Beyond Right Field

I had the chance to talk with our AG tonight in Grapevine, a great Texan and a very nice man. It was Reagan’s first time to meet Mr. Abbott and they had a great conversation about her school, her love of music and politics.

The question that always comes up in these situations was also asked, yes she was named after Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Abbott also promised me that soon after the session was over we would all have the answer we have been waiting on…what will he run for in 2014?

As I looked at the pictures tonight, I wonder where my baby girl has gone as she is all grown up and nearly a high schooler.

To counter some of the stuff going around, Bob sent this to me this morning:

When I decided to run for city council, I realized people throughout Keller would be looking at my record of service and my stances on the issues and deciding whether they would support me or my opponent. I’m perfectly okay with that — as long as people are truly basing their opinions on facts, and not the mischaracterizations that others might have you believe. So here are some facts I’d like to make perfectly clear.

1. I do not support high density development in North Keller — unless it’s specifically in an area zoned that way. To say otherwise is incorrect and frankly, misleading.

2. I’m not currently on the Mt. Gilead Ranch HOA because I chose not to seek re-election last year. I served 6 years on the HOA Board from 2006-2012 but didn’t run again because I already had plans to run for a city council seat in the Spring 2013 election.

3. I am running for city council to maintain and hopefully help improve the high quality of life we enjoy in Keller. I don’t have any other agenda — hidden or otherwise. I only want to apply my knowledge, experience and service to the community I have lived in for more than the past 20 years.

I’m going to continue running my campaign by telling my story and focusing on all of the matters that are important to our city. I won’t be talking about anyone else or standing solely on one issue. If you’d like to know more about me and what I plan to do on the Keller City Council, I encourage you to visit my campaign website at www.bobhillforkeller.com or email me at RJHill540@gmail.com.

Gio’s staff sent these photos today of Reagan’s trip to Austin to be a Page for the day

Whisper Campaigns are a way that a candidate goes negative spreading false information while trying to distance themselves from the information. They are unethical and dirty, to say the least. When you sign up to run for office in Keller, you sign an ethics pledge stating you will not engage in whisper campaigns, along with a number of other items.

Well, seems the Debbie Bryan campaign has decided to break that pledge and start a whisper campaign against Bob Hill.

A few weeks ago, while doing some Google searches, I came across a website using a Google cache search that had the url
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VY6am8SkL3EJ:electdebbiebryanv.com/+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Electdebbiebryanv.com has a private whois, so you can’t see who registered it, but it was registered March 7^th of this year, only days before I found the website.

On this website there was only one thing, a video, this video was produced to make Bob Hill look bad by taking things he said out of context and then placing a text box on the screen to further explain the producer’s point of view. It was a hatchet job.

I forwarded the video to Bob and some people in his campaign to make him aware of it, told him to make sure he had a response to it because the Bryan campaign would be releasing it.

Well, today I receive an email chain from the Bryan campaign, here is the jest of the whisper campaign.

From: Debbie Bryan <tnsplayer@verizon.net>
Date: April 3, 2013, 9:14:20 PM CDT
To: Debbie Bryan <tnsplayer@verizon.net>
Subject: FW: Hmmmm – video

  Just got this video from a friend in north Keller.  Very clever.  Looks like someone wants people to know the truth.  Hope you all get out and vote!!! J

 Thanks,

Debbie

Friends- Some of you may have already seen this but …it was forwarded to me this afternoon. It is a video of Bob Hill speaking in favor of higher density in North Keller during a city meeting. Also the council member who is supporting him in his quest to be on council is in the video. I think it is fair to say that some of his neighbors are NOT happy with him!

It then goes on to purportedly show that it was forwarded to her from a blank email address. The video I found on the web has since been taken down, trying to cover her tracks of the whisper campaign.

This is unethical, dirty and dishonest. And this person wants to be a City Councilperson in Keller? Does she think the citizens of Keller are in third grade? That we can’t figure out that her campaign produced the video?

Ms. Bryan needs to come and tell the truth, that her campaign produced this video and she is conducting an unethical whisper campaign, breaking her ethics pledge she signed when she signed the ethics document.

She also owes Bob Hill, and frankly the citizens of Keller an apology for running an unethical campaign.

I have been sitting on other items from her campaign supporters, including a former Mayor of Keller that is a Real Estate Broker who sells land to developers that states that he hates developers and infers I love them. Politics is a funny thing, and I will address this and other items in the days that come.

Not a good start, but it is a long season

There were a number of items I wanted to write about today, but being it is Good Friday I will wait until next week before I touch on them.

So, good news only today, Gio’s Gold Depository Bill made it to the front page of the Drudge Report today, you can read the article here.

