12.01.2021

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts




Ten years ago to the day four very little children were killed in Bay City, Texas. Remember it? 
  • Another day in America where you send your kids to school and they die. This time in Michigan. Will we remember this one?   

    • Watch this video if you haven't seen it. 

    • And the dead have names and faces.
      17 year old Madisyn Baldwin

      16 year old Tate Myre

      14 year old Hana St. Juliana

  • It almost seems wrong to write about anything else. 
  • The Update has story about a murder in Boyd last night.
  • The Ghislaine Maxwell trial got started off with a bang. 

  • There was a heck of a Republican fight between the Jewish Space Laser representative and a South Carolina representative yesterday.



     
  • Despite what you will hear, we'll learn very little in oral arguments today in the Mississippi abortion case.

  • I'm not saying that it's the beginning of a Winter Surge, but it could be the beginning of a Winter Surge. 

  • A couple of facts have been revealed in the case of the alleged drunk driving death which killed an off duty police office in Lake Worth.  According to an affidavit obtained by the Star-Telegram, the driver submitted to a breath test that came back at 0.144, and he "arrived at 11 a.m. Saturday at Fuzzy’s and began drinking, and left about 1 p.m."

  • I can't believe the Elizabeth Holmes trial is still going on -- she's been testifying this week -- and we learned this is an example of how she would write out her schedule. If your schedule is so packed, that seems like a lot of time wasted in writing it all out. (She actually says this was proof of the demands her boyfriend put upon her as he controlled and manipulated her.)


  • Another prosecutor story. "When one woman broke off a relationship with him, he subpoenaed her phone 33 times over two years, according to the indictment. She repeatedly told him to leave her alone, but he persisted." Yep, he was using grand jury subpoenas to spy on his past flings.

  • In this day of college coach turnover, it drives me nuts when people don't understand the term "buyout." Here we go: If a coach decides to leave before his contract ends, his contract "buyout clause", if there is one, will obligated the coach to pay the school a set amount of money (although the tab is often picked up by his new school.)  But if it is the school who fires the coach without cause (almost always the case), he is owed ever dime still left on the contract. Here's an example of a buyout paragraph: 

    • Some people get it absolutely backwards and say, "If there is no buyout clause then he gets no money if they fire him." Nope. If he gets fired, he gets all the money due him.  
  • The revised Big 12 will be on display this weekend in two championship games. 

  • Messenger: Above the Fold 

at 8:31 AM

11.30.2021

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts




I stand by that.   

  • I still can't get over that Lubbock shooting video I posted yesterday. And I've learned a wild twist: The shooter, at the time of the killing, was married to sitting district judge. Their divorce was finalized two weeks after the incident:

  • State Rep. David Spiller of Jacksboro has an opponent and, get this, he was arrested in April for taking part in the Trump Insurrection! He lives in Forestburg. He also deserves to receive zero votes. 


  • Since self-defense is a big player in the news these days, here is an interesting case out of McKinney. The jury rejected self-defense but she got a victory anyway in that they acquitted her of murder, found her guilty of just manslaughter, and then gave her probation. (It's a good thing they acquitted her of murder -- a jury can't give probation for that offense.) The deceased was a football star at Abilene Christian. Toby Shook was the defense lawyer. 


  • But those that shared that viral story last week told me they did their own research online.
  • LSU stole Notre Dame's Brian Kelly last night. This is amazing. Despite there being a very real possibility that Notre Dame is in the four team playoff less than one week from today, their coach has bolted. Insanity. 
    • There are some reports that Kelly will get $15 million a year. I'd tap the brakes on that. But I bet it's in the $10 to $12 million range.
    • An actual sentence from a 1982 Sport's Illustrated story about Texas A&M hiring head coach Jackie Sherrill: "Six days earlier, the 38-year-old Sherrill had stunned the college football world by signing a six-year contract with the Aggies for—hold on, folks—$267,000 a year, a total of $1,602,000. That makes him far and away the highest-paid college coach in the land." That was true. The highest paid coach ever. 
    • Speaking of old Aggies, former coach R.C. Slocum is doing a good job battling cancer. He "rang the bell" at Baylor's Scott and White.

  • OU quick hits:
    • The last picture of Lincoln Riley ever on the field as an Oklahoma Sooner:

    • Dude! TCU, Baylor, OSU, Tech, et. al. had to find out OU and Texas were leaving the Big 12 by reading the Houston Chronicle.

