  
• Fox 4 has very quietly gone to the top of the ranks of hot girls on newscasts. (The two on the right. I don't think the two on the left are on TV, but I'm sure someone will set me straight if I'm wrong.)
  
• Cascade has a commercial out now which tells us we can "save water" by running our dishwashers every single night even when the dishwasher isn't full. For the life of me, I don't understand that. 
  
• I still think the Blue Angels fly over was a waste of money, but if we are going to do it why not do it every year on the Fourth of July? That'd be more entertaining than being spared to death by fireworks.