Larry Harris had to come all the way to Texas from Arizona (okay, so it’s just a border but it’s a wide border) to run three National Guard vans in a convoy off the highway out in far west Texas. The truck were transporting Covid-19 vaccines to Matador, Texas.

Larry did some damn fancy driving to run them off the road and then spun his truck around and got out with a gun. He told them he was a police officer and wanted to inspect the vans. All 11 guardsmen were being detained by Larry when the Idalou police department responded to the situation.

They don’t have a staff psychologist at the Idalou police department but the officer on the scene said that Larry “appeared to be mentally disturbed.”

It does not appear the vaccines were what Harris was after, officials said. He told police that he thought people in the vans had kidnapped a woman and child, Williams said.

Thank goodness that someone drove by and thought maybe one kinda rickety old guy holding 11 national guardsmen at gunpoint might be odd even if it is Texas.

The vaccine got to Madador and Larry is staying in jail for the night with legal problems.

There are at last half a dozen versions of this story online. They all tell the same basic story but with different highlights.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.

Start at about 3:15.  He wants to ban assault weapons and close the loophole in the background checks.

Now. He wants to do it now. Thanks, Joe.

So come to find out, there was a sleeper in the 5,500 page appropriations bill under the last year of Donald Trump.  One small stipulation slipped past prying eyes.

The stipulation mandates that the director of national intelligence work with the secretary of defense on a report detailing everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects — known in agency lingo as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “anomalous aerial vehicles.”

I would expect some paragraph or two saying “what UFOs?” but anything else seems unlikely.

I would be wrong.

Written by Nick Caraway —

We will be hearing a lot of things over the next couple of days in regards to the mass shooting in Boulder. Maybe it will be in the mass shooting in Georgia. Heck, it could be any of the seven mass shootings we have had over the past seven days in this country. The conservative playbook is well-documented at this point.

1) It is too soon to talk about this.

2) Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

3) It’s a mental health issue.

4) Thoughts and prayers.

Get out your bingo cards. You’re going to win with that combination in any order. The one variant that sticks in my craw is how the right always tries to poke holes in the argument to install background checks or ban automatic weapons. The gamut they use to point out the isolated cases where those provisions wouldn’t have helped. In other words, the enemy of good is perfect.

If there is no perfect solution then we shouldn’t use it because it’s not perfect. It would be like striking down all traffic laws. See, not everyone follows speed limits. stop signs, or  traffic lights. There isn’t always a police officer there to write a ticket for those offending. Occasionally, someone dies because someone broke a traffic law. Texas alone has seen 611 deaths this year due to automobile accidents. Therefore, traffic laws don’t work because they haven’t addressed the problem perfectly. Therefore, they should be abolished.

The arguments against gun control make about as much sense. If people are going to wait around for the perfect solution they won’t get anything. Of course, we know that’s by design. The goal here is to make the world a better and safer place. We cannot make it perfectly safe. Perfect doesn’t exist. If background checks will prevent some of these events from happening then we need background checks. If banning assault weapons will prevent these events from being larger then we need to ban assault weapons.

The enemy of good is great (or perfect). Often times good is the best we can do. There are more deaths every year due to handguns than assault weapons. We likely won’t see an end to handguns and it’s debatable as to whether we should. Assault weapons and background checks are low lying fruit. The vast majority of people agree with those measures and it won’t severely limit people’s freedoms. If you need an Ar-15 to hunt I’d suggest taking up golf.

Nick

Frisco is a little town 0f about 200,000 right outside of Dallas known for uppity white people.  They are rich, they are white, they hate taxes, and they vote Republican.

Not only that, they appear to be a large coven of Q witches.

Hope for Trump’s return is fervent in Frisco and across the north Dallas suburbs, an area of rapid growth and rapidly increasing diversity. Nineteen local residents have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to federal authorities, one of the largest numbers in any place in the country.

They are growing, being pushed by social media and mega churches that preach what borders on white nationalism.  By the way, all depictions of Jesus show him with curly blonde hair and blue eyes in those churches. The Kingdom Life Church is lead by Brandon Burden, who took to the pulpit and said …

“We ain’t going silently into the night. We ain’t going down. This is Texas,” Burden preached.

Prophetic voices had decreed Trump would remain in office, he said.

The Guardian has a story that caught my fancy.

Donald Trump will soon use “his own platform” to return to social media, an adviser said on Sunday, months after the former president was banned from Twitter for inciting the US Capitol riot.

So, he’s coming out with his own Twitter.  I don’t care what he calls it, I’m calling it Bitter.

I can promise you that within hours, every Democrat will be banned and all that will be left are old straight white men who type in ALL CAPS so you can hear them better and pre-pubescent boys still trying to “own the libtards.” It will be a collection of perverts and scalawags who end up talking more porn than politics and be a majestic display of bad spelling.

I wonder where you apply for pre-banning?

I give it six weeks before Trump claims media bias against him by his own company. Old habits are hard to break.

By the way, the story also contains this tidbit.

Miller emphasised the hold Trump retains on his party.

“He’s already had over 20 senators over 50 members of Congress either call or make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to ask for [his] endorsement,” he said.

Okay, so my math is tad rusty but 20 senators isn’t even half of the Republicans. Trump couldn’t win his own caucus in the senate, but he’s doing even worse in the house with less than a fourth. That’s not a hold, that’s an ankle bite.

Bitter. I’m calling that.