Well, there's finally cinematic proof that driving a gas-guzzling SUV into a crowded restaurant may not be the best way to get quick service.
The accident happened at DiMassi's Mediterranean Buffet in a strip center near NRG Stadium on Kirby at 1:55 p.m. Wednesday, and left a number of restaurant patrons injured.
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Little Alex Hill would have been turning four-years-old this Friday. But rather than celebrating their child's birthday, the toddler's parents have only the bitter consolation of seeing a judge in Milam County hand Alex's foster mother a life sentence for murder.
Justice for Alex Hill Facebook
The life sentence is a small victory in the case of 2-year-old Alex, whose July 2013 death was caused by devastating injuries at the hands of her foster mother, 52-year old Sherill Small.
Alex was placed in Small's care in early 2013, after her father admitted to child welfare investigators that he had smoked marijuana while the child was tucked away in bed at night.
So, apparently criminals impersonating the Harris County District Attorney's office staff are calling residents and asking questions about loans in order to gain...well...we're not sure what they've managed to gain, but it's definitely a scam.
Photo by daBinsi via Flickr
These days the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals can generally be counted on for issuing decisions that are so far right they're practically left. They've made headlines numerous times in the last three months for their decisions on abortion law alone. There are conservative courts in the United States, but the calling the Fifth Circuit conservative is like calling a unicorn a pony: it's kind of accurate but it couldn't possibly cover the horned grandeur that is the Fifth. It wasn't always thus.
So what is the Fifth Circuit anyway? The Fifth Circuit is a court comprised of 15 active judges based in New Orleans with a jurisdiction covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Most of the judges are Southern Republicans, which is a key point here.
Come January, the Fifth Circuit is slated to ramp it up and finally hear cases on Texas court decisions regarding gay marriage and House Bill 2, the law that has forced most of the abortion clinics in the state to close, and with the current court makeup, only the most quixotic of gamblers would try and bet on the Fifth ruling against either. The court has been dragging its feet on actually hearing both of these cases, despite the fact that the odds are good that the Southern Republican block will come down against both issues with the force of the hand of God.
This isn't the first time that a bunch of Southern Republicans made sweeping decisions on this circuit court. The court has been around for a while. It was created by the Evarts Act in 1891 (the act both created the appeals courts and allowed Supreme Court judges to stop actually riding the circuit to hear cases across the country.) The appeals court deals with the appealed cases that have bounced up through the court system. But things didn't really get interesting until a crew of Southern (mostly) Republicans landed on the court.
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Investigators with the Harris County Sheriff's Office are looking for a man who they say is preying on women in the 5th ward, and is responsible for at least four sexual assaults in the last six weeks. 
While the police sketch may bear a strange resemblance to Fred Durst, the '90s white-boy rock-rapper popular with aggro frat boys who like to break stuff, this guy is much, much more dangerous.
According to police, the tattooed suspect has been picking up women who are working as escorts in the 5th ward area, just northeast of downtown. The women were then driven to Penn City Road in east Harris County, where they were brutally physically and sexually assaulted.
Photo by Groovehouse
This is one of those posts where I start off by giving the colloquial definition of "insanity." Not the Webster's meaning, in which it's defined as "extreme foolishness or irrationality" (although that would certainly qualify for anyone continuing to trot Ryan Fitzpatrick out at quarterback). I'm talking about the definition where we talk about "performing the same act repeatedly and expecting a different result."
If the benchmark is "competent starter," then Ryan Fitzpatrick sucks at being an NFL quarterback. If the benchmark were "suitable backup," Ryan Fitzpatrick is just fine. Unfortunately for the Texans, he's been their starter the first nine weeks.
Not only has he been mediocre to poor, but he's actually regressed over these past nine games, which is the antithesis of what's supposed to be happening with a veteran "gamer" who is supposed to be highly intelligent. Sending him out there in Week 10 to start against Cleveland would be the height of insanity.
Bill O'Brien is a lot of things. Earlier today, he provided evidence that "insane" is not one of them. Ryan Mallett will be your new Houston Texans starting quarterback.
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The man behind this ad is your new governor, Texas.
Anyone hoping Texas' deep red days were behind us got a big fat wakeup call last night. The AP called the governor's race for Greg Abbott just an hour after the polls closed (not much of a surprise there), and as election results continued to trickle in, this much became clear: big, moneyed efforts completely failed at pushing Texas any closer toward swing-state territory. No way in hell does it look like Texas will "turn blue" any time soon; last night, it just got a deeper shade of red.
