Yesterday was George Washington's birthday. In honor of our first President's belated birthday, we bring you this edition of the Saturday Morning Update.

I've been out of town all week working for a client, and am currently in a project that is going to take some intense focus for awhile, so these updates may not be as regular as they should be. Hopefully Brandon Cooper will step in to fill in the gaps.

New Tool for Neighborhoods
The first thing I want to let you know about is a new social media website for neighborhoods called NextDoor.com. I don't normally jump on the bandwagon for new social media sites, but I think this one can serve a good purpose. The site links physical neighborhoods to allow neighbors to discuss those hyper-local neighborhood issues like crime, streets, development, and so forth. My neighborhood has about 20 people signed up so far. The site requires the use of real names, and uses address verification to ensure that only residents of the neighborhood can join the group and see posts. So it's not same kind of thing as the other types of social media websites.

Other local cities - notably our neighbor, Flower Mound, have homeowner associations that help connect residents to each other and to their city government. This type of thing may be just what we need to help get more involvement. So I hope you'll consider logging in and signing up. If you use this link to sign up, and you're the first in your neighborhood, and your neighborhood site gets the 15 or so people it takes to launch, NextDoor will give us both a $50 Starbucks card. (Sweet huh?)

The Lewisville Leader has a pretty good article about Lewisville City Councilman Rudy Durham's bid for re-election. We'll do our best to get an interview or questionnaire to him and the rest of the candidates in the coming month.

Lewisville Lake Redevelopment
The Dallas Morning News has a story about the plans for re-development by Lewisville Lake. This was one of the items covered in the City Council Retreat this year. You can watch the video here, but we've not written anything up about it yet. Councilman TJ Gilmore does have some thoughts on the topic that he shared in his blog.

Miscellaneous Links
Ruth's Room is a thrift shop that benefits Habitat for Humanity.

Research shows that conservatives go for name brand goods, while liberals will go for generics. I guess that works out for us, because we only buy name brands for things like Dr. Pepper and Stubbs.

Should UNT walk away from its football program? I've been saying yes to that for years. It's wasteful, and a drain on resources that should be used for education.

Florida Atlantic University wants to name a football stadium after a private prison company. Bad idea. Both that we have private prison companies, and that they want to advertise.

Good dental floss ad.

If you ever feel bad about yourself or think maybe you made some bad decisions, you could always look at these idiotic tatoos and feel just a little bit superior.

Sick marriage counselor seduces a husband of a couple she's counseling.

A fisherman found a dinosaur bone in Lewisville Lake.

Freedomworks made a sex tape.

Is the Veterans Administration covering up the causes of Gulf War Syndrome?

Texas Sharon takes another look at that case of water contamination in Parker County. You remember the one where the guy's well was spitting out natural gas, and Range Resources sued him for defamation because he dared to blame them after they fracked a well nearby? Sharon says "I told you so."

RIP Mindy McCready.

By Brandon Cooper

Your editor is in Louisiana; you know the drill.

The Lewisville High School girls and boys basketball teams just barely made the playoffs, but already have some interesting stories to tell. The girls’ team, which went 6–24 during the season, defeated the District 6-5A champion Colleyville Heritage, who were 25-11, in the first round, but were defeated in the second round by Mansfield Timberview.

The boys team, on the other hand, defeated defending 5A state champs Marcus High School in a “loser goes home” tiebreaker game to decide who went to the playoffs. Word has it Marcus lost its rhythm when the LHS team refused to break for tea and crumpets. LHS plays–you guessed it–Colleyville Heritage on Tuesday night.

Argyle is getting its first grocery store. Hold on while I change my pants.

Apparently unaware that there is a such thing as "public image", the City of Farmers Branch is in the process of paying over $1 million on legal fees to fight the creation of a single-member district that would probably lead to a Hispanic city council member. That’s in addition to the $6 million plus they’ve spent on legal fees for their failed immigration policies.

Lewisville is getting its first synagogue. L'chaim, I suppose.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has released it's Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) information from the latest school year. You can look it all up on their website. Be prepared to use the zoom function on your browser, because the data pretty much scream "I hate your eyes."

Finally, Lewisville's newest distillery will be having a tasting at Hall's Liquor in Colleyville on Friday between 1 and 4 p.m. I've been told the official hashtag for the event will be "#Lewisarioadfzkxcndfwer".

