The State of Texas: Feb. 23, 2014

Happy Hour Monday

Soon, the answer to “Who Shot J.R.?” will be “anyone who bought a bottle.” In March, lovers of the Dallas TV show will be able to purchase J.R. Ewing Bourbon. Unlikely the character, whose personality traits would probably best be bottled as a life-destroying, rot-gut sour mash, this bourbon is “well-balanced and slightly fruity, with a lightly spicy/honey flavor.”

Video of the Day

It’s a story as old as America’s greatest past-time: Boy spends his time fielding baseballs from Texas Rangers’s spring training:

Daily Roundup

Got Shorty — Over the weekend, Mexican officials finally captured the notorious drug emperor Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman in the resort town of Mazatlan. Head of the Sinaloa cartel, “Guzman has been on the run for years and his capture puts an end to one of the longest and most profitable careers in the drug world,” reports NPR. While the capture is great news for the law and order crowd, it does raise concerns of new crime waves along the border, as friends and rivals vie for control of the drug trade. The general consensus among numerous experts interviewed by the Texas Tribune is: who knows what’s gonna happen next? “Only time will tell if Guzmán’s arrest means that the rival Juárez cartel will try to retake the Ciudad Juárez turf it lost in 2008,” and the “capture, though significant, should not dramatically alter life in Juárez.” As with upheaval in the corporate world, there’s gonna be a bit of reacomodo (reorganization), but experts are hoping there won’t be too much “unrest on Texas’ southern border.” Just, you know, the same unrest that’s been happening since since the start of the War on Drugs.

Jaywalking It Back — It’s been a rough week for Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo. First, video of the Thursday arrest of a UT student who failed to identify herself to police after jaywalking went viral. The student was arrested, but there’s a lot of he-said-she-said regarding how the detention went down. As Acevedo learned, however, it’s not a great idea to invoke that kind of language. “In other cities there’s cops who are actually committing sexual assaults on duty, so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin,” said Acevedo during a press conference on Saturday, in which he defended his officers’s actions. According to UT’s student newspaper, the Daily Texan, Acevedo backpeddled less than 24 hours later, saying his word choice was probably not great and “his comments were the result of a strenuous week for the department.”

Guv’nor Bummer — Hopes that Governor Rick Perry was leading Texas into a future free of any criminal charges against harmless potheads went up in smoke yesterday. It was just last month when Rick Perry publicly, and pretty unequivocally, voiced his aversion to draconian drug policies and toward decriminalizing the drug. On CNN’s State of the Union show, the once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate repeated that decriminalization line, but “was the first [of four featured governors] to jump in with a flat ‘no’,” when asked about legalizing recreational use. It’s commendable that Perry sees the cruel ridiculousness in sending a kid with “one marijuana cigarette” to prison, but the governor’s whiplash positioning highlights a particularly awkward fence-straddling that limelight politicians will have to make regarding the hazy area of our budding marijuana nation.

Johnny Combine — After partying and self-promoting, Johnny Manziel’s doing what he does third-best: performing like a champ. The NFL hopeful performed well at the league Combine in Indianapolis, especially after some hand-wringing about Manziel’s short-for-the-pros height. Because it’s every Texans’s duty to know every minute detail of Manziel’s life, the Dallas Morning News has a breakdown of Mr. Football’s performance. “He was the fourth fastest quarterback … ranked fifth among quarterbacks in the vertical jump … tied for fourth in the broad jump … and was second in the three-cone drill,” according to the report. Oh, and Manziel earned the top time among quarterbacks for the twenty-yard shuttle. Perhaps Manziel’s most impressive drill was the media one. His press conference on Friday was packed with journo jocks, according to USA Today, and the once-wild-child made a concerted effort to begin a new, mature phase in life. The main takeaway from all this being that you should hold onto that Manziel merchandise, ’cause the price is about to rocket up about as fast as Johhny Football’s career.