On Monday I am going to try to go testify in favor of Rep. Jonathan Stickland’s bill on Public Notifications. Gio just so happens to be on the committee hearing the bill, and word is he is against it. I appreciate his concerns with the bill, as it does need some tweaking, but I think it can be saved rather than scrapped. Jonathan has taken a lot of heat from the Newspaper industry over the bill, they have even gone so far as to put up a website personally attacking him. I am doing what I can to move my schedule around to be in Austin, but with my schedule these days it’s like moving mountains.

And keeping on the Gio theme, he texted me the other day to let me know that he will be on Fox Business News today during the 5pm hour. I have the DVR all set up just in case I get busy and miss it.

At long last, the Rangers open their season Sunday night in Houston against the Astros. Yes, for those that don’t follow baseball, the Astros are now in the AL West, and they will be horrible this year. What the new ownership has done to that team is bordering on criminal. Nicholas told me on a sports radio program the other day, the Owner came on and told the fans if they would like to donate money to the team so they could sign some players, he would put the money to good use.

There is a silver lining however, the Rangers record should be better this year because they will play Houston multiple times, and the best news is they didn’t sell out for opening night. In fact they had some great seats right behind home plate where I will be sitting with my son taking in the game.

On a final note about Easter, a story from my mom:

The Easter story of family lore is the year (we think 1967) that we went to Georgia over Easter vacation.  Roper’s (the stove plant in Kankakee where Richard worked) was moving their plant south and Richard wanted to see the area.  We all loaded into the car and took off for Georgia over Easter.

Easter morning dawned and as lunch time drew nearer and nearer, I was longing for the baked ham and all of the trimmings I knew my Mom would be serving for Easter dinner.  Later,  when I mentioned it to Richard, he stopped at a small grocery store on the rural road that we were traveling on and bought cold ham slices, bread and chocolate milk so that I would have ham for Easter.  It was a wonderful thought, but not quite the Easter dinner I was wishing for.

When we arrived back home to the Frake farm, there were lots of rabbits in our driveway.  Richard told you kids they were friends of the Easter bunny and they had come to deliver your Easter baskets….which you believed. 

I was thinking to myself, now what am I going to do since I had not made baskets up for you that year?  But there on our front porch were baskets for each of you delivered by Mr. Easter Bunny himself, Harold Frake.

We didn’t tell you that at the time, but now you know the rest of the story.

Harold Frake was the landlord for the farmhouse we rented, a super nice guy who my dad kept in contact with until Mr. Frake passed away a few years back. If there was one house I would consider “the house I grew up in”, it would be that house on Frake’s farm in Clifton, IL. We moved from there in the mid 70′s and began our journey of moving all over the world.

I hope that you are all able to spend some quality time with your family this weekend and make some memories, even if it a ham sandwich on the side of the road in Southern Indiana.

We started our new company November 1^st, and the original plan to just be a distributor for a number of products we are selling slowly morphed by the beginning of December into “Why don’t we have our own products manufactured?”

We (the three partners) looked at each other then they all looked at me and said; “Doug, handle it.”

For the past four months I have been working night and day, not only having to learn about the products I’m selling, but to contact designers, engineers, graphic artists, carton manufacturers, printer, attorneys to wade through the gagillion pages of federal regulations, and finally manufactures that would be willing to private label our product.

Today, the first shipment of product arrived at our shop, where we had to unload it, unpackage it, repackage it into retail packaging, label and then palletize it ready to ship to our customers in West Texas. It was an exciting day, one I’ll remember for a very long time.

I’m a project guy, one of the reasons I love the construction business is that I can drive on nearly every busy road in North Texas and can’t go 3 miles without pointing out a project we have been a part of. There is a huge sense of accomplishment in seeing a building 20 years old that we worked on back in the day that still looks as good as the day we tore down the scaffolding.

This business is a little different, but every time a Semi Truck pulls up from now on, I think there still will be that same sense.

We took a huge risk by doing this; we had a dang good business plan with just distributing other people’s products. We had a set profit margin and a constant level of quality control, we were also not having to warehouse a bunch of items. But what it didn’t allow is for us to determine our own delivery schedule, but most importantly to this allows us to design our products specifically for our customers, rather than the general market. This is something we have been very successful doing in the construction side, and it is why that 90% of our work is repeat business.

I think this model will work great for this new company as well.

It’s days like today that make all of those 16 hour days and 7 day weeks the last four months’ worth it.

The best thing? Half of that truck load of product we were able to repackage and palletize. It is now waiting on another carrier to come pick it up and deliver out to our customers.

Another truck comes in tomorrow. Excited to come to work and see how that goes.