Lawyers for Anthony Graves on Dec. 21 fired back at Burleson Co. District Judge Reva Townslee Corbett, who, in an apparent screw you to the federal bench, the day before set a $1 million bond for Graves to be released from jail.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March overturned Graves’ 1994 capital murder conviction and death sentence, ruling that prosecutors withheld crucial exculpatory witness statements from Graves’ defenders. Graves has maintained his innocence, repeatedly saying he played no role in the 1992 murder of six people – including four children under 10 – in Burleson Co. Nonetheless, Graves was fingered as an accomplice to the murders by Robert Carter, who was also convicted and sentenced to death for the crime. However, Carter later recanted – shortly before he was executed in 2000 – saying that he had lied and that Graves was in fact innocent. Indeed, during a recent hearing regarding Graves’ impending retrial, one of the original investigators in the case, Texas Ranger Ray Coffman, testified for the first time ever that Carter told him several times during the original murder investigation that Graves was innocent. Sources told the Chronicle that Coffman further testified that he’d passed that information on to former Burleson District Attorney Charles Sebesta, who spearheaded Graves’ first trial.

Chronic troll-in-residence M1EK (former Urban Transportation Commission member Mike Dahmus) points us to a lengthy comment in this Austinist discussion by none other than Brewster McCracken. (Or someone claiming to be him. But if it's a fake, then his doppelgänger's got McCracken's mannerisms – his talking points, the bloviation, the hepcat-parlance he adopts for the kids – down to an almost frightening degree.) After dispensing crazy "props," MC Cracken breaks down the science at Northcross, yo:

"1. The Council was told by Wal-Mart reps that the project was going to comply with the Design Standards and Mixed Use Ordinance when we were first told about this project the week before it hit the press. That turned out to be untrue.

2. Whether the neighborhoods would have the same reaction to a Costco or Target is apples and oranges, because this Super Wal-Mart will be 24 hours/7 days a week and will be 225,000 square feet. Costco is 153,000 square feet, located on a highway, and closes at 8:30 pm M-F, 6 pm Sat. and Sun. The largest Target in Central TX is 171,000 sq. ft, located on I-35, and closes at 9 pm M-S, 8 pm on Sunday… It's a completely different experience from other power center retailers.

3. It appears likely that Lincoln and Wal-Mart have been untruthful about the traffic impact of this highway-style development… At a minimum, Wal-Mart and Lincoln have some explaining to do, and they have a responsibility to start telling the truth.

4. It's a bum rap on the neighborhoods to try to label them as NIMBY's. They are supporting significant Triangle-caliber densities (which are far denser than the Northcross power center) at Crestview Station."

Which M1EK responds to with his hoary argument that locating Wal-Mart on a freeway or frontage road is a bad idea, because it's bad for pedestrian traffic.

So folks up in Minnesota elected an African-American to Congress who converted to Islam some years ago, and will take his oath of office on a Koran instead of a Bible. And one of his colleagues, some dumbass from Virginia named Virgil Goode, somehow decided this merited a call for tighter immigration laws to keep Muslims out of America. Aside from the utter hatefulness of this, we're almost as appalled by his lack of logic – how can tighter immigration laws do a damn thing to stop Americans from converting to Islam?

Still, you have to love democracy: Even the ignorant, fearmongering bigot community has representation.

Holiday hesitaters, listen up: with today's publication of the Chronicle's 2006 Political Procrastinators' Holiday Gift Guide, there's no excuse for an empty stocking. The best doesn't come cheap though, like this motivational picture for the condo impresario that has everything. But Christmas only comes once a year, right? Condos are forever.

For those on a tighter holiday budget, here's a few final suggestions:

The Gift that Keeps on Hoarding: Post-apocalyptic survivalists are always the hardest to shop for. So why not give them a gift certificate to survivormall.com? That way, there's no egg on your camo-greasepainted face when they get a second Scott M-95 Military Grade Gas Mask in the mail. Done and done!

