Streaming Video of Council Meetings

Come August, Richardson will be online

Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, reports that Richardson's city council is likely to begin making streaming video of council meetings available on the city's Web site beginning in August. Reader Sherri adds that council member John Murphy, in conversation after the council meeting, suggested that podcasts of the audio of council meetings might be available as early as next week.

This is all good news. If there was an issue that resonated with the electorate in the recent council election, it was transparency in government, with streaming video of council meetings the most requested symbol of improving transparency (that and an online checkbook). All of the candidates supported putting video of council meetings online, so it's good to see the new council quickly live up to what many considered an implicit promise.

Even though neither video nor audio of this week's council meeting was available online, Ian McCann did the next best thing by live-blogging the meeting via Twitter. Having a journalist tweeting highlights is great and will continue to be even after we get live broadcasts. Let's face it, there's a lot of dead time in a city council meeting. Having someone summarize is a great service and doing it in real time is even better, as it affords Twitter followers the opportunity to tune in when the debate gets interesting. Like when McCann reported the discussion about the costs of providing streaming video: "7-10K too much to set up cameras? Amir Omar says...'I've got a friend who could do it for a couple hundred bucks.'"

If others join the conversation, too, there's the potential of having the electorate play a significant role in council deliberations, not just play spectator. Maybe we need a Richardson hashtag like #cortx to collect all the chatter my feverish imagination predicts we'll have.

By the way, is streaming video the biggest issue facing Richardson? Of course not. But it's the right thing to do. And it's easy to do. It doesn't keep us from tackling other issues at the same time. Let's do it.

May I Have a Word? Veloweb

DART and trails in Richardson

Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News, reports the good news that "Richardson plans new trails to link to DART stations."

A new trail will provide access to the Bush Turnpike DART station, up to now isolated from all commuters except those who can get there by car or bus.

A new trail will connect Renner Rd with the Galatyn Park DART station. There's already a trail that does that, the trail meandering through Richardson's gem, the Spring Creek Nature Preserve, but some people have complained that they don't want to walk through the woods, especially at night. Now, they'll be able to walk a new hike/bike trail alongside the new Routh Creek Parkway. Sure, the new road scars a beautiful nature preserve, but if it caters to cyclists and walkers, too, maybe it is an acceptable balance of competing careabouts.

And there's hope for a new trail along the Cotton Belt rail line, which will eventually be home to an east-west DART line across Richardson.

All of this trail activity in Richardson is just a small piece of a much bigger network of interconnected trails across North Texas. The bigger network even has a catchy name, a veloweb. What's a veloweb? Dictionary.com has never heard of the word. Google can't define it. But the North Central Texas Council of Governments is promoting the term to describe the "644 mile, designated off-street trail network that has been planned to provide bicycle and pedestrian connections in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex."

Some people flinch when they hear the word metroplex. Veloweb sounds like the kind of word with the potential to irritate people, too. Here's hoping the word veloweb becomes as common as metroplex, for it will mean that the vision of that 644 mile network of hiking/biking trails will have become a reality.

Police Chase

If it bleeds, it leads

There's a reason I don't watch local television news. It's the same reason I don't own a police scanner. I'm just not into murders, rapes, drug deals, kidnappings, traffic accidents, drownings, and "body bag" journalism in general. Then, there are the public interest stories that promise to keep me alive and healthy if I stay away from peanut butter, hotel bedding, tap water and breathing.

I know I'm in the minority on this, as every local television station found out years ago. Now, I fear that my new favorite local news source, The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, might be tempted to follow Channels 4, 5 and 8 in a race to the mucky bottom.

Ian McCann posted a blog item about today's car chase from Mesquite to downtown Dallas to north Dallas, ending in crash at the Richardson/Garland border. By 5:40 PM, the post had attracted 77 comments, by far the largest haul of commentary in memory on this fairly new blog. I fear McCann and Jeffrey Weiss, the main bloggers, will notice (or someone higher up will notice) and decide that blood and violence play as well in the blogosphere as they do in the vast televised wasteland. Given every newspaper's increasingly desperate search for relevancy, who could blame them for finding it in "a nasty looking T-bone crash" in Richardson? Just tell me you guys aren't going out to buy police scanners, will you?

Where Is ... the Slash Pine?

Staycations in Richardson

From Where Is ...

This is the third in an occasional series of photos for which readers are challenged to identify the location where the photo was taken.

Jeffrey Weiss, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, solicits ideas for "interesting and inexpensive" staycations in Richardson this summer. His first suggestion is to visit the China Town mall on Greenville Avenue, which "includes a bunch of Asian restaurants (including one Vietnamese and one Korean), a bakery, a couple of music and book stores, a couple of beauty salons, and a restaurant supply store where you can find Asian specialties like woks." If you're Chinese-American and already frequent this mall, this may not be much of a staycation, but if you're a white-bread European-American who can't tell the Chinese character for "woman" from a Picasso sketch of a woman, then get adventurous and make a trip to China Town over the summer.

