Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts

• Big thumbs up to the incredibly well done Netflix movie The Highwaymen. Former Texas Rangers track down Bonnie and Clyde. It's one of those movies which makes you immediately start researching the whole story. 
  
• When the news broke yesterday in the Robert Kraft massage case that "a judge had granted a Motion to Suppress the video", people on my favorite radio station interpreted it to mean that the judge had ruled the video couldn't be made public. Nope, separate issue. It meant the video was ruled to have been illegally obtained and couldn't be used against Kraft in the trial. That basically kills the prosecution because they used it to identify Kraft -- evidence that also couldn't be used.
• I haven't read the exact reason for the judge's ruling, but I always thought it was odd that a search warrant could be used to install cameras in a private business to try to catch future crimes. 
• I bet the prosecutors are secretly thanking their lucky stars that this little misdemeanor case which is nothing but a headache for them is going away.
• The publicity of the case is far worse than any potential criminal punishment.
  
  
• This scorecard of a girl from Carrollton Ranchview competing in the state golf tournament truly had me think we had a serious cheating scandal on our hands. Nope. She's a phenom. 
  
• I saw this headline in today's Dallas Morning News so I thought I'd remind you that DPS spends your money on gun boats on the Rio Grande with twin 250 horsepower engines. 
  
• Now the U.S. Attorneys in the Justice Department are doing bits. Go back to work boys and at least try to be professional on Twitter.
  
• In the mid-1950s, my grandfather had a clothing store on the square in Decatur. Dad told me that one of the biggest sales he had as a salesman was when Sheriff Rook Ramsey came over one late afternoon and said he needed 12 sets of sheets. Why? A jury was being sequestered at the courthouse and was staying overnight. That used to happen. Until recently, there was an old shower on the third floor which had been used for that purpose. 
• I've made this request for 25 years: Does anyone have a picture of the Wise County district courtroom when the balcony was still in place? 
• There was another big verdict against Roundup's manufacturer yesterday - this time a ridiculous $2 billion dollars based upon a paid "expert" claiming the stuff causes cancer. Prediction: All of these verdicts will be thrown out and the term Daubert will be cited in every single one. (Bias: I love that stuff and use it all the time.) 
  
• With all these talks about tariffs, one thing that jumped out at me when I read Bob Woodward's book Fear was how Trump's former chief economic adviser and former COO of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, tried desperately to explain to Trump how they worked. In addition to trying to have him understand that it's nothing but a tax on Americans, he also tried to explain in childlike terms that a trade deficit isn't a bad thing: The U.S. economy is now service based and not manufacturing based. If we can buy a cheap washing machine from China we have more money to spend on a lawn sprinkler system, the gym, entertainment TV packages, etc.  - services that are the basis for American jobs.  Trump didn't get it and Cohn quit.  (Here's Cohn on the Freakonomics podcast explaining this.)
  
• From "financial mismanagement and sloppy bookkeeping" to a state championship football team that had it's coaching staff turned upside down in a strange controversy, Desoto ISD is a train wreck. When's the last time you heard of a massive teacher layoff?
  
• A jury trial is beginning today in Wise County for a murder trial where the defendant is a juvenile who has been certified as an adult. It will be the first trial of a certified juvenile in the county since one I prosecuted as DA in the fall of 1993. (I'm old.) Edit: Trial rescheduled.