Joe Lieberman "Go Joe" 2004 Bumperstickers:
The Joementum's only 50 cents. Don't order all at once, lest you "crash" Joe's website. Last, and decidedly least...

1600 For Men Exfoliating Power Scrub: The irony of the Bush White House licensing an official "power scrub" is almost suffocating. Or how about their "hand wash?" (Blogger David Neiwert says it's great for "getting out those nasty bloodstains.") Setting aside the Nixonian/Metrosexual connotations, one Amazon shopper wonders, "Can you imagine the uproar if Clinton had done something like this?"

On the heels of a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordering the state to set a bond for Anthony Graves – whose murder conviction and death sentence the appellate court overturned earlier this year – or free him on a bond set previously by a federal district judge, state Burleson Co. District Judge Reva Townslee Corbett on Dec. 20 set Graves’ bond at $1 million.

The six-figure bond is a far cry from the $50,000 bail set by U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent in November – a bond that would’ve allowed Graves to walk away from prison after 12 years on death row for just $5,000 up front, while the state prepares to retry him on capital murder charges for the murder of six people – four of them children under 10 – and for the arson prosecutors say was set to cover the crime.

Since our first round of suggestions got the blogosphere going nuts, here's another round of last-minute gift ideas, leading up to our print-edition extravaganza tomorrow. Suck it, secular humanists!

Shop WorldNetDaily: Aside from being a platform for black helicopter paranoia, standing firm against the nefarious homosexual/tofu agenda, and fanning Chuck Norris' literary flames, this winger-site par excellence offers plenty of ways to ruin the holidays. Their "Operation: Just Say... Merry Christmas" bracelets are an inexpensive way to remind loved ones that the season of peace on earth means nothing less than outright spiritual warfare. But WND doesn't totally hate the Jews – they need Israel to fulfill biblical prophecy and bring about the Antichrist, remember – so they've prepared a "The Gift of Chanukah" DVD. For their Muslim friends, WND offers… ha, we had you going there!

NukAlert: At all times, the Right must be vigilant in the war against Islamofascinazipinkonmulticulturalism. Who knows where you'll be when a dirty bomb's detonated – blogging from the front lines in the GWOT, in the bunker some call your Grandmother's basement, or, God forbid, on a Wasabi Funyuns and Mr. Pibb refueling mission. Well now there's NukAlert, the only $160 keychain authorized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Domestic Preparedness.

Apparently, Escuelita del Alma is preparing itself for the inevitable. According to the Austin Business Journal, the stalwart child-care center "tapped Southwest Strategies Group and Principal John Rosato to assist in the search for space… "Since our situation has left us with no alternative but to leave that prime location, I prefer to look for a new, permanent location," says Dina Flores, executive director of Escuelita del Alma. "Given Austin's hot real estate market, my fear is any leased space close to downtown stands to leave Escuelita in the same situation in which it is now."

Which would mean no day-care Downtown. Oh well, kids weren't very New Urban anyway.

Intriguing news from the Scientific American, of all places:

"(A) new genetic census of some air samples from Austin and San Antonio, Tex., finds that as many as 2,000 different kinds of microbes may be present in the air we breathe on any given day.

Microbial ecologist Gary Andersen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and his colleagues collected air samples in the two Texas cities over a period of 17 weeks, starting in 2003… In the air samples, the researchers uncovered at least 1,800 different types of microbes, including those such as the diarrhea-causing Arcobacter and ulcer-inducing Heliobacter genera that can be dangerous to human health."

Good God. Still, I'm sure the chamber of commerce can flip this into a net plus. How long until we see tees and stickers emblazoned with "Austin: Live Microbial Capital of the World?"

As a follow-up to the post below, apparently Wal-Mart sent a sacrificial lamb into the North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Association meeting last night. But Lincoln Property Group, ehh, not so much:

"Tonight, the North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Association — my neighborhood association — held a general meeting with the Northcross developers scheduled to attend. And again, Lincoln Properties was nowhere to be found.

Is Lincoln Properties ever going to talk with anybody, or are they just trying to run out the clock? The empty chairs are not a sign of good faith."