As many of us get ready to hit the road over the holiday weekend, Ralph Bennett in this TCS Daily article provides an excellent overview of the birth of the nation’s Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower Administration. We tend to take the system for granted these days, but it is truly an engineering and economic marvel that is one of our many blessings for which we will give thanks this holiday weekend.
Sounds as if Jack Kendall, who owns a couple of Lexus dealerships in the Houston area, had the round of a lifetime recently at Pebble Beach Golf Club:
Kendall, 63, . . . made Pebble Beach history when he became the first golfer, amateur or professional, to ace two holes in the same round on the first nine holes of the 86-year-old course. His holes-in-one came on the par-3 5th and 7th holes.
To put this accomplishment in perspective, many very good golfers go a lifetime without ever making a hole in one. To it twice in a round is almost unheard of. To do it twice in a round while playing one of the most revered golf courses in the US? Now, that’s going to be rather difficult to top.
In the right move, Texans’ offensive lineman Fred Weary’s criminal case was dismissed yesterday by Harris County Court at Law Judge Pam Derbyshire, who commented from the bench that Weary did not use enough force against police officers during the Nov. 14 incident to justify either the charge or, presumably, being Tasered.
Meanwhile on the police overreaction front, this Pokerati series of posts chronicles the latest Dallas SWAT team “success” — breaking into and destroying several of the city’s underground poker rooms. Pokerati has firsthand accounts of Dallas SWAT teams swooping into the poker rooms, breaking windows, kicking down doors, and charging with assault weapons drawn into peaceful gatherings of “dangerous” Texas Hold ‘Em enthusiasts. I’m sure everyone in the Metroplex is sleeping more restfully now that these evil card sharpies are behind bars.
As former Cato Institute policy analyst Radley Balko shows in this Cato study, small municipalities frequently misuse SWAT squads for routine police work, which has led to an increasing number of botched raids resulting in injury or even death to innocent citizens. The Dallas poker raids were only the most recent example of unnecessary and dangerous SWAT unit deployments; this earlier post reported on one in a Houston suburb. Police overreaction is dangerous enough when it occurs in the spur of the moment as in the Weary case. But the risk of innocent citizens being harmed goes off the charts when SWAT teams are unnecessarily deployed to break up peaceful gatherings of people engaging in harmless activities.