Alright, I've fallen behind again at posting an update. Basically, I spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and most of the day Sunday either videoing or producing video of the City Council Retreat or the roller derby bouts. It's taking up all my spare time. Still, I've been collecting some links for you:

Don't forget: Tonight at 8 p.m. is the State of the Union address. You can watch an enhanced live-stream here.

Norma Manis, the "Mama" of Mama's Daughters' Diner is hospitalized after suffering a stroke.

Some d-bag dumped out a few pigs in Lewisville, then turned some dogs loose on them.

Asteroid to pass Earth Friday. It will be at least 20 years before it comes back to obliterate us.

Easy mistake to make: violating the Texas Open Meetings Act. Dumb: joking around about it.

"Obamacare" in plain English.

California Governor Brown: Perry ads barely a fart.

Incredible 360°, zoomable video of erupting volcanoes.

Bang with friends. No, I'm not on there, but thank you for asking.

Are property taxes being used to drive minorities off their land? One group says they are.

News flash: Republicans are mostly white.

By Brandon Cooper

During the discussion over the city’s upcoming long-term plan at the Lewisville City Council retreat this weekend, the idea of using social media as a way to promote participation came up. Everyone in the room was well aware that face-to-face communication will still be the crux of the process, but there’s no denying the fact that social media outlets provide a new way to expand participation in Lewisville and encourage communication between city leaders, businesses, the media, and residents.

That said, some of that is easier said than done, especially if you don’t know where to look or who to follow. With so many possible subjects to explore on various social media networks, seemingly routine municipal matters can quickly sputter down your news feed when competing against pictures of grumpy cats and quotes from famous people superimposed over solemn photographs.

The purpose of this post is to point the average reader in the direction of social media accounts and websites that anyone active with city issues can–and should–actively engage with. To make it this bit more dynamic than just a list of links, I’ll be using an embedded Storify article:

It's Superbowl Sunday, and not a single damn is given here in our household. I should be on a plane to New Orleans tonight so I can go work for my client, but the Superbowl has the city all jam-packed, and no hotel rooms are available anywhere at any reasonable prices. So, instead, I'll be in town all week again. Yeah, I've got the TV on, but really only to see funny commercials.

This past week was the start of filing in local elections, which is always exciting to me. I look forward to the end of the filing period when we can really focus in on the candidates and bring our readers the information necessary to make good choices.

Steve Blow has Four core principles that would revive the GOP: Live within your means. Live long and prosper. Live and let live. Live it up!

A Flower Mound man was killed in a one-car rollover in Lewisville.

Papa Johns goes after media sites who covered their CEO's anti-Obamacare whining, and asks them to remove stories.

Meanwhile, this past week, Applebees attempted to commit corporate PR suicide by firing a server who posted a picture on Reddit of a receipt on which a Christian pastor had attempted to stiff a waitress. The pastor wrote "I give God 10% Why do you get 18?", and zeroed out the tip. Not content to be exposed for their admittedly awful behavior, they called Applebees, which fired the server who posted it. Applebees added gas to the fire by not handling the backlash well on social media. Then again, this is the same company selling inflatable "decoys".

My thought is that as long as the posting didn't reveal any credit card information, I really don't see how it violates any privacy. This pastor obviously wanted her identity known, because she didn't just sign it, but put her title on it. It definitely doesn't rise to the level of termination. At any rate, it's interesting to see how the public reacts when a franchisee does something, and the entire chain is punished. It's basically the opposite of the reason why you join a franchise, which normally brings with it a certain amount of goodwill. These days, I'm wondering if it's not more of a liability. Any particular franchisee can do something really dumb, and the whole chain will suffer. For instance, a Denny's franchisee took it upon himself to impose an "Obamacare surcharge" on his guests, which caused major problems for the chain and threats of boycotts from the left. Yet another Denny's franchisee recently caused threats of boycotts from the right after kicking out some detectives for having their guns in plain view. As for me, I don't eat at either restaurant. I prefer to support locally owned and operated independent restaurants or small chains for the most part. Applebees lost my business years ago by serving watered-down drinks at premium prices.

A recent investigation finds that some Texas public schools are still violating the separation of church and state, by teaching Christian theology. I have no problem with schools teaching comparative religion, or teaching the Bible and other religious texts as literature. But I believe the First Amendment requires that government leave the theology to parents and churches. From what I've seen, even the local group who supports LISD teaching bible courses really does so from the perspective of hoping to use it to proselytize, based on their comments to the school board in support of it.