In the same spirit, I offered a couple suggestions of my own. First, take in a Bollywood movie at Richardson's FunAsiA, "an interesting eco system of theaters showing Bollywood and other Indian language movies, banquet halls, radio stations and a magazine called as DesiPages." (Jeffrey Weiss ran with my suggestion, highlighting it in his own blog post "Hooray for Bollywood.")

But if Slumdog Millionaire is as close to Bollywood as you care to get, then how about seeking out and patronizing one of Richardson's non-traditional bookstores before Amazon.com drives them all out of business? Here's what a quick Internet search turned up, but be warned: businesses come and go and some of these bookstores might already be gone.

• World Bookstore
• Richland Bookstore
• Herald Book Store
• China Books & Arts
• Keith's Comics
• Half Price Books
• Medbooks
• Off Campus Books

Finally, if you want to get outdoors this summer, then how about going on a scavenger hunt for an Elderica Pine or a Lace Bark Elm or any of a couple dozen other species of trees found in Richardson? The City of Richardson conveniently provides maps. In today's photo challenge, readers are asked to identify the location of the Slash Pine in the photo above. As before, the first reader to supply the right answer wins a year's free subscription to "Ed Cognoski."

May I Have a Word? Hearsay

Withdrawn, your honor

I was met with some objection when, in a comment to a recent blog post, I described readers' reports of what was said at a Richardson City Council meeting as hearsay. I said, "I now have hearsay from two people and still no video, audio, or transcript of any of this talk."

You would think I called the reader a liar. Which, I guess, when it comes right down to it, maybe I carelessly did, although that was not my intent. Most hearers can be forgiven if they understood the word to mean idle gossip or, worse, malicious rumor or even deliberate untruth. It's often used that way. Instead, all I intended was the neutral connotation as defined by Dictionary.com:

hearsay [heer-sey] noun
1. unverified, unofficial information gained or acquired from another and not part of one's direct knowledge

My knowledge of what was said at the city council meeting consists solely of unofficial information acquired from this reader and not part of my own direct knowledge. In other words, according to this definition, my knowledge is hearsay. That implies nothing about the truth or falsehood of what I heard, only that I heard it from another and didn't experience it myself.

Then there's the legal definition of hearsay. Wikipedia defines hearsay as "information gathered by Person A from Person B concerning some event, condition, or thing of which Person A had no direct experience." In the legal sense, the report from that reader (Person B) of what was said at the city council meeting is not hearsay. It's evidence of what the reader heard. In contrast, if I were, in turn, to report what was said by the city council members, using only the first person's report as my source, my report (as Person A) would be hearsay, because I didn't hear the city council's discussions myself.

All clear? The lesson, for me, is that hearsay is the kind of word that's OK to use by professionals in a controlled setting like a courtroom. It's also the kind of word to use to insult someone, if that's your intent. But it's not the kind of word to use in any kind of neutral sense, at least not without running the real risk of insulting someone. So, your honor, you are right to sustain the objection. I withdraw my statement.

Apartment Dwellers vs Homeowners

Further thoughts on a complex issue

Yesterday, I feel I didn't do justice to the issue of property values in the RISD. Certainly, the issue is more complex than the critics of the RISD made it out to be. The issue is more complex than some might have inferred from my own sarcastic response.

To recap, here's my understanding of the argument against the RISD. The demographics of Richardson are changing. More racial and ethnic diversity. More poor people. More run-down apartments. The RISD, by offering better education than the Dallas ISD does, in general, and targeting services to apartment dwellers in particular, makes Richardson a magnet for poor people. More poor people move to Richardson making the situation even worse.

If that's the argument, and if there's truth to it, what should the RISD do about it? Degrade the quality of its education? That can't possibly be what people want, can it? Separate the poor children from the affluent, the apartment dwellers from the homeowners' children? That's illegal. Create economic incentives for developers to tear down those run-down apartments? Is that it? Although no one quite made that argument, it's the only one that makes sense to me.

I'm for creating economic incentives for redevelopment, if it can be done without harming the schools. But can it? After all, "create economic incentives" translates into giving money to someone, money that has to come from somewhere else, in this case, schools. The RISD risks degrading the quality of education by diverting money. (I know some argue that throwing money at education doesn't assure success, but diverting money doesn't assure it, either). The argument for diverting money now rests on the theory that the sacrifices are only temporary. Eventually, the redeveloped areas will be paying even more in property taxes than the RISD gives back today. It's an enticing argument ... for nearby homeowners. For the poor families who live in apartments and send their kids to RISD schools, it's not as enticing. For they lose on both ends of this deal. First, money is taken from their children's schools and given to developers. Then, when developers get the money and tear down the apartments, the families lose their homes, too.

So, the issue is complex. I admit it. The RISD school board recognizes it. The RISD has shown its willingness to cooperate in redevelopment programs. It entered a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) agreement with the city of Dallas for the Skillman corridor. It did so only after ensuring that it was in the best interest of *all* residents of the RISD, not just the developers, not just the homeowners, but the apartment families and schoolchildren as well. Issues that pit homeowners against apartment dwellers put the RISD in a difficult situation. I am convinced that the RISD is attempting to balance all interests. My eyes were opened yesterday to the fact that some reasonable people insist on believing otherwise. Reasonable people on both sides need to resist the urge to suspect the motives of each other. They need to keep talking and working together to develop win-win situations for all.