  • More coaching news this morning: Texas Tech's Offensive Coordinator Sonnie Cumbie is headed to Louisiana Tech as head coach.
  • Briefly last night:

  • I watched a short documentary on Amazon which I knew nothing about: The Bombing of Wall Street in 1920. I love learning about stuff like that. 

  • Rare baseball bullet point: "At 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Dec. 1, baseball's current collective bargaining agreement will expire. If no agreement is reached, we will have a lockout." I think we are going to have a lockout. Fun fact: They are meeting in Irving right now. 
  • The Wise County Messenger is running a deal for $20 a year which is both print and online. Buy it. Support local media.



at 8:33 AM

11.29.2021

Random Monday Morning Thoughts





There needs to be a documentary about this. She was convicted by a jury and then cut a deal instead of having the jury or the judge assess punishment. (She faced possible prison time.) She was then later found* "actually innocent" on the charges, and sued the prosecutors for malicious prosecution. They escaped because of immunity law. Amazingly, her lawsuit against Collin County is still alive after a Motion to Dismiss was denied at the district court level in May of this year. I suppose that is now on appeal. She got her law license back and tried to run for judge in 2019 but got kicked off the ballot by the Republican chair for a very technical reason. (*Nerdy stuff: I haven't confirmed it, but I bet she waived her right to appeal as part of the plea agreement, but the agreement failed to say she couldn't raise an actual innocence claim by a writ -- assuming it can be waived.)


  • This video out of Lubbock is one of the most horrific things I've ever watched (and I urge caution before you decide to click on it.)  And I think the self-defense claim is a reach. From the moment he went and got the gun, it feels like he intended to kill the man.   Another shocking aspect of the video is just how everyone reacts so casually as a guy lays dead on a porch. Story. 

  • Good grief. 

  • An off-duty Euless detective was killed by an alleged drunk driver in Lake Worth on Saturday afternoon. There's a connection to Fuzzy's restaurant (but not the one in Decatur). 

    • I mentioned the former Bridgeport resident and current  Lake Worth PD chief on Friday. Little did I know he had to deal with that the next day. 

  • This wreck on Stemmons Freeway on Saturday injured a Dallas deputy. That's a heck of an impact. 

  • I said on Friday that the new COVID variant would be named "Nu."  Well, it was supposed to be until the World Health Organization thought that people would confuse "Nu" with "New". The next name up, "Xi" just happens to also be than name of a certain Chinese man. So it got named Omicron.
  • Matthew McConaughey says he will not run for Texas governor. It would have been a good bit. 
  • Rep. Louis Gohmert may be the dumbest man in East Texas, but Wise County's representative comes close. Jackson is, somehow, a doctor. 

  • Legal stuff this week: (1) Arguments in a Mississippi case targeting  Roe v. Wade is in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, (2) Jury selection begins toay in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in New York City, and (3) jury selection also begins for the trial for Minneapolis female cop who killed the guy when she mistook her gun for her taser in April of this year. That's taser case got to trial quickly.

  • Lincoln Riley leaving OU for USC is about as shocking of football news as I can remember. 

    • And some speculate that he was bolting because he wasn't a fan of OU going to the SEC. I scoffed at that at first, but then I saw some takes like the one below. That guy's right. Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Aggie, Florida, Auburn, Tennessee, Texas, and OU can't all be winners when they are in the same conference. 

    • Within hours of Riley's announcement, OU's top running back recruit, top QB recruit, and top WR recruit decommitted. Earlier in the afternoon, this guy saw it coming: 

  • I don't know how anyone thinks the NFL can compare to college football.  Saturday I watched Baylor escape Tech in a bizarre and wildly entertaining game, Alabama and Auburn go to 4 OTs, Oklahoma State hang on to dear life against an OU miracle drive, and even SFA and Incarnate Word going to overtime in a playoff game. It was all glorious. And I just saw the highlights of Aggie/LSU and only parts of Michigan and Ohio State. 
    When Alabama tied it up in regulation.
    After Michigan's win. 


  • The Star-Telegram has started a new thing every Sunday . . . 

at 8:31 AM

11.26.2021

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out of Here

at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts




I didn't expect it would take 10 years+ before they hooked up again.    

  • There is no Messenger Update, most people are in bed, but THWMISB©, a modern day farmer of yore if you will, is up before the sun. 
  • When I'm wrong I'm wrong, and I was definitely wrong with my prediction on the Arbery trial. I didn't think a jury in the Deep South had it in them, but they did. 
    • But the case will forever be a perfect example of how any suspect should never talk to the cops.  There are no deaf, dumb, and blind men in prison.

