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.