'Maggie Lee for Good': The Book

If you'll excuse an off-topic indulgence, long-time readers may recall that my niece Maggie Lee Henson died along with another boy nearly three years ago in a tragic church bus accident, lingering three excruciating weeks in intensive care before finally giving up the ghost. My brother and sister-in-law have jointly authored a book about their extraordinary personal and spiritual journey in the aftermath of that family cataclysm titled "Maggie Lee for Good," which is also the name of an annual memorial on Maggie's birthday which began in 2009 and has taken on quite a life of its own. The mostly online campaign encouraged people to perform one good deed or act of kindness in Maggie Lee's memory on her birthday, October 29. Tapping into religious communities not just in Louisiana, Texas and the South but worldwide (my brother is a preacher in Shreveport), the effort far surpassed anyone's expectations, with more than 18,000 people participating in the first year. This book documents both stories of goodness that resulted from the ML4G campaign and their family's personal struggles and crises of faith during that dark hour in their lives. From the publisher, here's the set-up:

'Let Yankees adopt such low callings ...'

Thanks to readers who had kind things to say, in the comments and via email, about my father's recent award. My brother has written about the ceremony, and I put up an item on my personal blog, Huevos Rancheros, ruminating on some of the family history discussed at the event. See "Let Yankees adopt such low callings: Reflections on the making of a southern lawyer."

Death to the Facilitators: Why Grits won't be "occupying" anything anytime soon

With public support weakening, police today will roust Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in multiple cities, most notably at the epicenter in New York. In general, Grits disapproves of police rousting protesters of whatever ilk, but since the OWS folks appear to have no goals and no endgame, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.

OWS has accomplished one amazing thing. They've re-framed how Americans talk about wealth inequality in a way that gives most Americans an "us" (the 99%) to align with. But there's a lot more to do to turn that important but potentially short-lived shift in public perception into tangible reform. Getting to actual change takes more than vague ideas and slogans. It requires leadership, decision making, and long-term movement-building and mass organizing.

Sign at OWS protest, via the International Business Times

The main reason I won't join the OWS movement any time soon has nothing to do with its lack of a well-defined agenda (there are plenty of opportunities for good work on their issue areas), but mainly with its lack of a well-defined leadership. Sun Tzu said millenia ago that formations dictate outcomes, and it's true. I vowed several years back never to join another political group that operates based on a "consensus" decision making process, which unfortunately is one of the hallmarks of the OWS movement. Indeed, I wrote a disgusted polemic several years ago articulating a detailed case against that bane of lefty movements and corporate retreats titled "Death to the Facilitators! In Favor of Roberts Rules of Order." The issues addressed in that unpublished essay are incredibly relevant IMO to why the OWS movement is losing steam as winter sets in: Their structure disavows leadership to the point that their decisionmaking processes become as frozen as Zuccotti Park campers in a snowstorm.

Your correspondent has never been a big "joiner" when it comes to political groups, and I'm not much of a "little d" democrat. I'm as suspicious of the mob as I am of law enforcement. In general, I do not consider public camping a viable nor sustainable political tactic. When I hear a protester chant into a bullhorn, "This is what democracy looks like," I must (usually successfully) resist the urge to physically attack them. When sitting through any meeting involving a "facilitator," I harbor dark fantasies of hitting them over the head, covering them with a sack, and transporting them to a dimly lit warehouse where I'd hold a gun to their head and force them to read aloud from Robert's Rules of Order.

So while I share many of the "Occupy Wall Street" critiques of society - particularly regarding the complicity of the financial sector in both a casino mentality and severing middle-class wage hikes from productivity gains - I think we're witnessing the limits of their tactics. Professional lobbyists and political campaigners are disdained as sell-outs by the drum-circle crowd, and Robert's Rules are considered antiquated and hierarchical compared to cool, supposedly more democratic "consensus" approach. But the OWS folks could learn a thing or sixty about the nuts and bolts of mass organizing from those who've organized successful mass movements in the past. For reasons presaged in my 2005 essay, reliance on a "consensus" decisionmaking structure doomed this effort before it ever got started. The OWS episode may have symbolic resonance going forward, but regrettably, in its current form, it's unlikely to have much structural impact on laws, regulations, or how Wall Street operates.

Preoccupying food question requires reader input

I have an off-topic food-related question I'm going to throw out to readers just on the off chance somebody has special insight, even though doing so requires me to apologize for self-indulgently straying far from the usual subjects covered on this blog.