Red Light Cameras Work

Latest evidence is from the city of Dallas

Kimberly Thorpe, in Unfair Park, reports on a meeting of Dallas' Automated Red Light Enforcement Commission, at which members were told that since the installation of 66 cameras in 2007, there has been a 62% reduction in red-light related accidents at intersections with cameras. The program cost is $6 million per year and ticket revenues last year were $7.4 million. After sending half of the net revenue to Austin, as required by the Texas legislature, the city's net revenue was $676,753, or about 10% of the cost of the program.

In short, red light cameras work! Our intersections are safer. The red light cameras are not "a bald faced cash grab," as one reader still believes even in the face of contradictory evidence. Or at least the cash grab isn't by cities; Austin's demand for half of the revenues is another matter. In fact, if the incidence of red light running continues to drop as drivers adjust their driving habits (which would be a good thing, remember), revenues will drop as well and the program might no longer pay for itself. In ticket revenues, anyway. In accidents avoided and lives saved, the program's positive return will be longer lasting.

Mark Davis on Mark Sanford

My nominee for today's award for unintended irony

Mark Davis: "I suppose I should be thankful that a guy who I might have favored for the GOP nomination has done us all the favor of revealing that he is a complete idiot."

You'd think Mark Davis would be used to it by now.

RISD and Property Values

Readers say quality education lowers property values

Jeffrey Weiss Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, posted Monday night's action agenda for Richardson's city council meeting (God, it's good to see the DMN cover local government!). Reader reaction surprised me and had me saying "Really!?!" like an episode of SNL's "Really with Seth and Amy" (only not about Rod Blagojevich). Reader "schoolboardblues" tells us that last week's city council goal session was a real "yawner" and Richardson residents ought to go over to the Richardson ISD school board meetings. Now, if you ask me, both the city council and the school board are very well run, especially compared to their equivalents in Richardson's big brother city to the south.

But, OK, I'll bite. What is the issue with the RISD that has readers so concerned that they hijack a blog item about the city council to whine about the RISD instead? It's apartments. Rundown apartments are the result of the RISD offering quality education. Really. Reader "fedup" explains: "The single family homes in and around the old apartment areas are still in the tank (e.g. Richland Park as one of many examples). When RISD continues to offer programs which appeal to apartment dwellers, they will seek out RISD - plain and simple."

It's time for a sanity check. Really. Richardson ISD is the state's largest school district to earn a rating of "Recognized" in the TEA's accountability assessments. That's a point of pride, folks, with a beneficial side effect for homeowners. Good schools support higher property values for single family homes. If you don't like what your own home's resale value is, don't blame the good schools. And don't blame the RISD's quality education for decaying apartments. If the RISD were to lower its education standards, those decaying apartments aren't going to be filled with more affluent tenants. Take your concerns about rundown apartments to the city council, which does have responsibility for code enforcement. Ironically, readers side-tracked a blog item about the city council, which has the power to address the readers' complaints, to complain about the RISD, which doesn't. Really.

Grading Newspaper Websites

The DMN flunks the test

The Web site 24/7 Wall St. recently published reviews of the top 25 Newspaper Websites, including The Dallas Morning News, which gets a grade of D-. Here's a sample of the report card:

"Dallasnews.com looks like it was put together by The Mad Hatter. Poorly designed traffic and weather sections often sit at the top of the homepage. There are some headlines that have no explanations. Others are explained too much so that reading the story would be redundant. The visitor cannot expect any consistency as he moves around the site. The first few stories are followed by blogs and a photo section where the content seems to have been picked at random. The rest of the homepage has other major sections with their primary stories highlighted. Local news does not get much exposure."

Ouch. Trust me, this isn't taken out of context. There are a few kind words about the DMN blogs and the DMN share of premium advertising, but a comment about how the DMN mixes editorial content with advertising also sums up the review as a whole: "Joseph Pulitzer is spinning in his mausoleum."

24/7 Wall St. begins its reviews by noting that newspapers need to increase revenue from their Websites faster than they lose revenue from declining circulations of their print editions. The DMN can't do that if it continues to delegate its Website design to the Mad Hatter. If the executives with careers steeped in print can't see that, maybe it's time to turn the company over to executive talent with some online experience.

FWISD Video Streaming of Board Meetings

Others can do it, why not Richardson?

Fort Worth Star-Telegram congratulates the Fort Worth school board on plans to stream its monthly meetings on its Web site, for live or delayed viewing. Hooray! It's about time. As the fictitious taxpayers in the Star-Telegram editorial say:

Taxpayer 1: Starting Tuesday night, we'll be able to watch streaming video of school board meetings online. You can watch live or later.

Taxpayer 2: Oh, joy. I can't wait. Scintillating on cable and computer.

Taxpayer 1: No, seriously, this is an exciting move into the 21st century.

Taxpayer 2: And it's only 2009.

