A Pound of Thoughts

…of sports, that is.  Brittney Reese, a track-and-field athlete at University of Mississippi in Oxford, has just earned herself a ticket to Osaka, Japan, to compete in the World Track and Field Championships.  Read the full article here.

She competed in Indianapolis, Indiana, over the weekend at the U.S. Championships.  She almost won, also.

Reese came within an eyelash of matching her personal best in the long jump, placing second to Nike’s Grace Upshaw with a jump of 21 feet, 10¾ inches.

The kicker, as Reese freely admits, is she led for nearly the entire competition. The 28-year-old Upshaw, a three-time U.S. Outdoor champion, hit 22 feet, 1½ inch on her final attempt, which gave Reese one last shot at beating her more-experienced contemporary.

Reese sprinted down the runway and did just about everything right… except she caught her toe on the foul board. When she landed in the sand, she realized she’d have to settle for second.

Either way, she’s headed for the World Championships starting Aug. 25 in Osaka, Japan.

There’s just one rub, though…she needs to get a passport - and fast.  I am happy for the girl, I really am…I just have one thing against her - Why couldn’t she have attended Mississippi State instead?? (Just a joke…congrats, Brittney!)

She was born in 1998.

These stories just keep mounting up.  Driving into work this morning, I was listening to “Gulf Coast Mornings” on our local Fox News Talk Radio station.  Then they broke this story.  Totally tragic.  When is our country going to wake up?

Per Sun Herald:

A Vancleave man, grappling with a potentially failed marriage, stabbed his wife to death early Tuesday morning, then plunged 10 stories to his death from atop the IP casino parking garage.

Witnesses report seeing the mangled body of Manuel Sandoval, 32, on the sidewalk at 5:30 a.m., a suicide note crammed in his pocket. Two hours later Jackson County officials found the body of his wife, Samantha Thomason, in a bed in the couple’s mobile home at the corner of Southern Pine and Western roads in Vancleave.

To top it all off, he is an illegal alien.  And another thing:  he was a “contractor” per the above-linked report.  How on God’s green earth could he get a job as a contractor without the proper credentials??  Amazing.  Just amazing.

Apparently, the reason he killed her was she was leaving him.  He allowed some of his Mexican buddies to move in, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  When she came by to pick up her belongings, he killed her.

This may sound cold, but at least we taxpayers don’t have to pay for criminal trial proceedings as well as deportation proceedings.  At least he spared us that expense.  I just grieve for the poor girl’s family.

They need to find out who his employer was and charge them to the nth degree for violating immigration laws…Oops, I’m sorry guys, I forgot.  They don’t do that here in this country…

She was born in 1968.

Otherwise known as the 4th of July!

“You see things that are and say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), dramatist and writer.

factious \FAK-shuhs\, adjective:
1. Given to faction; addicted to form parties and raise dissensions, in opposition to government or the common good; turbulent; seditious; prone to clamor against public measures or men; — said of persons.
2. Pertaining to faction; proceeding from faction; indicating, or characterized by, faction; — said of acts or expressions; as, factious quarrels.

Example Sentence:  Many nobles sought good government, rather than being factious, and were only forced into war by the king’s incompetence.
– “Cade’s Rebellion, History of United Kingdom,”, Encyclopedia Britannica

Origin:  Factious derives from Latin factiosus, from factio, a party, a group of people, especially a political party, faction, or side.

Update (1:23 p.m.):   Per the same website (MichelleMalkin.com), Cochran voted Nay on the cloture vote…So I’ll have to strike through some of what I wrote below…I reserve the right to leave some of what I said standing - for now - until the passage vote is done.

According to this article at MM.com, the shamnesty bill cloture vote has passed, 64-35.  That means the bill gets pushed further into review by the Senate.  Among the votes for cloture?  Mississippi’s own Thad Cochran and Trent Lott.

Now is the time, folks of Mississippi.  I dare say that Cochran & Lott have been in Washington too long.  They are ignoring their constituents to their own political peril.  (Although Trent Lott has been pretty much useless since the whole Strom Thurmond gaffe).  I, personally, am committed to seeing new leadership for Our Great State.  If our senators have no respect for our intelligence and our desires for this nation, then they need to go.  It’s that simple.  And we have the power to change the landscape.

We can always send Trent Lott back to tend to his goats.

(You can also go here for the best summary I’ve seen for this.)

Go here for a remembrance of the lives of Wayne and Michelle Hughes, the tragic victims of Sunday’s motorcyle accident in Gulfport.

I will provide one quote from the story:

“They were just fun and fun to be around,” said Bobby Hughes, Wayne Hughes’ only living brother. “They were friendly and they were always interested in you. They were just easy to like.”

“Wayne never met a stranger he couldn’t talk to, and Michelle was very outgoing.”