Skattershooting . . .

• A while back I caught all sorts of grief for writing that the lowering of the blood alcohol limit to .08 for DWI would do more harm than good in this state. (I even made the great Bud Kennedy's column). In a nutshell, I said that the change would simply clog the courts with "marginal" DWI cases.  Based upon the new numbers, I may have been right. The Department of Public Safety reports that in the first 9 months after the law changed, DWI arrests increased by 2,700  - that's a 14% increase.
• I support ABC's decision to put Dennis Miller in the booth for Monday Night Football. I don't need an ex-jock to tell me what I just saw.
• Speaking of Monday Night Football, new sideline reporter Melissa Stark is hot.

• What irrelevant subject was being babbled about by John Madden and Pat Summerall as Joey Galloway lay on the turf after suffering an obvious knee injury during the Cowboys-Eagle game?
• From the "Department of Huh?": Troy Aikman had been taken to the locker room after getting his head rattled and the Cowboys were set to receive their first kickoff since that injury. So what was new QB Randall Cunningham doing at that moment in preparation for his debut? Sitting on the bench looking like a deer in headlights.
• The University of Texas will rue the day they put Chris Simms ahead of Major Applewhite for the QB job. I don't care if Simms looks like Charles Atlas and Applewhite looks like Opie. Applewhite has the ability to simply win. Just ask Texas A&M fans to reminisce about Bucky Richardson.
• Is there any greater waste of time than listening to someone, and I mean anyone, predict the exact score of a football game? To quote Slate magazine, “The odds against predicting a final score are quite high, and even if you're right, it's a fluke, and then so what?”
• Moving away from football, the current problem that Firestone is facing because of their faulty tires is more than simply a problem. It might kill the company.
• After a water main was cut by a fiber optics company, the basement parking garage of the Santa Fe Lofts in downtown Dallas was flooded on 9/4/00. On Channel 8 that night, one resident was interviewed and said, “People were crying. There were Jaguars and Lexuses down there.” Oh, the humanity.
• Speaking of materialism,  I always joke with my buddies that God has a Power Point presentation waiting for us on the day of our death. As we walk up to the Pearly Gates, He fires up one slide showing the wealth we've accumulated and then, after a moment, shows a different slide of a starving Ethiopian boy. At that point the lights come up and He turns to us and says, “Now, explain to me what I just saw.”
• The network's coverage of George Bush blunders is puzzling. None of the major networks so much as mentioned the release (on www.thesmokinggun.com) of the wedding videotape showing a possibly drunken Bush. However, when he inadvertently utters the "A" word into a live microphone, you couldn't turn the TV on without seeing it.
• Space prevents full coverage here, but there is a fascinating story ongoing regarding former assistant United States Attorney Bill Johnson. He made headlines in February when he resigned his position as AUSA because he believed high-ranking Justice Department officials had failed to inform Janet Reno of critical evidence pertaining to the 1993 Branch Davidian raid. The feds were not happy about him breaking ranks. Texas Monthly magazine was so impressed that it selected him as one of twenty "most impressive, intriguing and influential Texans of 2000". (September 2000 edition, page 155). Now, according to a September 1, 2000 story in the Dallas Morning News, he is facing prosecution by the federal government for allegedly failing to disclose evidence to his superiors. Smells fishy.