    • And without the video taken by Defendant Bryan "Roddie" Williams (pictured in the middle, above), there would have never been a prosecution. And even that prosecution didn't occur until that video was leaked to a local Georgia radio station who posted it on its website and public outrage ensued. It soon went viral. But get this: It was leaked to that radio station by Williams (!) because he "wanted to clear up some rumors circulating in the community." 

  • The Fort Worth Court of Appeals late Wednesday refused to reverse the conviction of the "Lottery" case out of Wichita Falls which I've been following for months.
    • Jason Carlile was charged with a sex offense. His mother just happened to win the lottery. 
    • Before the criminal trial, the mother testified at a divorce hearing in December, 2018 that she had "anted up $650,000 in legal costs for her son, Jason Wayne Carlile" and specifically "indicated she paid $400,000 to attorney Heather Barbieri of Plano to defend her 47-year-old son against sex-crime charges." That's when my radar went off. 

    • So what happened at trial? This is how the court of appeals described the attorneys' conduct: They "conducted no voir dire, exercised no peremptory strikes, made no opening statement, examined no witnesses, made no objections, presented no defense, made no closing argument and presented nothing on punishment.” He received a life sentence in prison. 
    • According to the court, the decision of his lawyers to do nothing was an intentional trial ploy with the hope of getting the case reversed on appeal for, well, doing nothing. That was a bold strategy. 
    • A different lawyer had to handle the appeal so he argued ineffective assistance of trial counsel, and used some blunt language saying, "Defense counsel did not even ‘fog a mirror’ during trial.” 

    • But since the plan to raise ineffective assistance was the plan all along once a Motion for Continuance was denied, the appellate court said it wasn't going to bail the defendant out now. 
    • The court wrote, “Carlile and his attorneys spread their joint motive all over the record.” Quoting one of its prior decisions, the court also said, “There is no room in our profession for the playing of games.” His conviction will stand. 
    • The guy will do life in prison. Maybe he deserved it, maybe he didn't. But it wasn't a fair fight at trial. 
    • I'm really appalled at all of this. And if that $400,000 figure as reported the the Wichita Falls Times Record News is correct, this case should receive wide publicity. (It's always possible that some of the fee was refunded, but I haven't seen any reports about it in the media if it was.)
  • Ok, this is wild. 
  • Remember the two teenagers who were murdered on the basketball court in Haltom City at Beach and 820? Well three arrests were made: One defendant is 17 and the other two are only listed as "juveniles" which means they are under 17. Remember me saying on Wednesday that there has been a lot of violent juvenile crime in the metroplex lately? 

  • There is an inordinate amount of buzz yesterday and this morning about a new variant of COVID (it will be called "Nu") which seems really potent. I don't know if it is legit or if it is over-hyped because of skeleton news crews looking for content on Thanksgiving. But in the last 24 hours Britain, and now Israel, have shut down travel from some southern African countries in response.

  • WFAA is flat out making this up.

  • Good grief. The victim (and future author) failed to pick the defendant out of a lineup but that didn't stop the prosecutor. He went forward with the trial anyway and convinced the victim they had the right guy so she identified him at trial. It wasn't him.  (The guy served 16 years in prison, and once released, had been on the sexual offender registration list which serves as a Scarlet Letter for jobs and relationships.)

  • The Cowboys game had an official time of 3 hours and 53 minutes. The teams had a combined 28 penalties for 267 yards. 
    • Of all college rules that need to be adopted by the NFL, it is the change to 15 yards and an automatic first down for pass interference instead of from the spot of the foul. 
  • I thought that 2 minute and 20 second Chipotle commercial during the Cowboy game was fantastic. It had everyone in our house locked in.  (And how much did that cost when you consider air time, production, and paying the music rights to Coldplay for the song and Kacey Musgrave to sing it?)

  • Anyone try to go to Fort Worth from Wise County late in the afternoon lately? You'll hit a rush hour traffic jam between Bonds Ranch and Blue Mound roads as the population around that area has exploded over the last few years. 
  • Since it is now officially Christmas time, we can all agree we hate this couple, right?

  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 875 days.
  • Messenger: Above the Fold (there's not one.)

at 8:29 AM

11.25.2021

Annual Thanksgiving (Not So) Random Thought

 


Always a crowd pleaser for long time readers. 

at 8:29 AM
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