Eternal Life Sentence for Sex Offender

You know you've been bad when your next 40 lives will be spent in prison.

Texas is Great! Give Me Chocolate Cake!

That was an inane Bill Cosby comedy reference. But check this out via Don Surber:

Brian Stevens told News 4 his wife, whose six months pregnant, had just called him after she noticed someone lurking around the house. When Stevens got home, he saw the suspect going house to house. He went inside his home and then heard some rattling coming from his own back fence. Stevens then ran upstairs and grabbed his gun.

"I was waiting for the police, and he just walked in the door. He just walked in," explained Stevens.

Stevens said a man later identified as Stephen Garcia made his way inside the home and started walking towards him.

"I gave him plenty of times. I mean, I was screaming at him, telling him 'Get out of my house. Who do you think you are? Just get out. Get out!'," Stevens told News 4.

But Stevens said the 21-year-old intruder kept coming.

Castle doctrine. Smart wife. Armed husband. Almost dead dumbbell burglar. All in all, a good day for crime abatement in Texas.

Don't Mess .... In Texas, You'll Get Shot and Killed Dead

Why would you be a bad guy in Texas? Everyone owns a gun and people really, really like to use them. Dave from Ace's blog has been watching this case, as have I. He explains what happened:

To recap: Joe Horn, a resident of Pasadena Texas observed two men (illegal aliens as it happens), burglarizing a neighbor's home, and he called 911.

He spent some time on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, waiting for law enforcement to arrive.

They didn't, and he grabbed a shotgun and went out to confront them.

According to the transcript, the 911 operator repeatedly urged Joe to stay inside and wait for law enforcement. Joe waited a while, then said 'he did not believe it would be right to let the burglars get away'.

"Well, here it goes, buddy," Horn can be heard telling the operator. "You hear the shotgun clicking and I'm going."

He went out, told em to stop. They didn't. And he shot both of them, in the back.

Allah says:

There’s the “stand your ground” provision. If it justifies him leaving the house to face them down, it’s not so much an exemption from the duty to retreat as an affirmative right to advance. And how was deadly force “immediately” necessary if it could have been prevented just by sitting tight? He’s got the shotgun and he’s watching them; if they try to come in his house, they’ll never know what hit them. Eh, whatever. It’s not worth parsing the statutes too finely since ultimately it’s in a (grand) jury’s hands and they’re not going to send an old man to jail for shooting two felons caught in the act, whatever the felony and time of day.

Well, this is Texas. The police took a long time to show up. A plain clothes detective saw it and did nothing. Will this force a change in Texas concealed hand gun statutes? Doubtful. Will the Castle Doctrine and its parts and pieces get revoked? Doubt that, too. Will it confirm for knobby-headed elites that Texas is a barbaric, cowboy-attitude-infested wasteland? Probably. Just want to remind the naysayers of this.

One would think that a few instances like this would be a major deterrent to crime. Move to DC, it's safer to be a criminal there.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

High Gas Prices Cause Parents To Murder Children

Murderous impulses abound these days. In Houston, children seem to be particularly vulnerable to their parent's frustration. It's a new phenomenon, really, child abuse, and the local government officials are grasping for reasons what has so recently gone horribly wrong. The Houston Chronicle's Dane Schiller reports:

With word Saturday that yet another parent was implicated in an attack on his children — police say he led them to the partially burned bodies — there was a feeling that something is horribly wrong with some families in the Greater Houston metropolitan area.

"Whether it is high gas prices or people not happy with their jobs or whatever, we have got a lot of anger and violence in our society, way too much, particularly family violence," Houston Councilman Peter Brown said.

Later, another expert gives his explanation:

Still, Klineberg said, they speak to growing stress for families, including the challenge of making ends meet.

"It is tough out there. People snap," he said. "And when you have 6 million people, one or two are going to snap in a bad way."

A few years ago, Andrea Yates drowned her kids in a bathtub. The gas prices were a moderate sub $2.00/gallon. Houston didn't want for violence in 2005 and gas prices were fantastic.

Houston's unemployment rate was higher in 2006 than it is now, so murders should be lower now. And maybe they are. You won't find this out from the local press, though, because it doesn't fit the narrative. And what is the narrative? The economy is horrible. Life is horrible. Gas prices are high, oil companies are bad and that's horrible.

Oh wait, when looking at the numbers, though, murders were up in 2006, but it wasn't unemployment, it was the fine folks from New Orleans. As those yahoos got put in the clink, the murder rate declined in 2007. And looky here:

HPD officials say that the City of Houston has recorded the fewest numbers of murders for the first quarter of this year since 2005.