My query concerns what to do with fresh peaches. There's a peach tree in my front yard that's about 10 years old, and which is fruiting spectacularly for the first time this year thanks to all the extra rain we're getting. Over the last decade during the drought, its fruit would never quite ripen and squirrels would pick off any promising candidates prematurely, often taking one bite then throwing the peach on the ground. This year our tree has been overloaded to an amazing, ridiculous degree. We've probably harvested more than 200 peaches so far (and likely lost a similar amount to squirrels, bugs and neglect), and even so the limbs are still sagging under the weight of those that remain - the next few days promise a whole bunch more, though we seem to be on the downward slope of the cycle. They taste spectacular and it's really been a wonderful, summer surprise from a tree that we'd resigned ourselves would provide more shade than edibles. There are also two fig trees in the back yard that have produced far more figs than we've remotely known what to do with.

My question: I've got a decent cobbler recipe, but what else besides fruit salad am I supposed to do with this overwhelming quantity of peaches? We've eaten them at every meal, given away a boatload and still have multiple bags of sliced, fresh peaches completely filling up a large freezer, with more coming every day. I'm the house cook so it falls on me to figure this one out. Send via email or post in the comments any recipes or suggestions along these lines. Ditto for figs, which I've tried relatively sparingly but only because I simply know few techniques to use them, (though they're quite plump, wonderful, and delicious just consumed raw). The dilemma stems from the quantity - I need more options to use them up without making the same couple of dishes over and over.

Austin's Biggest Water Wasting Outlaw

BTW, I'm doing some public policy research for the Save Our Springs Alliance and have begun a little related blogging over at their Save Water Save Money site. Today's subject: Who's the Real 'Water Wasting Outlaw' in Austin?

Maggie Lee for Good: One day, one deed

Today would have been Maggie Lee Henson's 13th birthday, and I still can hardly believe she won't see any more. At left, see a picture from her 12th birthday.

Regular readers will recall that over the summer, my niece Maggie Lee was tragically killed when a church bus she was riding on its way to youth camp flipped over and landed on her. She spent three seemingly interminable weeks in a Mississippi ICU, mostly in an induced coma, before finally giving up the ghost. But in the meantime, her story spread virally across the internet, with thousands of people (including many the family didn't know) tracking her progress on Facebook and through a website called Caring Bridge. The story was distributed so widely on listservs and Facebook pages that it garnered its own Snopes.com entry confirming the details.

Maggie Lee's death was an unthinkable blow to the family and a true test of faith for my brother John, a Baptist preacher, and his wife Jinny. It's impossible to endure the death of a happy, healthy, vibrant child and not think, "It's not fair. Why would God let this happen? What good could possibly come from such a tragedy?"

After she died, a friend of the family suggested that they honor Maggie Lee by attempting to get 1,300 people to commit to performing an act of kindness on her 13th birthday. Her Mom posted the suggestion on the Caring Bridge site, and almost immediately several times that number pledged to participate in the one-day commemoration, dubbed "Maggie Lee For Good." Check out the website created for the effort. Pretty soon, they upped the goal to 13,000, which they also topped.

As of today, her birthday, some 17,800 individuals have signed up to commit to performing a single act of kindness in Maggie Lee's honor. Here are some examples of things people are doing. In some cases, entire schools are participating. E.g.:

St. Thomas Moore Catholic School is having a Mass in Maggie Lee's name where the written good deeds of all students will be placed in a box on the altar. ...

TROPHY CLUB, TX - Lakeview Elementary is having a Maggie Lee For Good WEEK!!!! and donating food items to the Northwest Area Food Bank.

When I saw John and Jinny over the weekend for their son Jack's 11th birthday party, I learned there is even a budding clothing and jewelry line, with several different folks selling items to raise money for various good causes (with the family's blessing). Somebody created a neat logo for them (see below) and there are yard signs and even a small billboard around Shreveport promoting this special day.

For those who care to do so, I'd encourage you to honor Maggie Lee's memory today, even if you never met her, with some commemorative act of kindness or good deed. And if you want to let my brother's family know what you've done on their daughter's behalf and perhaps leave a message of encouragement, you can use this form on the MaggieLeeForGood.org website.

If you're interested, check out my brother's blog, Wondering Thoughts, where he's posted his own thoughts this morning along with a link to Shreveport Times coverage.

