Afternoon, everyone
Phillip, that's fantastic! For at least last night, he was the biggest, baddest kid on the court. He's go more guts than I do just for guarding a guy that big.
Ken, the total is for both the city and county of Los Angeles. Last time I read, Southern California, including San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties, were approaching 100 helicopters for law enforcement and fire fighting. That doesn't even count the 150 or so aircraft that the California Department of Forestry has based in the area.
Rex, I hope your mom is doing OK. Tuscaloosa County really has done a good job of upgrading their Sheriff's Department, something I wish I could say for Autauga. We are still in the dark ages here.
Steve, I'm glad you and the train crew reacted fast. Must have been a scary few moments there.
Paul, I think the government is trying to show it's "even-handed" about enforcing the border laws on the south and the north. We all know the greatest problems come from the south but we have to irritate our citizens and neighbors to the north just so no one can say we are being unfair to Mexico. The whole thing makes no sense, of course. I'll bet there are 10,000 places you could just walk through the woods and across the border in New York and no one would ever know. It was the same thing when we were allowed to carry our weapon on intrastate flights as long as we went through the same training as the sky marshal's and used the same ammunition. If I was flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I could carry my weapon but not if I was flying to Reno, because the feds never made a rule allowing it. The estimate I read is that there about 350 sky marshals flying daily and about 3,000 off-duty peace officers from other jurisdictions. As long as we had the right training, wouldn't it make sense to have all those guys available to react to an emergency? Not to the Feds. Same thing with the rule that the sky marshal's always had to wear suits. On a flight to Acapulco, how hard do you think it was to pick out the sky marshals?
Still overcast and cool down here but it's supposed to get up into the 50's tomorrow, which will be the first time we've seen that since the new year.