The NRA has an enemies list, which pretty much just serves two purposes:
1. It makes them look crazy.
2. It makes them look outnumbered.
Seriously, how does it bolster one's argument to post a gigantic list of celebrities, dignitaries, and respected organizations that you say support the other position? As I've said before, I'm a gun owner, and I support the second amendment, but I ditched my NRA membership years ago. They don't represent me; they represent crazy.

Here is a review of the last gun show in Lewisville, which had attendees lined up nearly around the corner. I've been a couple times too, and will say that they pretty much have everything you could want. The problem right now is that the hoarders are in full paranoia mode, and you can't buy anything for the right price.


A report says Texas has the 5th most regressive tax system. Regressive systems are those that ask the poorest to pay the highest percentage of their income. Sales tax is regressive because those with lower incomes spend much more of their income on taxable goods. Years ago, I wrote some commentary on the "Fair Tax" proposal which would eliminate income taxes in favor of regressive sales taxes.

I'm shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you, that Lewisville Councilman John Gorena didn't send us a press release announcing his re-election bid. Then again, he apparently didn't send one to the Lewisville Leader either, who instead interviewed him and let him say any old stupid ignorant thing he wanted to say. There is so much stupidity in this article, I'm basically speechless. Actually, I've got plenty to say, but it will be in a separate article.

The other day, my oldest son said the food in his school cafeteria was nasty, and it tasted like there was horse meat in the burgers. I have no idea how he would know what horse meat tastes like. In England, Burger King and Aldi got burned by a beef supplier using horse meat. They found equine DNA in the meat.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic ... e-meat.html#axzz2Jiam3aMN

State Rep. Myra Crownover filed a bill to allow county courts to review district creation.

The High Performance Schools Consortium, of which Lewisville ISD is the largest member, has sent its first report to the Texas Education Commissioner, requesting waivers from state education laws, as allowed under SB 1557. Texas Observer says the schools basically would like to secede from Texas' overbearing high-stakes testing system.

Irving City Manager Tommy Gonzalez is under investigation for soliciting inappropriate gifts from people with business before the city.

A famous retired Navy SEAL sniper was killed Saturday, shot at point blank range by a former Marine suffering from PTSD. For some reason, they were on a shooting range, and the Marine turned his gun on them.

A former Williamson County District Attorney faces a court of inquiry in the wrongful prosecution of a man who spent almost a quarter of a century in prison for the murder of his wife. The prosecutor withheld clearly exculpatory evidence, and now faces criminal action and disbarment.

This bit of idiocy was posted in the Denton County Republican Party's Facebook group.

The Lewisville Leader had an article about the Lewisville City Council. I think we have a preview here of Councilman John Gorena's campaign issues: Debt and water prices - the same winning issues that got Steve Hill elected. Oh wait, no, that didn't work for Hill.

Councilman TJ Gilmore has thoughts on the January 7th City Council meeting. He ridicules Gorena for his ridiculous opposition to the building codes that ensure our safety.

Dallas Morning News has an article about how Hispanic advocacy groups are accusing Lewisville Police Department of racially profiling. LTJ has attempted to contact the group and get their story, but we have not yet received a response. The Lewisville Police Department does have a policy in place against racial profiling. The article says the police department had not yet received any formal complaint.

If you ride DCTA, they would like you to complete a survey to help them get some feedback.

Here's the kind of thing that can happen when you store a lot of ammunition in a house.

New Denton County Constable Tim Burch spent 600 hours on an investigation, even before taking office, and was able to reunite a family that had been separated by a kidnapping.

The Lewisville Leader has a bizarre article about one family's troubles with a fence contractor. TLDR: The City's building inspection department is not small claims court. The city Building Services department maintains a list of contractors, and will be able to tell you if a given contractor has previous problems in the area. Check references, get your contract in writing, and if you can't work out problems with your contractor, then consider Small Claims Court.

Farmers beat Marcus 46-37 in boys' basketball action.

North Texas Derby Revolution's season opener double-header is today. LTJ will be there to video the bouts.

Nerds!

Just as the police and the laws they tried to enforce were on the wrong side of history then, so are the people who want to take away the rights of gay people today. Your religious freedom does not include taking away rights from others. Kudos to President Obama for putting Stonewall in the context where it belongs: just another part of the long struggle for civil rights.