Thanks a lot for your off-topic indulgence.

Texas Bribery Roundup

Somebody could launch a kickass blog devoted entirely to covering Texas-related bribery cases and it'd be a long time before you ran out of material. Just to mention a few recent examples:

US House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers' wife, who sits on the Detroit City Council, pled guilty yesterday to taking a bribe from a Texas-based company:

Prosecutors said Friday that Monica Conyers accepted two payments in late 2007 to support a city contract that would pay $47 million to Texas-based Synagro Technologies to recycle wastewater sludge and build a modern incinerator in Detroit. The council voted 5-4 to approve the deal, with Conyers supplying the decisive vote.

Synagro is based in Houston and one of its employees is expected to take a plea deal on Monday, but there are also a couple of ugly Dallas cases worthy of note. At the Dallas school district:

Federal authorities say the cash-strapped Dallas school district has agreed to financial penalties to settle claims that it abused a government program that provides Internet access to lower-income schools.

The settlement announced Friday requires the district to abandon more than $150 million in requests for federal funding and pay $750,000. The district faces a $30 million budget shortfall.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Dallas say the school district engaged in noncompetitive bidding practices and accepted improper gifts from vendors, including free use of a yacht.

Yikes! Losing $150 million in stimulus money is a damn harsh penalty for the school district. Meanwhile, it looks like the couple accused of bribing state Rep. Terri Hodge and a host of other Dallas officials may have cut a deal with prosecutors. If so, that will certainly put the squeeze on the remaining defendants in the Dallas city hall corruption case scheduled to run for the next six to eight weeks.

Employees at the San Antonio Housing Authority this month were indicted for allegedly taking kickbacks from contractors.

Finally, in El Paso the distict clerk has been indicted for bribery; prosecutors say he accepted cash and a trip to Vegas from a local attorney allegedly "to rig bid specifications on a proposed $53 million county contract." One of his employees, a county commissioner, and the former chief of staff for the county judge have already taken plea deals as a result of the FBI investigation.

Obviously those who've not pled or been convicted must continue to receive the benefit of a presumption of innocence, but there's a lot of smoke here for there not to be some fire and on its face these problems seem awfully widespread.

Seriously, this would be a great niche blog topic. I'm pretty full up with my own self-assigned beat, but I'd sure like to see some energetic blogger take up the mantle.

Helping Pat Crow

This is off topic, but call it a point of personal privilege. I'm about to head out to a benefit for a dear friend, mentor and long-time Austin-based campaign manager Pat Crow, who suffered a stroke last year during heart surgery. Her friends and supporters (she managed 22 political campaigns over the years, including a slew of judicial candidates) are hosting a benefit tonight.

A grass-roots field general of the first order, Pat is one of the folks who taught me the nuts and bolts of political campaigning when I was a young pup. Pat changed my life in all sorts of odd, unpredictable ways, looking back, just from knowing her. Though our political paths diverged after a few years as I began focusing more on criminal justice stuff, she was a truly important figure in my life and it's quite arguable that, if it weren't for Pat Crow, I'd never have set out on the path that, years later, led to the creation of this blog - for good or ill.

Check out an excellent Austin Statesman story on Pat promoting the event, and also an article written by my better half, Kathy Mitchell, who profiled her soon after her stroke for what turned out to be the final issue of the Austin-based Good Life magazine.

If you know Pat (and if you run in Austin political circles, she's hard to miss) but can't make it to the event, go to the gorgeous website established to help her pay back $65K in medical and rehab expenses. Needless to say, given that kind of debt, if you're able, contribute generously.

Thanks for your indulgence ... and now back to our regularly scheduled programing.

AG Abbott disregards Public Information Act to conceal Governor's daily schedule

While this isn't a criminal justice story, I can't help but indulge in an off-topic post to express disapprobation at the Attorney General's blatant disregard for their own open records standards to allow Governor Rick Perry to conceal his personal schedule from the public.

Last week Attorney General Greg Abbott's office approved a request by Governor Perry's staff (see the July 10 letter ruling) to conceal the Governor's prospective daily schedule from an Austin TV station, even with times and locations omitted, citing "special circumstances" under the Public Information Act in order to protect Perry's "privacy rights."

I've received appointment calendar information from public officials in numerous open records requests over the last two decades, so I'm fairly familiar with the historic standard surrounding such information, which the AG letter articulated quite adequately:

This office considers "special circumstances" to refer to a very narrow set of situations in which the release of information would likely cause someone to face "an imminent threat of physical danger." .... Such "special circumstances" do not include "a generalized and speculative fear of harassment or retribution."

