Tex's Place

Good morning!     This is your daily forum to share what you've heard, what you've learned, and what you know, and just shoot the breeze.   Have a wonderful day my friends.   -Tex

A Lakewood, Colo., residential neighborhood is one target of new state zoning laws aimed at creating more affordable housing choices. (The Denver Post) By John Aguilar Late nights that stretched past midnight. Nearly 100 hours spent revising more than 350 pages of city zoning code. Attempts to engage with restless residents who worried about where the whole effort was headed. After all that work, the Lakewood City Council finished the job in December, passing final changes to the city’s land-use blueprint designed to pave the way for the construction of more diverse and dense housing, like triplexes and quadplexes, anywhere in Colorado’s fifth-largest city. “It was very condensed, very intense in terms of the time we put into it,” Lakewood Mayor Wendi Strom said. Fast-forward to the April 7 special election brought to a ballot by residents unhappy with the changes. When the initial results popped up on the city’s website at 8 p.m. — showing a resounding rejection of the counci...

By Becca Lower President Reagan used to love to use an old Russian adage, "Trust, but verify," when  talking abou t the nuclear disarmament negotiations with the former Soviet Union and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the 1980s. I'll get back to that in a minute. As RedState previously wrote, our negotiating team (possibly without VP Vance in tow) is returning to Pakistan for the next round of nuclear talks with Iran on Monday, as numerous uncertainties compound about who speaks for the Iranians or even controls its military actions. In the middle of trying to make a deal of a different kind on nukes with Iran (and whomever is actually running it right now), President Trump and the U.S. might well turn to a paraphrase of Reagan's favored quip: " Don't  trust  and  verify." That was a point U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz made during a sit down on ABC News' "This Week" program with host Jon Karl, which aired on Sunday. Waltz told ...

Submarine under construction in 2015 at Elecctic Boat in Groton, Conn. (AP) By Owen Tucker-Smith GROTON, Conn.— Thirty-five years ago, the end of the Cold War drained this hardscrabble coastal manufacturing town of its chief purpose: building America’s submarines. Now the Navy needs the shipyard along the Thames River to rev its engines back into high gear. The military’s orders have left Groton with a high-stakes challenge: how to resurrect a bygone era of military might in a far-flung seaside town short on workers, homes and transit. “It’s amazing,” said Martha Marx, a state senator, of the potential impact of the company’s hiring push. “Except we don’t have anywhere for these people to live.” In its race against China’s advances in maritime technology, the Defense Department is focused on upgrading its nuclear-submarine fleet, and it’s the job of Groton-based manufacturer General Dynamics Electric Boat and a slew of local suppliers to keep up. After a string of delays, the ...

By Nick Arama One of the problems with addressing Iran's misbehavior in the Strait of Hormuz has been laid bare in recent weeks: the cowardice of some in the world community to stand up for what's right, for countries to stand up even to protect their own economic interests and their own vessels.  There was a resolution from Bahrain trying to address the problem, but it was blocked in the United Nations. That was a particularly  shameful vote  when they couldn't stand up to a terrorist state and showed their ineffectiveness to the world.  Instead, you got a whole lot of talk about what they might do after the military action was over. After Iran caved to our pressure and agreed to reopen it. Man, Keir Starmer is a wanker. Keir Starmer is a wanker. Bet he shows up next to end WW2. Wanker. pic.twitter.com/XepC5Xb163 — Adam Schiffylus (@GogginWalters) April 17, 2026 Thanks for nothing. The funny thing was that, as we reported, one cruise ship, the Celestyal Discov...

By Ross O'Keefe Heartless users on  Los Angeles’ Skid Row  are testing their drugs on dogs as part of  horrific animal abuse in the notoriously squalid area , a nonprofit group says. “Every day we get another call, saying people are trying to sell their dog for drugs, and this dog is dying on the streets,” Joey Tuccio, a volunteer with Starts With One Today,  told KTLA , saying vile abusers have tested their drugs on dogs to make sure they’re not laced with deadly fentanyl. “We try to come every Sunday and all we see are dogs being bred, dogs being abused and neglected.” The group receives frequent calls about animals in need in the area and dogs dying or being sold for drugs. A photo of a black dog rescued by the group shows the pooch with a cone around his head and a rotten leg. “We had to amputate the black dog’s leg because it was rotten to the bone,” he told The California Post of the Skid Row rescue. The group’s co-founder, Jonathan Parker, said puppies are be...

By Jennifer Oliver O'Connell This week seems to be rife with journalistic malpractice from outlets either running with leaked and unsubstantiated material that tries and fails to put Trump administration officials in a bad light or works to erode and undermine our nation's institutional bodies of governance.  The latest installment from The New York Times involves leaked memos from the United States Supreme Court, verified by  more anonymous sources .  The Times spoke to 10 people, liberals and conservatives, who were familiar with the deliberations over the pivotal emergency order and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because confidentiality was a condition of their employment. Amazing how one can fail so spectacularly on this basic tenet of integrity. God help us. The papers expose what critics have called the weakness at the heart of the shadow docket: an absence of the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases. After obtaining th...

By Tyler Durden Authored by Bryan Hyde via American Greatness, A pro-life father of seven whose Pennsylvania home was raided at gunpoint by the FBI under the Biden administration has been awarded a seven-figure settlement from the Department of Justice (DOJ). Fox News reports  that Mark Houck, a devout Catholic and pro-life activist, was arrested in 2021 by the FBI and prosecuted for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. The charges stemmed from an October 2021 incident that took place outside a Philadelphia, PA abortion clinic where Houck and his young son were accosted by a pro-abortion volunteer who harassed and yelled at the boy until Houck pushed the volunteer away. A  jury acquitted Houck  in 2023; he and his wife then filed a lawsuit later that year alleging that the Biden DOJ had engaged in malicious and retaliatory prosecution, abuse of process, false arrest, and assault. Houck’s lawsuit specifically  accused the DOJ of wh...

By Jennifer Oliver O'Connell We watched on Thursday as the entertainment zine "Variety," and CNN international anchor Christiane Amanpour, crashed and burned in their attempts to own Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. However, legacy media is committed to its mission to take out the Trump administration cabinet, especially the ones they really cannot stand: like Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel. The end result of these quixotic campaigns is the media beclowning themselves, as "The Atlantic" has now done. On Friday night, The Atlantic released an anonymously sourced hit piece on Patel titled, "The FBI Director Is MIA:  Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences ." The article begins with an anecdotal story about Patel supposedly losing access to his computer, and freaking out so much that he assumed he had been fired. It rambles on with "people familiar with the matter" sourcing, peppered ...