When will Richardson join FWISD in the 21st century? The Richardson ISD does not provide streaming video over the Internet for its board meetings and, as far as I know, has no plans to do so. The Richardson City Council does not provide streaming video over the Internet of its city council meetings, and, as far as I know, has no plans to do so. Only promises that grow ever older. Video streaming of council meetings was a hot topic during the recent council election campaign, with all candidates telling voters they support it. Yet now, 45 days after the election, tonight's council meeting won't be available online, either live or in archive format. What gives, Richardson?

CLIDE Awards

Richardson wins for "Public Policy and Planning"

The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) annually honors development and planning projects that help ensure sustainable growth for north Texas. This year, only nine projects were honored with a NCTCOG "Celebrating Leadership in Development Excellence" (CLIDE) award. Only three projects were honored in the public policy and planning category, including Richardson's 2009 Comprehensive Plan. Brenda Scheer, the CLIDE Awards jury chair, said the plan "uses interesting and important themes to tie its various recommendations, which focus appropriately on sustainable goals and making Richardson more livable and more urban." Andrew Laska, in The Richardson Echo, has the full story. Kudos to the Richardson City Council and Planning Commission.

Where Is ... The Train?

Can streetcars make a comeback?

From Where Is ...

Today's blog is another in an occasional series where readers are challenged to identify the location of the object in the photo.

A recent blog post here commented on plans by the city of Dallas to bring back electric streetcars to downtown streets. Everything old is new again. Oldtimers know that streetcars once ran on downtown Dallas tracks. And electric railways once stretched far beyond the reach of DART light rail today. Today's challenge is, exactly where was the photo above taken? For bonus points, what is significant about the dates December 31, 1948 and December 9, 2002?

As before, the first reader who provides the correct answer wins a year's free subscription to "Ed Cognoski."

New DMN Blogs

How soon the DMN "blog" blog?

Keven Ann Willey, in an "Ask the Editor" piece in The Dallas Morning News, plugs the addition of five new blogs to the fifty or so that the DMN already runs. She says "savvy" readers already know about them. She says the DMN is "excited" about the opportunities the new blogs present. She says they are part of an "explosion" of new blogs newspaper-wide.

Pardon me if I'm less excited than she is. The Opinion blog, where all the topics used to be discussed, now seems to be more and more just an announcement vehicle for discussion that's moved to the other blogs. There's less and less reason for readers to come back there. And I sincerely doubt that the "Death Penalty" blog is going to attract enough readers to sustain itself. How long will it be before the DMN launches a "blog" blog, where we can discuss the "explosion of new blogs" on the DMN alone?

Books for Summer 2009

What I've been reading

Summer is almost here, which means it's time to pick out a good book to read at the beach or cabin. For those who haven't already made up their minds what to read, here are my recommendations, based on my own reading since last winter. (My 2008 recommendations are still good for 2009, too.)

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

  Because summer reads are supposed to let you escape the newspaper headlines, my top recommendation is a novel that's unlike anything you've read before. Part coming-of-age memoir, part murder mystery, the novel is narrated by Blue van Meer, a very smart and highly educated girl who, in her final year of high school, witnesses a drowning, a suicide (or was it murder?) and enough mysteries (conspiracies?) to turn her life upside down as she becomes amateur detective to understand it all. But the story, the plot, is not the main attraction to this book. It's Pessl's mastery of language. Every page is filled with footnotes of literary, historical, and scientific references. The use of metaphor and simile is abundant and when Pessl gets it right, which is often, the effect is wondrous.

• House of Cards by William D. Cohan

  This account of the sudden collapse of Bear Stearns, one of the oldest financial institutions on Wall Street, might sound too dry for summer reading. But those days in March, 2008, when it all came tumbling down, make for fascinating reading because of the unparalleled access the author had to the principals at Bear Stearns, who sugar coat nothing. They tell their side of the story while the wounds are still raw, still hurting. Day by day, hour by hour, as escape paths are cut off one by one, you feel what they feel as Bear Stearns goes down. Equal parts drama, gossip and financial analysis, this book is a page-turner, even on the beach.

• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

  If the financial crisis seems like an unsuitable subject for a summer read, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq must seem even more so. But what makes The Forever War a candidate for taking to the beach is the human side of the war revealed in its pages. Filkins, a New York Times reporter who has travelled extensively in the Middle East, doesn't tell us about the politics and strategy of the war. He paints, in multiple vignettes, stories about the people, the soldiers and civilians, the Americans and Iraqis, whose lives are impacted. The result is a literary work, not a news account. Serious reading, but never dull.

• The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

  If your summer lasts long enough to finish the other books, you might consider the last book in my recommended list. It's something to get you ready for reading the financial pages again next September. It's The Ascent of Money, a companion book to a PBS television series of the same name. The book traces the history of money, credit, bonds, stocks, and insurance. It describes the notion of risk and how the world of finance evolved to deal with it. It explains how globalization isn't a new phenomenon, using examples from the Roman Empire to the European colonization of much of the world. But, in truth, you probably won't miss much by skipping the book and watching the television series instead. It's available for free, instant viewing on the PBS Web site.

Streetcars

Cold case: Who killed streetcars?