So how does releasing the Governor's schedule (with the time and locations omitted) create an imminent threat of harm? Here's the explanation given for how that works:

The governor asserts that the information at issue must be withheld because the privacy rights of the Governor include the right to be safe from physical harm. The governor states that, "the subject matter of some events inherently reveals the time and location of the event." For example, the governor states that "if only 'Aggie Muster 2008' is listed for a particular day, one could quickly determine the location and time of the annual Aggie Muster." Additionally, the governor states that "by providing a schedule to the requestor with the location and times redacted, the order of Governor Perry's day would still be revealed." The governor explains that "[b]y doing research to determine the location and time of each item on the schedule, combined with the order of his day being revealed, it would be very easy to determine when and where [Governor Perry] would be at any given time." Thus, the governor asserts that the requested information reveals detailed time lines of Governor Perry's future daily activities, and that release of this information would be valuable for someone who intended to cause him harm. Based on these representations and our review, we determine that the release of the information at issue would place the Governor in imminent threat of physical danger. Accordingly, the governor must withhold the information at issue under section 552.101 of the Government Code in conjunction with the "special circumstances" aspect of common-law privacy.

This, of course, is Pure-D foolishness. How can danger be "imminent" if, upon receiving the information, a potential perpetrator could not pose a danger to the Governor without first "doing research to determine the location and time of each item on the schedule"? And anyway, the recent attack at the Governor's mansion occurred at a time when Perry has been living elsewhere for many months (assuming a perpetrator would have to do "research") - there's simply no reason to believe beyond a "generalized and speculative fear" that anyone's out to harm him.

Without this strained definition of "imminent," the Governor's schedule of events in which he's participating as a paid elected official is clearly public information.

This was a terrible, embarrassing ruling. It should be revisited and reversed.

Ne'er-do-well makes good

If readers will forgive an off-topic point of personal privilege, congratulations to my father, Tom Henson, for his recent selection as president-elect of the Texas Association of Defense Counsel (that's civil, not criminal defense attorneys). Reported the Tyler Morning Telegraph:

The TADC is a statewide association of more than 2,000 private practice attorneys specializing in civil defense trial law. Henson, who practices primarily in complex toxic tort and commercial litigation, is admitted to practice in the Southern, Eastern and Northern Federal Districts of Texas, in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and in Texas and U.S. Supreme Courts.

I suppose that means I'll be seeing the old man in Austin more frequently. I'm proud of you, Dad, good job, and good luck.

Humor is the best medicine - okay, not for children with lead poisoning, but I'm sure it's helpful for other stuff

If readers will forgive a humorous but important off-topic post here entering the holiday season, I wanted to share with y'all a really cool web video and political action project on toxic imported toys, produced by the lovely and talented Kathy Mitchell (a.k.a., Mrs. Grits), who happens to run the national internet advocacy campaigns for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine.

Click here to see their Christmas song and video about the lonely toy inspector and his befuddled staff awash in a sea of Asian imports. The song was written and performed by the Austin Lounge Lizards, while the hysterical animation was created by Austin-based PowerHouse Animation. Enjoy, and share. The video parody is part of a Consumers Union netroots campaign to help convince Congress to improve health and safety regulations for imported toys.

I think the video is hilarious and I'm real proud of Kathy for putting together such a creative way to get people's attention in the all-too-distracting holiday season. You'll want to listen to this one a couple or three times, or at least I did, to catch all the jokes.

More bad luck for Bronte school district

A month after the Texas Youth Commission abruptly ended a contract with a private youth prison in Bronte, Coke County that eliminated funding for 40% of the local school district's teachers, Bronte ISD now faces another catastrophe from out of the blue. Reported the San Angelo Standard Times, "The Bronte school district’s newest bus, worth more than $100,000, burned Tuesday on a trip back from Midland after the girls volleyball team’s playoff victory there. No one was injured, but the bus was destroyed. 'We take good care of buses, and it was a freak thing,' said Pam Hilliard, assistant volleyball coach.'"

I know this is a bit off topic, but when I saw this picture I couldn't help but think to myself, "Man, those poor Bronte ISD employees and school board members must feel like they're cursed." I'm glad everybody got out safe - sounds like a close call.