Battleground Texas, the group started by former Obama operatives that hoped to boost the state's Democratic vote, appears to have changed very little this go at it. Some say its blunders -- like declaring in a memo right before Election Day that voter turnout was totally up, when it was really totally down -- may have actually hurt Democratic prospects in Texas. Maybe it really was impossible to make any gains with this level of anti-Obama fervor bleeding into state races across the country.
Battleground Texas had from the start said it was playing a long game, saying it couldn't change Texas overnight. But the statement last night from executive director Jenn Brown, lauding the group's "unprecedented data infrastructure" and "cutting-edge digital strategies that helped connect Texans in every community," was exactly the kind of opaque language you'd expect when there's very little silver lining to point to.
There are a number of reasons to believe Texas might not turn blue anytime soon -- booming population in the state's red-leaning suburbs, small towns that are even more staunchly Republican than they used to be, and a state Democratic party that can't field enough candidates to even put at Democrat in every race across the state (see this handy Texas Monthly graphic). So lets look at some of last night's races to see what prompted state GOP chairman Steve Munesteri to oh-so-humbly declare, "We annihilated Battleground Texas."
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Print ArticleThe texas governor's election results map. Turn Texas blue? *snort* #tcot #Texas #ByeByeWendy #TexasElections pic.twitter.com/7B0sNa6UUQ
— ThreePercenter (@jon_jononymous) November 5, 2014Well, it appears that Texas is remaining awfully red. At least for the next four years or so, anyway.
With the results of last night's elections leaning quite heavily in favor of Texas Republicans, quite a few of the folks who were aiming to turn Texas blue took to Twitter to voice their frustrations.
We love a good vent -- especially on social media -- and so many of the Dems' responses were too clever to pass up. So we've compiled some of the best to help you ease those blue-blooded wounds this morning.
But don't worry. There's more.
While we were trolling our Twitter timelines for reactions that measured up to comedic gold, we came across some of the worst sore winner comments we've ever seen, and because we were kind of horrified, we've thrown some in for good measure. Fair is fair, right?
Here's to four more years, folks.
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Prior to and even after the inception of a college football playoff (which would be given the creative proper noun name of College Football Playoff), the naysayers said that expanding the postseason to four teams would cheapen the regular season, that games would become less meaningful.
Dinur
And as anyone with a remote sense for the weekend to weekend drama that is college football's regular season knows, that notion was and still is utterly asinine.
Of course, the people trying to sell the erosion of the regular season's significance as some sort of justification for avoiding a playoff had a vested interest in the previous system. It lined their pockets. But the runaway freight train of cash could not be stopped. The playoff is coming, and the second week of CFP rankings along with the upcoming schedule this weekend illustrate how ludicrous the notion of the regular season's being diminished is.
First, here are the latest rankings:
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Victoria County Sheriff's Office Robert Kirchener claimed he went on missionary trip to Sierra Leone right before he was picked up for public intoxication.
Nobody wants to go to jail, but some people are willing to go that extra mile to try and avoid being behind bars. And sometimes, every so often, there's an extra-special almost-brilliant type who comes up with a get-out-of-jail plan so brazen that all the rest of us can do is stand back in wonder. Robert Brandon Kirchner, of Victoria, is such a man.
Last Thursday, Kirchner, 29, was arrested by the Victoria Police Department for public intoxication. He was duly transported to the Victoria County Jail. That's where things got entertaining, because Kirchner took a rather interesting route to try and avoid jail, according to a Victoria County Sheriff's Office release.
Now, in case you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, people across the Lone Star State have been pretty freaked out since the nation's first Ebola patient arrived in Dallas in late September. We've heard about people dodging Texas weddings over Ebola fear. One family even forbade a relative from visiting after a trip to South Africa (keep in mind that this bout of Ebola has been confined to West Africa, which is a long way from the southern part of the continent.)
Over in Victoria, the Victoria County Sheriff's Office has changed its intake procedures. When booking someone, sheriffs now ask questions -- subtle stuff like, "Have you been to Africa and do you potentially have an incredibly infectious and dangerous disease?" -- meant to determine if you might possibly have Ebola. (Though if the Fox News pundits are right and Ebola is actually being brought in from Mexico, we detect a flaw in their questioning.)
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