The Dallas Morning News reports that the city of Dallas is seeking $80 million in federal funds to develop a downtown streetcar system. Anyone old enough to remember streetcars has fond memories. But one DMN reader, "1bellplaza," no fan of streetcars but perhaps too young to remember them, says in a comment, "Someone should ask why they did away with streetcars."

Seque to Trey Garrison, who inadvertently suggests an answer while lobbying for something else entirely. In a blog defending drinking and driving (that's not a typo; libertarian Garrison has some strange causes), Garrison notes:

"My favorite attorney, Robert Guest, talks about how bad zoning contributes to DWI. ... Robert equates bad zoning -- separating residential and retail use so that you can’t have a neighborhood bar or neighborhood market in an actual neighborhood -- with the word 'sprawl.'"

Related zoning laws required new businesses to set aside a minimum amount of parking space for cars, leading to businesses set back from streets and acres of parking lots in front of new retail. Streetcars, tethered to their tracks, were isolated and doomed. More mobile cars, now favored by zoning laws, thrived and drove the streetcars to extinction.

Would streetcars have survived without the favoritism of zoning laws? Maybe not. But it wasn't just zoning laws that streetcars had to contend with. The growing automobile industry left nothing to chance. In an essay titled "The StreetCar Conspiracy," former U.S. Senate Counsel Bradford Snell indicts General Motors:

"The streetcar did not die ... because of demographics or economics or disinvestments or evolution; it died because GM in 1922 made a conscious decision to kill it and, for the next several decades, pursued a strategy designed to accomplish this objective."

That strategy allegedly involved using freight leverage to force railroads to divest themselves of electric railways, pressuring banks to withhold funding for electric railways, purchasing and scrapping electric railways directly, and bribing mayors and city councils with Cadillacs and GM dealerships to convert streetcars to buses.

As with so many historicals trends that might have happened no matter what, this one was helped along by those who stood to benefit from the outcome at the expense of society as a whole. With unintended irony, that same DMN reader who advises others to ask why they did away with streetcars to begin with, thinks he knows why some government officials are now trying to bring back streetcars:

"Let me tell you why I think we need streetcars....... someone in city government will make millions off the deal."

If there's any truth to that, it would be a case of déjà vu.

RISD Budget

No news is good news

Jeffrey Weiss, of The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, was in the audience at the Richardson ISD school board meeting Monday night. He was the only one. As he tells us, "Since not a single person who wasn't getting paid by RISD or the DMN attended Monday night's school board meeting, maybe y'all want to know what happened?"

Do I detect a bit of sarcasm or maybe criticism of Richardson residents for taking such little interest in their school system? The lack of attendance is probably a little bit because of lack of interest but a big bit because the school board has the district in good shape. No news is good news.

Weiss goes on to report that there'll be no change in the property tax rate; a budget that projects a surplus; a 2-3% raise for teachers, counselors, nurses and librarians; no big program cuts. All in all, steady as she goes. Not a small accomplishment given the perfect storm that's hit the economic seas we're all sailing in.

Ayn Rand, Oil and Self Parody

Trey Garrison is losing it

President Barack Obama has been in office only four months. Judging by the tone Dallas' own libertarian writer Trey Garrison in the last week, Garrison is going to have to pace himself if he's going to avoid a breakdown sometime in the next four years. Faster than you can spell ad hominem, Garrison denies Obama's obvious skills and decries anyone who doesn't see it Garrison's way:

"The current occupant of the White House, meanwhile - a superficial, shallow, and wholly incompetent man - has a press corps following him more sycophantic than Pravda in the Stalin years."

The more progress Obama makes in rescuing our economy, the more Garrison wraps himself in his libertarian myths and hagiography. With failed irony and a little flummoxed grammar, Garrison claims, "Now, I don't much do much preaching here or elsewhere" before he launches into a rambling sermon on the merits of Ayn Rand. Not just her supposed economic and philosophic merits, but her literary merits, too. About now, I'm remembering a different group of worshipful followers, the Red Chinese, insisting on Mao's own literary skills as they clutched copies of his Little Red Book. (OK, that last was a bit over the top, but come on, comparing Obama to Stalin?!?) Hardly any but the devoted can make it all the way through cult works. In a final bit of irony, I had to will myself to make it all the way through Garrison's own overblown, tedious tribute to Ayn Rand.

Now, if there's anything that rivals Trey Garrison's irritation over a failure to respect Ayn Rand, it's a failure to pay homage to ExxonMobil. In another blog post that reads like a monologue by Stephen Colbert, Garrison attributes every good thing in life, indeed even life itself, to the wonders of oil and the good work of oil executives.

"So, thank an oil executive next time you see one. Give him a hug. Pay a few extra bucks at the pump. Go on, rev that engine and race someone when the light turns green. For god's (and your own) sake, vandalize a hybrid. Because petroleum is what makes life possible, and worth living."

How do you parody something like that? Trey Garrison's descent into self-parody is already well underway.

Where Is ... Jacob Routh?

From Where Is ...

