folo

Incredible. Be v e r y glad if you don’t live within nose-shot of Saltillo Lake in Tupelo, Mississippi. Some nearby idiot better get out of town fast and never come back.

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All in all this is probably not a good month for Don Barrett, who is having to deal with the consequences of ex parte contact on multiple fronts. This time he was without question right in the middle of it. As this David Rossmiller post describes, in February the Fifth Circuit set aside a fee award in a New Orleans class action, the High Sulphur Content Gasoline litigation, because Barrett and others had obtained the order setting the split of the attorneys fees through secret conferences with the judges. Lawyers who were excluded from the process and felt shortchanged appealed to the Fifth Circuit. In reversing, the Fifth Circuit said:

Lead Plaintiffs’ Counsel in this class action persuaded the district court to divide up a $6.875 million lump sum attorneys’ fee award among more than six dozen plainttiffs’ lawyers according to Lead Counsel’s proposed allocation. This might be permissible, except that the court was so persuaded in an ex parte hearing and apparently without benefit of supporting data. The Court further accepted the Lead Counsel’s proposed order sealing the individual awards; preventing all counsel from communicating with anyone about the awards; requiring releases from counsel who accepted payment; and limiting its own scope of review of objections to the allocation. These and other facets of the court’s process are unauthorized and objectionable. . . .

Here’s the full opinion. It’s worth reading for an account of just how far out there this ex parte contact went.

Yesterday, a new district judge on remand issued an order on remand about what he intends to do. He is going to have a Special Master make a recommendation about the fees, based on all the lawyers making an attorneys fee submission. He sets forth a process for doing that.

And in the meantime, everyone who cashed their check for fees has until May 29th to pay back to the court 1/3 of the fees they got or they will have to pay it all back on the 30th, to be held until the fee awards are resolved. Ouch! (Just think if you were told that some pay check for, oh, months of work you got a long time ago you were going to have to ALMOST IMMEDIATELY return a third of. Probably no big one for Don Barrett, but not everyone has a tobacco fee income stream).

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Oh, ccvz, our day is made: I’ve just had this email (and permission to reprint it) from our dear Miz Gloria:

Oh My Word!
I have never gotten so much attention. Thanks!!

I have been to NC visiting my son and his family…So I am busy getting this yard back in to shape….but this evening I am going to pour myself a glass of wine and read all of the posts again!!!!

I shall be keeping up with your blog…

Thanks again
Gloria

Standing O for our Queen of Edwards, y’all!

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There’s been a new motion filed by the defendants in one of the former Judge DeLaughter cases that is under investigation, Eaton Corp. v. Frisby.

People who have been around a while will recall a group of cases involving Judge DeLaughter, Ed Peters, and strange results. The most famous, of course, is Wilson v. Scruggs, in which Joey Langston, Tim Balducci, and Steve Patterson have agreed in guilty pleas or sworn testimony that they paid former D.A./DeLaughter mentor Ed Peters $1,000,000 to influence DeLaughter secretly in the case on Dickie Scruggs’s behalf through ex parte contact that included allowing Scruggs’s side to draft orders DeLaughter ultimately signed as if they were his own. Another was Kirk v. Pope, and the third was Eaton Corp. v. Frisby. We began blogging about these cases in January, and they became the subject of the Judicial Performance Commission’s ethics investigation of Judge DeLaughter in March. The lawyers for Wilson in the Wilson v. Scruggs case have filed motions to reawaken that case and sanction Scruggs. The lawyers for Frisby in Eaton Corp in January raised issues involving Peters’s role, and a special master was appointed.

We’ve just learned that Frisby has filed a “Motion for Determination That Court Fraud Exception Is Applicable and to Establish Procedure” and that Eaton has filed an Objection to Order Appointing Special Master. We will post more about this when we are able to get copies.

I’ve wondered what happened to Kirk v. Pope.

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There’s a lineage of great piano players in New Orleans. The bridge between pre-WWII New Orleans and r&b (and then rock and roll) is Professor Longhair. His playing has this wonderful rhumba thing going on that makes it very deceptively simple sounding– the polyrhythm he gets going by having a syncopated left hand base line going against triplets and etc. in his right hand is a lot tricker than it sounds on first listen. Try tapping your left hand along with his bass notes and your right hand with the melody line at the same time and you’ll see what I mean.

The lineage he is in goes from Tuts Washington to him to Allen Toussaint and Dr. John. He had some local and regional r&b hits– his theme song was “Tipitina,” and it became the name for the club founded at the time of his reemergence in the 70s, and he had smallish hits with “Bald Head,” his Mardi Gras song, and, in the sixties “Big Chief.” In the 70s, he recorded Crawfish Fiesta with Dr. John, and got some of the recognition he deserved. There’s a wonderful documentary about him, Washington, and Toussiant by the New Orleans filmmaker Stevenson Palfi, who was a sad Katrina-related loss, Piano Players Rarely Play Together, which is finally out on DVD and available from the Louisiana Music Factory.

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These last few days, “the press” has been on my mind even more than usual because a dear friend has been visiting — a friend who spent 17 years as a reporter and columnist for the local paper and another 18 at the Palm Beach Post. Here and farther south on her spring trip to Florida, she’s been commiserating with old colleagues over their scarily-immediate futures. Overhearing her end of several phone conversations brought home the point that we’re about to have many fewer professional watchers of government in place to keep it at all honest.

Not, of course, that all that many still on the job are hitting much of a lick. NMC gave us an example this morning of what happens when we get doofi playing “journalist.” And a couple of days ago in the New York Times (h/t Sailor’s Mr.), Elizabeth Edwards so nailed the general syndrome, I didn’t know whether to stand up and cheer or sit down and cry:

… Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

News is different from other programming on television or other content in print. It is essential to an informed electorate. And an informed electorate is essential to freedom itself. But as long as corporations to which news gathering is not the primary source of income or expertise get to decide what information about the candidates "sells, " we are not functioning as well as we could if we had the engaged, skeptical press we deserve. …

Beyond the personal traumas her old friends are facing as their jobs go away and the whole news industry constricts under new managements, my friend and her other friends and Elizabeth Edwards and I mourn the losses we see already and the ones to come.

Read Bowling 1, Health Care 0. Damn. How do we salvage this?

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One of y’all who know how to read metadata, we sure would be interested in the innards of this email that ItsAllGood brought in . . .

Thanks, IAG.

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This is a pretty cool gadget at MSN. Put in your zip code and they show you the lowest-to-highest gas prices in the area from a sampling of 90,000 stations. Here’s the link. Thanks to LydiaLaw for the h/t.

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So Hillary Clinton challenged Barack Obama to Lincoln-Douglas style debate. And, like any cable news network, Fox News wanted a graphic to illustrate it. And what did they select (the graphic appears at about 0:14)?

Hey Fox! That’s Frederick Douglass! This is Stephen Douglas:

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. . . this morning, you can see the reason that huge water oak at St. Peter’s in Oxford had to come down. R.I.P., good old tree.

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