The unofficial numbers show 78 murders were recorded through the first three months of this year.nThere were 88 murders for the same period in 2007. That’s an 11.3 percent decrease.

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt said the decline shows that the department’s targeted crime initiatives and overtime programs throughout the city are paying off. “While murders are nearly impossible crimes to predict and prevent, we do feel our overtime programs in place, including those officers assigned to our Crime Reduction Unit, can impact crimes that could escalate to murder,” said Chief Hurtt.

Wow, those are dramatic numbers and not at all the impression one gets from reading something like Dan Schiller put together. The notion that there are always going to be nutso crazies killing their kids doesn't occur to these people. What occurs to them is that it's politically expedient to exploit a child's horrific death at the hands of a parent and blame......the latest trend.

Whether it be Twinkies (really depression) or oil or the economy or global warming or fill-in-the-blank excuse, according to Leftists no one is responsible for his murderous impulses and it's always worse Right Now! because it fits the latest trendy, alarmist call to action. It's stupid. I hope no one is paying attention to them.

Oh wait, they're not.

H/T Rorschach

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

Houston Is #1

Yeah, baby!

Houston, We Have A Gas Problem

No, I'm not talking about the toilet that is still malfunctioning on the space station (horrors! it's been over a week). Wait, it was fixed yesterday. I'm talking about Continental cutting 3,000 jobs because of jet fuel costs. This will have a profound effect here in my community.

I don't see how fuel costs can't adversely affect the economy over the next few months. It affects the costs of everything.

One Tough Son of A .....

The last election cycle here in Texas included incessant "one tough grandma" advertisements by Carol Keyton Strayhorn. She was going to "clean up Texas" and "take on the insiders". Her voice was so grating and her message so superficially disingenuous that I thought to myself that woman is not getting my vote no matter what. From the things I read and from the the things she said, Strayhorn just seemed to be a troublemaker. She seemed to be working to craft a "character". And in fact, she did run for Governor based on her "one tough grandma" persona.

I don't know Texas political history, I've only been here 11 years, but it turns out that the old adage "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" is true. Scott McClellan is Strayhorn's son. I guess disloyalty and opportunism is a family trait.



Glenn Reynolds quotes Mark Twain regarding McClellan, "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man." I'm guessing the problem is even worse when the man sees himself as pleasantly plump.

FLDS's Culture of Depravity and CPS' Culture of Duplicity And I'm Sick of Kids Being Harmed By Those Who are Supposed To Help

Fox News shares these absolutely disgusting pictures of FLDS "spiritual leader" Warren Jeffs spiritually sticking his tongue down the child-wife of his "spiritual marriage". No, he and his followers aren't pedophiles. No way.

Now, I know that Texas social workers can behave badly. In fact, any agent of the state I suspect almost as a matter of course. I'm just saying that it's possible that funky stuff is going down in that compound and that sending girls back there will be endangering them. The fact that Texas CPS acts above the law and family courts in general have no constraints engenders doubt even in legitimate cases.

Children will be harmed because of this mess and if f*cking pisses me off. Man, I'm in a bad mood and this kind of shit makes me even more irritated. Oh, and in case American kids are not sexed up enough, LL Cool J is here to help. I thought that guy was supposedly a Christian. Oh, and here's more irritation: imagine being forced to have only one kid and the kid being crushed in a substandard government-built building. Some days I just want to smash some stupid skulls. This is one of those days. Damn. How am I going to sleep with my BP this high?

Due Process In The Texas Polygamy Case

Darlene Click has more about this case. She believes this will make other cases of abuse difficult to prosecute.

Hurricanes in 2008

Guess. I want you to guess: Will there be a slow hurricane season this summer or will there be a catastrophic level of horrendous devastation and destruction secondary to Global Warming? If you get the answer wrong, you're stoooopid. Go to the link for the answer.

Polygamists Might Get Their Kids Back

A Texas appellate court says that the removal of the kids from their moms is unlawful. I wonder if that means the 15 year old moms married to 50 year old men, too. Holy f*ck what a disgusting mess. There is just something about seeing these moronic Little House on the Prairie women running out of the courthouse that pisses me off. You don't have to dress like Britney Spears to be in the culture but not of the culture. According to the New York Times:

The ruling asserted that the state’s child protection agency acted hastily in removing the children from the Yearning for Zion ranch in April and did not make a reasonable effort “to ascertain if some measure short of removal and/or separation from parents would have eliminated the risk” of abuse toward the children of 48 mothers who filed the suit. The district court was ordered to remove its restraining order giving the state custody of those children, but it was not immediately clear how the hundreds of other children, now in foster care, would be affected.