This is the first of an occasional series of photos of places in Richardson, in surrounding communities and across the world that, for reasons to be determined, strike me as worth sharing. Your object? Identify the place. And what it is about the place that makes me publish the photo.

This first one is easy for regular readers of "Ed Cognoski." Hint, hint. Go back and read this week's blog.

Oh, the prize for the first reader to provide the right answer? A year's free subscription to "Ed Cognoski."

DART's Lake Highlands Station

Trains OK. Cars OK. Just no walking.

Michael Lindenberger, in The Dallas Morning News's new Transportation blog (has anyone else lost track of how many blogs the DMN has now?) reports that some neighbors don't like the idea of providing access to a new DART Lake Highlands station on the Blue Line, set to open in 2010, from White Rock Trail. "They worry that if residents can walk so easily from their neighborhoods to the station, criminals from elsewhere can do the same thing in reverse just as easily."

Let me get this straight. Some people in Lake Highlands like the idea of light rail but want to make it so that only people who own cars can use it. Walking to and from the rail station will be discouraged. I suggest DART drop the idea of a Lake Highlands station altogether and use the money saved to put a station in a community that wants it. Win-win.

Richardson will take an extra DART station for the Red Line at Belt Line Rd (Main St). It'll be a shot in the arm for redevelopment of Richardson's old downtown.

DART to DFW Airport

Jim Schutze, Derailed

Unfair Park's Jim Schutze, who is generally on target and on time on almost anything to do with big Dallas projects like the Great Trinity Forest or the Trinity Parkway or the Trinity levees, goes horribly off-track today in a story about DART's long-term planning.

Schutze tells us that, in an effort to secure suburban support for recent legislation in Austin, DART was toying with the idea of changing its long-stated plan to extend the Irving Orange line to DFW airport and instead have the line take a right turn to Southlake. It's a crazy idea, even as an insincere talking point to get a few extra votes in Austin. If Schutze had just pointed out that it's a crazy idea and left it at that, he'd get no argument from me. But Schutze used it as a wedge to split the city of Dallas and the suburbs. Any thought of working together, of finding win-win solutions for the region as a whole, and Jim Schutze says, "what is my answer, assuming I have at least a low-functioning I.Q.? Skeeereeeew regionalism!"

It's the kind of comment I expect to read in the comments section. It's more than disappointing to read it coming from Jim Schutze himself. It just about kills my hopes that DFW might be serious about an alternative to building more highways. It's so easy for DART planning to collapse into regionalism, in the negative sense of the word. I had hoped that Jim Schutze would guide us past that trap, but instead, he falls into it himself.

Spring Creek Nature Preserve

Pave paradise, put up a reliever road

Jeffrey Weiss Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, reports that "Construction crews are wrapping up work on Routh Creek Parkway, which connects [Richardson's] Glenville Drive to Renner Road, a reliever route for traffic from the new Blue Cross Blue Shield building."

Good news? Not so fast. As the original article from 2008 about the new Routh Creek Parkway puts it, "there isn't often the opportunity to plan and build a road on previously untouched land in a city as built-out as Richardson."

And it's a shame they did. Slicing through the Spring Creek Nature Preserve for a reliever route might be a convenience for Blue Cross employees, but it's a permanent loss to anyone who enjoyed the solitude that that tiny bit of unspoiled nature provided to residents of Richardson. Walk through it sometime. You'll see.

P.S. Apologies to Joni Mitchell for the headline.

P.P.S. No apologies to Rodger Jones, who, as "DART Man", wanted to see a sidewalk built down the shoulder of Central Expressway so he wouldn't have to walk a paved trail in the woods through the Spring Creek Nature Preserve.

Bailouts and Rick Perry

May I have a word? Astroturfing and honeypots

It's a practice as old as Roman circuses, but it's been given a new name. Astroturfing is the modern day practice of using a professional marketing campaign to rally the public and have it appear as a spontaneous "grass roots" uprising.

One recent example was April's Tax Day Tea Parties, practically produced and directed by Fox News and presented to the public as spontaneous rallies across the nation.

A similar example is the email campaign to "stop the bailouts". One such email spamming inboxes bears the subject line, "Help your country get back on the path to freedom and prosperity." It encourages readers to contact the Supreme Court to stop the government-brokered deal by Fiat to rescue Chrysler from bankruptcy. Oh, and it also asks readers to visit a Web site where they are asked to sign a petition, providing their names, email addresses and telephone numbers.

The telltale sign that this is an astroturfing exercise is the legally required notice at the bottom: "Political advertisement paid for by Texans for Rick Perry." The Web site itself is a "honeypot," a trap set to attract conservative sympathizers and entice them into giving their contact information to the Perry campaign for re-election as governor. The strategy is clear: Perry won't let Kay Bailey Hutchison get to the right of him in his primary election battle. Perry intends to push all the hot button issues to work his base into a fury to ensure they turn out to vote for him.

The irony is that Rick Perry himself is accepting federal bailout dollars to keep the Texas budget balanced. As explained by John Young, in an op-ed piece reprinted in Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

"Gov. Rick Perry, who looks good in any suit, hitched up his designer tie and bragged that Texas was alone among states in cutting taxes during a recession. ...

