Is My Neighborhood Santa Protesting Police Brutality?

Today is the first day of Winter.

Winter is off to a chilly start at my usually not too chilly location on the planet.

Yesterday, on the last day of Fall, on my way to walk around Fosdick Lake in Oakland Lake Park, drenching drizzle caused me to opt out of that plan and continue on to an increasingly rare Saturday Town Talk visit.

Today in the noon time frame there was no drenching drizzle so I opted to take an increasingly rare walk around my neighborhood.

Walking north on Canyon Creek Drive I soon saw that one of my neighbors has Santa looking a bit unusual.

This Santa is about three miles from the machine gun toting Santa I blogged about earlier in the month in a blogging titled On My Way Today To Walk With The Village Creek Indian Ghosts I Had An Encounter With A Machine Gun Toting Santa.

I am fairly certain there is not some sort of Santa Gang War going on in my neighborhood.

Could Santa, with his arms in the air, in a "Please Don't Shoot Me" pose, be a reference to the Michael Brown murder in Ferguson?

Or is this supposed to suggest that Santa is climbing the tree to gain access to the chimney?

I likely will never know the answer to this particular Santa question....

Rainbow Lounge Police Brutality In Fort Worth

There have been a few times since I quit getting a daily local paper when I have found I missed an item of local news. Usually I learn this when someone makes mention of something with me having no clue what they are talking about.

The latest instance of me being in the dark is in regards to an incident in Fort Worth that has turned into a national story that has Fort Worth not looking so good, with me learning about it via the New York Times.

A few weeks ago a new gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge opened in Fort Worth. On June 28, about an hour after midnight, the bar was raided by Fort Worth Police and agents from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

June 28 was the 40th anniversary of the infamous Stonewall riot in New York City that sparked the gay rights movement.

The Fort Worth raid turned violent, leaving one man in a hospital with a serious head injury. The man with the head injury is Chad Gibson, 26, from Euless. He has a concussion, a fracture to his skull and internal bleeding. Another man had his ribs broken and another had his thumb broken.

The police entered the bar without saying who they were or why they were there. Witnesses described the police as acting "hyped up." More than 20 men were rounded up and taken outside where they were handcuffed and forced to lie face down on the parking lot.

The police continued their harassment for about a half hour. When Gibson was attacked he was sitting on steps at the back of the bar, holding a bottle of water. The cop tapped him on his shoulder, Gibson then turned and asked, "Why?" The cop then twisted Gibson's right arm behind his back, grabbed him by the neck, swung him off the steps and slammed his head into a wall. Then the cop threw Gibson to the floor.

One witness, Lindsey Thompson, said she saw the cop slam Gibson's head onto the floor after his hands were cuffed.

Reaction to the police brutality was swift. Within hours 100s were protesting at the Tarrant County Courthouse. When the police report came out it drastically did not match what observers say actually happened. This further inflamed the protesters. After a week of bad publicity, making Fort Worth look worse than usual, Mayor Mike Moncrief called for a Federal Investigation.