CBS DFW looks at some Railroad Commission documents filed after the natural gas explosion in Lewisville, and concludes that TNMP and Atmos point the finger of blame at each other.

Rezoning school attendance boundaries is a necessary, but thankless job that seems to always get parents up-in-arms. When one school is overcrowded, and an adjacent school has room, the district needs to adjust attendance boundaries to shift some of the load. Invariably, this results in some students living closer to one school, but having to attend another. Districts like LISD offer no guarantees that a given piece of property will always be zoned for a particular school. We think the best thing the school board can do is to make these types of adjustments slowly and far in advance of actual overcrowding. Use plenty of compassion and let students already attending a campus choose to stay there. Cross Timbers Gazette has more information about rezoning plans in Flower Mound. Some parents have started a petition to ensure that students from their neighborhood stay at their current middle school.

Opponents of renewable energy had a couple of setbacks this past week, publishing a deeply flawed study, that once the errant math was corrected, actually showed the opposite of what they claimed, and getting caught trying to astroturf, hiring fake protesters via Craigslist.

How Hillary Clinton dealt with "mansplainers"

Supposedly, today is "Gun Appreciation Day", so today's update is brought to you by me and my little friend. I'm still looking at President Obama's various proposals for reducing gun violence, and hope to bring you some thoughts on that in a separate column.

Lewisville police arrested a suspect in a shooting from last Sunday, who they think was also responsible for a murder in Flower Mound January 1st.

Crazy conspiracy nuts have now taken to harassing someone who helped children after the Sandy Hook tragedy. These nutjobs are convinced the whole thing was a hoax put on by the government to drum up support for gun control. I sort of miss the days when the nutjobs were just ostracized and ignored, and didn't have such an outlet to join forces and spread their crazy theories.

The Texas Tribune has a decent summary of the various gun-related bills that have been filed in the Texas Legislature.

Here's a video of some various brilliant people having fun with guns:


Hope you enjoy your gun appreciation day. Join us tomorrow for couch fort appreciation day.

A truck driver was found dead at a Denton gas well site where condensate was being loaded, and officials say that some was spilled. It is suspected he died of the fumes.

Republican members of Congress will hold their retreat this year at a site that bills itself as a central part of plantation life in Virginia. What better place to have a session entitled "Successful communication with minorities and women", than in the Plantation Room. Keep stepping on your own dicks, GOP.

It's time to Speak Up for Public Schools, says Stacey Amick. Just as a reminder, there will be three public forums in and around Lewisville on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Rick Perry and other Texas Republicans just cannot seem to tell the truth about their massive cuts to public education. Politifact has a rundown of the various lies they've told. Here's the article we did last year on local State Rep Myra Crownover's massive whopper about education funding.

WFAA had some commentary on last week's gas explosion, and why it should have been avoided. Meanwhile, the residents of the area wanted to know why they were not evacuated. The local CBS station had more questions. While the stations questioned Atmos and TNMP and their role in the explosion, my concern was less politically correct. As much as we all love firefighters and respect the work they do, it seems pretty obvious with hindsight that they should have evacuated the nearby homes when they became aware of the severity of the leak. Predictably, the city seems to have clammed up on the issue, probably fearing lawsuits. I can understand that, but I care less about blame and more about whether they now understand the risk and will learn from what happened last week. I was therefore happy to see that when there was a second gas leak, the fire department did evacuate nearby houses.

The City of Denton just passed a gas drilling and production ordinance by a 5-1 vote.

NFL Bad Lip Reading

Satanists are planning a rally in support of Florida Governor Rick Scott.

It's Sunday, and your editor is about to hop on another plane soon for another week in Louisiana. I've been working on a project for a client there, and it's pretty intense, so I've fallen behind on some things here. One thing I want to do is get that Lewisville Citizen of the Year story completed. We do have a selection, but it will probably be next week before that will be one.

The big news this past week was the explosion Friday that leveled a duplex in Old Town Lewisville. WFAA and the Dallas Morning News, as well as a dozen other outlets have done a fine job reporting on that, so we'll mostly just link to their stories for now. WFAA has more about the victim* who was in the house. I also want to share the police and fire recordings from Friday, which you can listen to by going into our police and fire radio archives. The 12 o'clock hour was the one with most of the action. It's not really known at this point the mechanics of how the gas got into the house, but I'm sure that will come out in the investigation and eventual lawsuit(s). My suspicion, which is totally speculation at this point, is that perhaps the leaking gas found its way into the house through the sewer lines. *Update - 1/13 - 11 p.m.: NBC 5 reports that the victim, 55 year-old Scott Deahl has died from his injuries.

