Texas Judge Violates His Own Stay At Home Order To Go To Grandson’s Birthday Party

The obvious hack is to e.g. mark a journalist as positive and see which leak suspect quarantines.

He self-detonates regularly in these briefings. And then his sycophantic aids use saliva and hairspray to glue the globs of fat back together for the next day.

Literal lickspittles.

It’s the same governor who decided that absentee ballots can be used only by people over 65 who tend to skew to the right and the occasional jailbird.

To be eligible to vote early by mail in Texas, you must:

  • be 65 years or older;
  • be disabled;
  • be out of the county on election day and during the period for early voting by personal appearance; or
  • be confined in jail, but otherwise eligible.
1 Like

Texas is anything but ordinary. I wish.

Five years’ writing opinions for my judges on TexCrApp (excuse me, Tex.Crim.App) opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. I damn near helped send an innocent person to his death (he’d been in prison for a decade or two when the truth came out), which was no fun.

Getting back to Williamson County: Ken Anderson, the district judge there who was disrobed and disbarred for his behavior as DA for the county, was my immediate predecessor with my first judge. I met him in the hallway at the court. Judge Douglas thought Ken was a liberal, and I’ve no doubt that’s how he came off. Ken probably knew that, as the judge himself told me in my interview, Judge Douglas liked to hear opinions not his own. He listened, too. I believe I changed his mind once or twice on cases we saw differently, and he certainly changed mine on a few.

Ken was loaded with smarm. He was also crooked — or at least warped. Real hard on individuals who were busted for drugs, but somehow never got around to getting indictments on any of the traffickers. I hope he really chafes at his fate.

1 Like

Revolting as Patrick is, Abbott has plenty of hatefulness on his own.

2 Likes

Ok, you got me confused here. This n00b is a “county judge” right? Do I have the nomenclature correct?

county judge
Not a lawyer and no courtroom?
Yet in a populous county it’s a 5 person County Court? A County Court with no actual courtroom where cases are decided?
I assume you do have actual courtrooms with judges and juries and stuff like that.
This is disturbing to this outlander. We have nothing similar in Arizona. Here a judge is part of our legal system.
And this "County Judge " who isn’t a lawyer and is not an actual judge in the legal sense has the legal power vested in his office to write a statute (a law) to keep folks in their homes during thus pandemic and if someone breaks that order they could be fined or imprisoned?!
Like I said… this is confusing.

He needs ( and deserves) to be prosecuted. Williamson County officials (I live in Travis County, just south of there) are among the worst Trumpers in the state. I would LOVE to see him get prosecuted. Failing that, I’ll be happy to donate to his next opponent.

1 Like

@darrtown Not to excuse this asshole, but in Texas, “County Judge” isn’t a term for any sort of actual judge. It’s just the term for the highest authority for a county. Pretty much equivalent to the term “Mayor” for a city. DON’T get too hung up on the terminology. The issue here is that the highest authority in Williamson county (a long-time GOP stronghold just north of blue Austin) is a complete hypocrite and public-endangering asshole.

2 Likes

This may the only way we can get the upper hand on the virus.

Contact tracing is low tech and it requires man- and woman-power. There is also the problem that tracing sexual contacts is much easier than tracing casual contacts. Someone with SARS-CoV-2 sneezes on Main Street. Who are all the people within 15 feet?

A cell-phone app is a force multiplier. I don’t know if I will install it when it becomes available. Whether I do or not, government use and access is going to have to be closely monitored. It will have to be limited to public health agencies, preferably local PH agencies. HIPAA-like provisions will need to be placed around the data. Basically, like Census data restrictions, but stronger.

2 Likes

We have a higher percentage of our population tested (0.81%) than either Spain (0.76%) or France (0.51%). And they both have a much higher rate of deaths per capita than we do, as of course is true of Italy as well. We are a week or two behind those countries, so our numbers aren’t really as bad as there’s are; we’ll know better in two weeks’ time. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

And a government structure like the one described in the article almost guarantees that you’ll have a “rules for thee” situation:
As a county judge, Gravell wields sweeping authority over Williamson County as the local government’s chief executive officer who oversees the county’s budget and the commissioners court, [per Texas law]

1 Like

Of all the obnoxious actions of authorities and US leadership, this is at the bottom of my “breathing heavy” checklist.