"Thanks to $12.1 billion in federal stimulus money, this budget holds the rate of spending increase to less than 2 percent, below inflation and population growth. What will happen when those federal dollars go away will likely make even the most hardhearted conservatives wince.

"When those federal dollars go away, we will see what shreds are left of the fine threads our governor and lieutenant governor model today."

It's a nice trick Rick Perry is pulling off ... using federal bailouts to fund his business tax cuts while criticizing that same federal money in speeches to his base. And doing these political contortions without messing a single hair on his head. Kay Bailey Hutchison has her work cut out for her.

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The irony of Rick Perry using federal bailouts to fund his business tax cuts while simultaneously rallying his base to oppose federal bailouts was highlighted today by a story in Dallas Business Journal headlined "Texans receive $100 million in unemployment benefits from stimulus plan." The stimulus plan being disparaged by Perry is providing an additional $25 per week in benefits to Texans who have lost their jobs. Perhaps the next time Rick Perry sends an email to his base criticizing federal bailouts for carmakers in Michigan, he'll rally them to take up their pitchforks and torches and march to their local unemployment offices, too, and take back that $25 from the unemployed workers in Texas, too.

The best part of the story was hearing Tom Pauken, Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, brag about the increased benefits. Pauken said, "The $100 million for increased unemployment benefits supplied by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being pumped back into the Texas economy." Yes, that Tom Pauken, the former chairman of the Texas GOP, the founder of the knee-jerk conservative Dallas Blog, the champion of smaller government, the foe of all things socialist, taking credit for Barack Obama's stimulus plan and its benefits for Texas unemployed workers. The irony would be delicious if it didn't leave such a sour aftertaste.

Perry to Pick SBOE Chair

Let's have another one, just like the other one

In the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Betsy Oney suggests Gov. Rick Perry is facing a dilemma in picking a new chairman for the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). His last nominee, Don McLeroy, failed to win Senate confirmation, so Perry must pick another to serve until the next legislative session in 2011.

What got McLeroy into trouble was that he was the leader of a faction of seven SBOE members who represented the religious right who, in Oney's words, "see benefit in turning public education into religious education at taxpayer expense. They see benefit in keeping critical thinking out of the classroom."

If Perry picks another member of that faction to serve as chairman, the politicization of the SBOE will continue. If he goes with one of the two moderate Republicans on the SBOE, the religious right may turn against Perry in his campaign for governor. Oney presents this as a dilemma for Perry. Oney calls it, "Money and ideology vs. public's interest."

But Oney never spells out why Perry would find that decision to be a dilemma. Was it a dilemma two years ago when he chose McLeroy? Why does she think Perry would now want a change from the McLeroy era? She says the McLeroy-led SBOE "listened to ideology instead of experts and were intent on imposing an antiquated education system on Texas children." Right. And that's probably what Perry wants to see continue. So, expect him to name as new chair of the SBOE, not the moderate Pat Hardy of Fort Worth or Bob Craig of Lubbock, whom Oney is pushing, but one of the other members from the radical faction that McLeroy has led. And expect Texas education to continue its backward trajectory for at least another two years.

Texas legislative session

Grading Austin

The Dallas Morning News grades the just completed session of the Texas legislature in an editorial today. As to be expected, the grades are mixed. From transportation to education to air quality to the death penalty, the News summarizes its editorial positions and what progress, if any, was made in Austin this session advancing those positions. Read it. It's a great summary of five months of legislative sausage-making in Austin. And it's a great example of why we still need newspapers, staffed with professional journalists, in this day of blogs and Twitter and Facebook.

Blogging the Death Penalty

Do we really need a death penalty blog?

I've commented before on the proliferation of blogs at The Dallas Morning News. There were over 50 and counting then. Today, on the Opinion blog, Michael Landauer talks about the fact that there have been 200 executions in Texas during Gov. Rick Perry's time in office. To mark the occasion (I guess), the News has instituted yet another blog, the TEXAS DEATH PENALTY blog. Is it possible for a blog itself to deserve the death penalty? Other than this comment, don't expect to see any references to the new blog here.

Local option transit tax

GOP to voters: We don't trust you

Richardson likes DART. It's paid into the system for years. So, too, Plano. What about Allen, McKinney, Frisco, and other growing cities to the north? They've said no in the past, but some want to give voters in those cities a local option to raise taxes to pay for the kind of public transportation their exploding growth could benefit from.

One of the suspenseful questions as the Texas legislative session approached adjournment was whether the transportation bill, reauthorizing the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), would make it. Richardson's Senator John Carona (R-Dallas) threatened to filibuster the bill unless a provision allowing local option taxes to pay for public transit projects was in the bill. The session expired without consideration of the bill, eliminating the need for Carona to filibuster.

So, the expansion of light rail to the northern suburbs is in limbo. So, too, is TxDOT itself. And any claim that conservatives make about supporting local options is dead and buried. Michael Landauer, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, blasts the Texas GOP for using a "bucket of half-truths and comical spin" to kill the bill:

"The Legislature is not considering raising the gas tax. That's simply not true. It is considering giving YOU the option of raising it if you want to. You would have to vote twice to raise this tax, first in a state constitutional amendment election, and second on a local plan. The GOP does not trust you to make this decision."