Using religion as a cloak for pedophilia prone middle aged men grates (link via Maggie's Farm). I want those kids back in that situation like I want boils on my feet. But I'm just not sure about the best environment for these kids... And while it seems excessive to lump all 400+ kids in the abused category, it seems equally excessive to lump all the kids into the everything-is-hunky-dory category. (Which isn't the case, I guess this ruling only applies to 38 kids.)

Forget the abuse, isn't polygamy illegal in Texas? And why don't we prosecute them? And say the kids aren't "abused", what of the rest of it? And does this case mean the state will go after Muslims practicing polygamy?

And yes, I see the implications for parents worried about their kids being yanked away on the "evidence" of one anonymous phone call. I recognize that some kids suffer because the greater good is the presumption of innocence and sanctity of the family relationship.

What a mess.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Texas Tort Reform

Good for doctors and consumers, bad for lawyers. And Texas has more Fortune 500 companies now than California or New York. Come on down, ya'll!

Don't Let Your Mama's Have Babies In Texas, Ya'll

Texas ranks last in all things maternal. It's because of lack of health insurance, of course. Uh huh. Could it be that illegal aliens don't get prenatal care and the first time anyone sees them is when they stumble across the emergency room threshold to birth a new American? And in that case, I think Mexico could safely be blamed for their lack of good prenatal care.

I've spent far too much time in and around the Medical Center. Texas in general, and Houston in particular, lacks many things (namely mountains) but excellent medical care that is open to all is not one of them. One disturbing statistic that the research doesn't mention is the over-reliance on c-sections. Houston has one of the highest C-section rates in the country. This is major surgery and unnecessary most of the time.

Another Reason I Love Texas

Stooopid robber, BB guns are for kids! Them shotguns will get ya.

More Teenage Mothers From Polygamist Compound

Twenty-five more women under the age of 18 are baby factories in service to the polygamist FLDS cult. I mean they are mothers of children who have been taken custody by the great state of Texas. The notion of children being yanked from parents who love them is repugnant. The notion that children are being used to serve pedophiles disguised as religious leaders is also repugnant. I wonder how old these girls are and how old they were when they were "taken" as wives.

By the way, I continue to cover this topic, not because it is salacious, but because it has serious implications all the way around. This is a church-state issue. Civil liberties of all Americans are at stake here. Casting judgment on polygamy is studiously being avoided by the press (substitute Muslim polygamists anywhere you see Morman and then you'll know why no one dares say anything). The behavior of Child Protective Services is coming to light. In short, this case touches many American sacred cows and it's worth paying attention to them.

Texas Primaries--UPDATE

Anecdote Alert: This is not scientific nor is it a particularly accurate indicator of what is happening here in Texas, but I thought that I'd relay the conversation I had at the deli counter while grocery shopping today.

So, I'm ambling around the obscenely crowded store, pushing the blue race car grocery cart and looking mighty hip doing it while my son was "driving" and screeching out demands--cereal, Mama!, Cereal!--when I park it in front of the deli counter. Once again, and this is an aside, the snotty high school kid "gets" me. The last time I faced this little gnome and asked for a dill pickle, he proceeded to give me the smallest, skimpiest pickle there was and he was waiting, just waiting, for me to say, "Don't you have a bigger pickle?" Pickle size is important as they are all 69¢--so as in most things, bigger is definitely better. Oh, I wanted to say, "I want a bigger pickle". But I refrained. He is my deli nemesis and he served me again today. No pickle today, just sliced turkey.

But that is not my point. While waiting for the gnome to get the turkey, I talked Texas primaries with a dashing, white-haired gentleman of about 60. He asked me if I had voted yet and I responded in the negative. Gasp! I know. I know. I've been doing stuff. Anyway, he had voted for Huckabee. He was a staunch conservative and I told him I was a blogger. I told him that Huckabee gave me the willies and he plead his case: Huckabee changed his stance on the border. He'll be a good conservative. I, of course, disagreed. Here's where it got interesting, though. His daughter voted for Hillary. She figures McCain has the best chance against Hillary and so cast her vote that way.