I thought by the title that the judge blatantly drove to his grandson’s party and tied one on, spitting on attendees and tongue kissing one and all.

He loves his grandson and over-protected himself in order to see the boy. He scoffed at his own order while doing it, so, yeah, what a butthead.

I just don’t care about this, with the rest of the hideousness of all that is being done by trump and gopers going unchecked. So by all means sue me.

Now that the story is broadly shared, the judge is getting numerous death threats; that will teach him and his grandson he loves.

So, please feel good about all that heavy breathing.

2 Likes

Ah.

So he was accessorizing the fire truck he commandeered to take to the party.

2 Likes

No, Apple and Google are not designing apps. They’re designing a software framework, including provisions for security and privacy. That software framework will likely be included in an upcoming software update. On Apple devices, it will be turned off by default and users will have to turn it on via a setting. (The same will probably be true for Google’s Android devices.)

Then, for the installed and enabled framework to actually be used, people would also have to download/install an app that knows how to use it. In some cases this app could come from a (trusted?) state or local public-health agency. Where public-health agencies do not write or otherwise offer an app, there may have to be some other provider. It is possible that Apple and Google will also offer relevant apps of their own.

Finally, even if you enable the framework and install an app that uses it, for all intents and purposes you’re still anonymous – unless you test positive for the virus and you and your physician decide to report the test result via the app.

And upon making that decision, you’d be in virtually the same situation privacy-wise that you’d have been in if contact-tracing were done entirely without the help of your mobile device, except that the software could help make the process faster and more reliable.

 

Even at this very moment, without any known contact-tracing software enabled on our mobile devices, the chances are that numerous apps we’ve each chosen to use are collecting and (properly?) using a great deal of information about us. So, even at this very moment, there is a risk that Apple, Google, unscrupulous app developers, hackers, government agencies, and hackers hired by government agencies can all do nefarious things using information we’ve made available.

Enter the pandemic.

Contact-tracing is a powerful tool that can be used to control the spread of the virus. Yes, as with everything else on our mobile devices, there is a risk that it can be abused. We have to decide for ourselves (1) whether Apple or Google have a record of doing enough over the years to mitigate the threat to our privacy; and (2) whether any protections they further include are sufficient for us to enable this sort of automated contact-tracing on our mobile devices.

1 Like

Used to know better, too, in the old days.

2 Likes

There has been a bit of convergence over the years. When they first opened, they had a separate store next door to CM for things like dish soap and toilet paper. Now you can buy it there, as long as you get the expensive French import versions. And lots of CM branded items are available in regular HEBs now.

That said, the fresh produce, bulk, and bakery sections can’t be beat. It’s actually cheaper for me to shop there for the kinds of food we usually eat. I’ve done probably 75% of my shopping there over the past couple of decades, and it’s about price as much as convenience. As long you stay away from the $30 bottles of olive oil and stick to basics like lentils and bananas, they are a really good deal, even compared to a regular HEB.

First question: yes. Second question: ???. I think McCabe has been an intermediary. Buddy Falcon’s big beef has been with the Sheriff (disgruntled ex-deputry) and his purported ally, the Judge, got caught in the cross-fire as far as I can tell.

The gov/ the leg pull that on Austin all the time, for about as long as I’ve lived here.

Funniest one was the legislators who tried to keep the old airport open for general aviation so they wouldn’t have to drive an extra ten minutes from the capitol. It wasn’t even for the convenience of the general public, since everything commercial was moving to the new ABIA.

Oh come on, you know that “local control” doesn’t count for entities representing more than, say, a couple of good-sized Lufkins on the outside, especially if you count the black folk.

Just wait til you find out what the Railroad Commission does. Also how we pronounce “Mexia”.