Lewisville City Councilman John Gorena wants to run for re-election. He campaigned on the idea that Lewisville should have term limits, and that someone should only be able to serve two terms. If he is fortunate to be re-elected, this would be his last term, by his rules. It is also interesting to note that he is looking for someone to run against place 5 Councilman, Mayor Pro Tem Rudy Durham.

BTW, I'm amused by this quote from his site:

"I am not going to talk bad about the liberal websites and their comments but I am also hoping that people are smart enough to know the difference between a blog and a "want-to-be" newspaper site."

Our priorities should begin where our future does — in public education.

More than 5 million children are enrolled in our public schools, which is more than the total population of 29 states.

More than 3 million of them are deemed economically
disadvantaged, and almost 1 million of them speak limited English. The education of all our students will determine whether Texas is a land of prosperity or lost opportunities.

There should be no sacred cows when it comes to our children — including our accountability system. For more than a decade, this state has used an increasingly rigorous series of standardized tests to measure academic excellence.

But by now every Member of this House has heard from constituents at the grocery store or the Little League fields about the burdens of an increasingly cumbersome testing system in our schools.

Teachers and parents worry that we have sacrificed classroom inspiration for rote memorization.

The goal of education is not to teach children how to pass a test, but to prepare them for life. The goal of every teacher is to develop in students a lifelong love of learning, and we need to get back to that goal in the classroom.

To parents and educators concerned about excessive testing — the Texas House has heard you.

We will continue to hold our schools accountable. But we will also make our accountability and testing system more appropriate … more flexible … and more reasonable.

By Brandon Cooper

When it comes to addressing contemporary issues, the Lewisville ISD administration does its best to come up with practical solutions. When it became apparent that the district’s technology policy had become outdated, they replaced it with one that gave teachers more discretion as to when to use mobile technology in their own classrooms. Much in the same way, the district’s policy on students’ attire must also be updated to meet the needs of this generation, not the expectations of the previous one.

Although the district has a general policy on attire, the current practice allows each principal to modify and add to it as he or she sees fit. Reasonable limitations on students’ attire, such as prohibiting inappropriately revealing clothing and anything advocating illegal or unsafe behavior, make sense. When composing a larger list of prohibited attire, however, it becomes important to pick and choose battles carefully. It’s here where schools often wade into subjective grey areas, and individual administrators often base their policies–and enforcement–on personal preferences, rather than practical concerns.

The Lewisville Lake level as of this morning was 515.69 feet ASL, or about 6.5 feet below conservation level. We might get some rain the middle of this week, and it could be a "frog strangler", they say. Bring it on!

Testing Texas' backlog of 20,000 rape kits would cost $11 million. State Senator Wendy Davis would like to find the funds to make it happen. We never did hear back from the Lewisville Police Department on the final number of kits that had not been tested here. I guess that is something to follow up on.


Meanwhile, a court ruling allows Texas to go forward with its women's health program that specifically excludes Planned Parenthood, in violation of federal regulations, at a cost to the state of $30 million. The federal government had paid roughly 90% of the cost of the program, which provides access to women's health for low-income women.

This past week, a crematorium overheated in Lewisville, causing a fire.

A second state trooper was suspended due to those ridiculous roadside body cavity searches of two women who were suspected of having marijuana. The case is expected to go to the grand jury this month.

Somebody shot and killed the Denton County Sheriff's Office's only canine over the holiday.

House Republicans have an entirely new plan: No negotiations with President Obama. Color me shocked. Shocked, I tell you!

I'll be darned! Someone found a way to make a cat useful. Too bad they used it for evil instead of good.

Put God back in public schools? He never left.

Republican Rep. Steve King filed a bill to "end birthright citizenship". King apparently is unaware that Congress must act only in accordance with the constitution, which is crystal clear on citizenship as a birthright. There is not even any room for interpretation with the wording. Thus, it's clear that to some, the constitution is sacrosanct only when it's convenient. Perpetual wingnut dumbass Rep Louie Gohmert is a cosponsor. Someone send these guys a copy of the constitution so that they can at least understand the process to use to pass a constitutional amendment if they really feel they must.

What did the Senate do Tuesday? Unanimously confirmed a ton of President Obama's appointments.

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