What I'm wondering is how many people have done the same. Now, Karl Rove just said on Fox that for every one Republican going over for Obama, there are two Democrats going over for McCain. I've talked about this before and I think in the general election, either Clinton or Obama would have trouble against McCain.

I'll update later tonight. In the meantime, Stephen Green (may his liver rest in peace) is drunk blogging the whole thing again.

UPDATE: Texas called for McCain. McCain clinches nomination. Big surprise.

UPDATE II: Texas called for Clinton. Here's an email from Austin via the Corner:

K-Lo, writing here from Austin, Texas.

Not sure why the networks haven’t picked up on this, but there is definitely a sizable portion of the vote in Texas tonight comprised of Republican voters looking to “game” the Democratic primary. I spoke with numerous friends today, who claim to be Republican, who said they voted for Sen Clinton with the thought that it will prolong the Dem in-fighting and therefore benefit Republicans. I won’t debate the merits of their argument here, but the phenomenon (Republicans voting for Sen Clinton to gain the system) is real and I think material to the results. I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone reporting it and just how large the impact might be. I’m sure it is contributing to the number of voters deciding in the final three days to support Sen. Clinton. Would be curious to hear your contributors comment on this dynamic. The VRWC conspires to save the Clinton campaign?

I noted the cross-over yesterday from my anecdote in the grocery store and today, Glenn Reynolds and others are noting it, too. What does this all mean? Well, Hillary should thank the Right Wing Conspiracy, for one. When those rubes vote as a block, they can be powerful! Stupid (from her perspective), but powerful.

For me, this continues to be the strangest election. None of the candidates are bring-home-to-your-mother great. They all seem average. They seem unoriginal ideologically, inexperienced (except for McCain), and they are all statists--that is, they all view the all-mighty government as the solution to everyone's problems. This year is a year of picking the best of the worst.

So these factors seem to be making the electorate to take the candidates as seriously as they really are--which is to say, not too serious. Democrats are crossing for Republicans. Republicans are crossing for Democrats. Besides the Obamasseiah true believers, most younger than 30, or a more than a few cents short of decent pocket change, the electorate feels rather blah about the rest of them.

I'm not sure things will settle down in the general election, either. This year, more than any other, I think the Veep choices will be paramount to all the candidates. I advise them, if anyone gives a flip what I think, to choose wisely. This year, the Vice President will swing voters, I believe. No one feels that great about the candidates. They'll need to feel great about the Vice President.

More On The Economy: NAFTA, It's A Good Thing

If you live in Texas, that is. States like Ohio and Michigan suffer at their own hands. (Sorry friends from up north, but the business climate sucks for a reason and the reason ain't NAFTA.)

Looking Toward The General Election

The day of doom is upon Hillary Clinton. Here in Texas, her strength is in doubt. If I'm to believe the local news reports, Obama's messianic message (not) taps a deep well here and he has solid support in the cities.

I'm not thinking about March 5 right now. It almost doesn't matter. Clinton and Obama differ little in their socialistic, statist views and, in Obama's case, seemingly Marxist sympathizing. We must hope that neither wins the Oval Office. And on this score, I actually think that John McCain has a solid chance. Even in the Democratic primaries, certain statistics spell doom for Obama:

The new voters would seem to favor Obama, Beatty said, but 69 percent of the early vote was cast by people older age 40 and 41 percent of the votes were from older women. Obama's appeal has been strongest with people younger than 40.

There aren't enough voters under 40 to decide this election. In the general election, McCain is going to appeal to a lot of Democrats who start to get nervous about Senator Obama's experience. And if, by some miracle (Glenn Reynolds, for one, believes "the Obama wave has broken), Clinton wins the nomination, some Democrats will tremble at the notion of Bill being in the House again. In both cases, McCain will seem like a reasonable alternative to the moderate Democrats.

After President Bush's eight years of garbled communication and low ratings in spite of all the amazing good he has done, I thought that any Republican would be doomed. In fact, I'm still not entirely sure that's not the case. But I am feeling a bit more optimistic. While the far left will vote for anyone as long as he, she or it wears a donkey, the moderate Democrats will look favorably on the old (also known as), experienced McCain.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Texas The Least Vain State

Don't mess with Texas, right? Our land is big. Our egos bigger.

Or not.

Texas comes in dead last when it comes to vanity plates. Perhaps we should reconsider our big-hatted reputation!

Texas Justice

"You sneeze, you're a dead man." But the best quote is from his wife who enthuses after her husband rounds up the rabble," It's like being a newlywed all over again." She giggled like a school-girl. It's good to be a manly man.