Peggy Venable, conservative activist and state director for the "Americans for Prosperity", pretty much admits to hypocrisy in an essay published locally by Dallas Blog (where else?). She says, "We conservatives usually like local options. But not when the cards are stacked against taxpayers." How does a bill giving taxpayers a vote stack the cards against taxpayers? Venable explains in another opinion piece published on the AFP Web site. "It’s a tax and local officials would put it on the ballot until it passed." In other words, Venable doesn't trust taxpayers to vote the way she wants them to vote and so she opposes even giving them a say. If anyone is stacking the cards against taxpayers, it's Venable. So, the next time you hear a conservative talk about solving problems at the local level, or about giving power to the people, remember the hypocritical position they took to kill the transportation bill.

Richardson Council Goal Setting

Don't let others define you

An issue in the recent Richardson city council election was transparency in government. Candidates were unanimously in favor of increasing transparency through steps such as video streaming council meetings. The obvious reason is that voters have a right to know what their council does. Televising meetings allows voters to keep an eye on the council, providing a check that elected representatives are doing what they told voters they'd do.

Today, we see another reason why council members might want to televise their meetings -- self interest. Destiny, in the Conserve & Protect blog, reports on Monday night's city council goal setting meeting. She complimented new member Amir Omar for his "amazing job." She dismissed new members Bob Macy and Mark Solomon for offering nothing new. She gave a back-handed compliment to mayor Gary Slagel for the whole exercise of setting goals.

By and large, Destiny was objective, but the council shouldn't expect that from bloggers in general. My advice to the council: if you don't want the public's impression of the council to be shaped by your opponents, you'd better make it easy for the public to see for themselves what you are up to. Get that video streaming system in place pronto. It's in your own best interest.

TAKS Improvements

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Jeffrey Weiss, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, reports the good news that the Richardson ISD "has reduced the gap in scores since 2005 between white students and those of blacks, and Hispanics. Bottom line: On every test, the gap has shrunk. In some cases pretty dramatically."

It's good news as far as it goes. But, as the saying popularized by Mark Twain goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." And someone really needs to explain the limitations of the TAKS scores in giving a complete picture of what's going on in our schools. I'm not sure administrators themselves understand just how limited their statistic of record is.

That's because TAKS scores only measure how many students get over a very low bar, not by how far they get over it. Both groups can approach 100% success without the gap in absolute achievement closing at all. It's possible for whites to clear the bar by ever higher and higher margins while blacks are only just getting over. I'm not saying this is what's happening. I'm saying the current TAKS measurement doesn't tell us enough about what's really going on in our schools.

2010 SBOE Election

We're not just voting for governor

The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) has been the target of the social conservatives for some time now. The SBOE determines the curricula for Texas schools, including textbook selection. The religious right now has a majority, or close enough to it, on this board, to push Creationism and other right-wing causes.

The religious right achieved their power on the SBOE at the ballot box. Conservatives like vouncher proponent James Leininger funded one far right candidate, Cynthia Dunbar, with tens of thousands of dollars, even though she faced no Democratic opponent. Dunbar is famous, not just for being a fervent Creationist, but for predicting the "end of America as we know it" should Barack Obama be elected President. She claims his election is null and void because he isn't a United States citizen. She says that if America suffers a terrorist attack, it will likely be part of a conspiracy by Obama to impose tyranny through martial law. Obama is not the only subject of her conspiracy fantasies. She claims that America is under daily attack by the "militant leftist Judicial branch."

You might wonder how such an extremist achieved a position of such influence over the classrooms of our children in Texas. It's because moderates and liberals haven't paid enough attention to these elected positions. Maybe that's all about to change. According to Burnt Orange Report, organizers are taking notice of the upcoming 2010 election in which Cynthia Dunbar's place on the SBOE is before the voters. "Education First", a network of residents of Cynthia Dunbar's District 10, is holding meetups 17 months before the election "to promote educational excellence by reducing the influence of politics and ideology on the board."

SBOE District 12, including Richardson, is represented by Geraldine "Tincy" Miller, who is a mild pro-science member of the SBOE, but whose vote for teaching science in our schools' science classes and not Creationism is far from assured. It wouldn't hurt for the moderate voters in Richardson to pay attention to SBOE races, too, to keep the Creationists from taking over the SBOE entirely. So, don't get distracted by all the sound and fury that next year's governor race is going to generate. Save just a little attention for those down-ticket races for SBOE.

DART in Richardson

A Richardson resident's case for DART

William 'Bill' McCalpin lays out the benefits to Richardson of having DART light rail.

"This is a ‘win-win’ for everyone in Richardson. The homeowners preserve the integrity of their neighborhoods, the businesses in Richardson are able to locate more of their employees here, the young and young at heart are able to live in apartments or other shared housing in a living urban environment, and mostly important, Richardson continues to grow."

Read the whole essay. You'll feel better about Richardson and its future. You'll feel better about our local government. You'll just feel better period.