hud.gov

Obama's new HUD Secretary Julian Castro: Focus on this picture for a while, and you can see him blink.

City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed yesterday by HUD and the city (see below) is a clean-sweep victory for Dallas and a bruising defeat for HUD.

In yesterday's settlement, HUD admits unspecified errors in its November 2013 finding of noncompliance. HUD releases Dallas from any obligation to pay a fine or suffer a loss of federal funding. The agreement makes no mention of compensation for Curtis Lockey or Craig MacKenzie, downtown developers who claimed Dallas scotched their tower re-do deal at 1600 Pacific because it would have accepted too many minority tenants.

See also: The Feds Say Dallas City Hall Has Promoted Racial Segregation in Housing Projects for Years

The accord signed yesterday is a bitter slap for Lockey and MacKenzie and I hope I can say, without sounding too self-referential, for me as well, since I've been pretty much the Lone Ranger around here for the last couple years predicting exactly the opposite outcome.

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Wikipedia

City Hall staff shown shortly after least real audit, about 100 years ago.

The city auditor's new bad report on a 27-year-old economic development fund in black South Dallas talks about technical problems with paperwork and mumbles on about the need for better "performance measures." Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when, Mr. Auditor, were you going to tell us about the missing five million bucks?

Talk about a performance measure. Here's your performance measure. Where's our five million dollars? Perform that.

The audit of the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund recently sent to the City Council hints broadly that the fund has been handing out a lot of money over the years without much attention to who's getting it or what's being done -- worthwhile matters of concern, to be sure. But Suzanne N. Smith, a member of the trust fund board who has been looking into its underlying finances, told me Tuesday morning she was surprised to read the audit and find scant mention of the missing moolah.

"I'm surprised that this audit report didn't discuss it," Smith said. "It was to me a golden opportunity to come clean and say, 'Look, we made a mistake, and here is how we are going to completely re-do South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund.'"

Smith declined to comment on the five million dollar figure. Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston told me earlier in the day that's how much may be missing from the fund. Kingston said he has discussed the issue with City Manager A.C. Gonzalez who, according to Kingston, promised some kind of action on it several weeks ago but has said nothing publicly since.

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Wikipedia

New York Times media writer David Carr, who's almost always right about everything, has a piece in today's paper about sponsored (paid-for) journalism, in which he singles out The Texas Tribune in Austin for having avoided the obvious pitfalls. I'm not too sure about that.

Carr kicks off his piece talking about a digital "news" site called SugarString , actually a brand-building beard paid for by Verizon, dedicated to covering all the hot Internet topics in the world except domestic spying or net neutrality in this country. Today's lead item is "Just How Terrible is Hungary's Proposed Internet Tax," illustrating what we in the daily newspaper business used to call the "Three Rivers Rule" of safe journalism. You can stir the pot, kick the hornet's nest, write about anything you want, as long as it's at least three rivers away from the city where your publisher lives.

In this case a headline seeking to tantalize me with just how terrible that tax in Hungary might be raises what I think is an appropriate response: "No, Verizon, how about we discuss instead how terrible you are, you greedy cynical bastards, for turning over all our private phone records to the NSA without a fight." And Carr's point is that you're not going to see that story on SugarString. (Side note: Is a sugar string not an old-fashioned device used to lure ants to a bowl of water where they drown? Just asking.) Anyway, Carr makes a good point on that one.

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Wikipedia

I'm just trying to think of other ways to make body bags funny.

It has taken me a long while -- I was slow -- but I guess now I sort of get why some people think the "Ebola House" is funny. Sort of. Still working on it.

Decorated for Halloween as an Ebola disaster area and located in a rich part of Dallas called "The Park Cities," the Ebola House strikes some people as funny because Ebola is such an exotic, distant, far-fetched phenomenon.

It's OK to make fun of Ebola in the Park Cities area of Dallas because something about Ebola itself is funny -- the faraway places it comes from, perhaps, or the kind of people who get it. Something. Still trying to put my finger on the real joke.

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Wikipedia

Not sure, but I think the yellow flag on the right is for The World Order of Big Guys Against Nurses

Just when we thought we could never show our faces again, thank goodness for Chris Christie. We owe him. Only the governor of New Jersey could make Dallas look good on Ebola.

Look, we won't be bragging any time soon about the day Ebola hit Dallas. It was a mess. We all get that. Now with the perspective of time, we might be tempted to say we suffered the bad luck of being first, and it doesn't really look as if other places would have done much better in the same positon. But that would be whining, and we mustn't do that.

What we did need -- the impossible dream, really -- was someone so callously crass, so utterly ugly, so very vulgar and flamboyantly foolish that he made us look -- well, I have to say, you know, somewhat slick. By comparison. And now we have that person.

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dallascityhall.com

They want to blow up Tietze Pool, fill it in and replace it with nothing. Then they want to build some suburban-looking crap like this way off somewhere else. Really.

Sorry, everybody else, but this is one of those times I have to go all-in, full-tilt, do-or-die East Dallas on you.

East Dallas! Listen to me! They're going to take Tietze Pool away from you!

Tietze Pool! One reason you moved into the Greater M Streets Area, also known as Far Outer Lakewood, also known as Old East Dallas, whatever the hell you want to call it. Tietze Pool! It's cool! It's one of the top cool things.

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dallascityhall.org

Might make a good graphic for a billboard that says, "Remember, only you can prevent shrimp boat accidents."

A little over two years ago The Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit support group for Battery Park at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers on the southern tip of Manhattan, decided that it needed a new chair. The conservancy wanted a new park chair that would be light enough to tote around, heavy enough not to blow away in heavy weather and beautifully wonderfully distinctively designed.

So The Battery Conservancy announced an international competition for best Battery chair design. From 15 nations 679 designers submitted sketches, which a panel of judges whittled to 50 finalists, then five, then one. The winner, Andrew Jones of Toronto, drew a chair described by The New York Times as, "a pale blue flower, its curving petals forming the outlines of the seat, back and arms. Its smooth surface is perforated with tiny, seemingly random holes that will allow the seat to dry quickly after it rains."

A chair.

Here in Dallas decades of botched flood control, official neglect and simple happenstance have endowed us with an opportunity to create the largest urban park in the nation, vast enough to include huge recreational areas, a sprawling natural forest and a serious river. In short, this could be a park that truly redefines the destiny of a city, transforming Dallas from a jerry-built outback outpost to an American 21st century Mecca, a place where urban life and nature itself meld seamlessly at the city's heart.

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Wdstckdr via hitchikers.wikia.com

Hoping it's not bad luck to say this so soon, knocking on wood, rubbing my figurative rabbit's foot (my wife won't let me carry a real one), but I think this city and maybe even the nation deserve praise for overwhelming equanimity in the face of the first American Ebola cases. What the response so far shows is that we handle the truth a lot better than we do lies, and we tend to have real respect for real doctors as opposed to spin doctors.

Sure, there has been some flat-out goofiness, as in the school district in Maine that sent a teacher into quarantine because she had attended a conference in Dallas. But people in Maine are famously xenophobic anyway. Just like Texans.

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Wikipedia

Turf. Its dirty. But people fight for it.

Talk about mixed feelings this morning. On the one hand thanks to a youthful experience I would rather not recount here in colorful detail, I know exactly how Dallas school board member Bernadette Nutall feels about getting rousted by the cops earlier this week in a Dallas school building. My heart goes out.

See also: Mike Miles and Bernadette Nuttall Slap Leather

On the other hand, the same experience leads me to believe she's entirely in the wrong for thinking somebody owes her an apology. If anything, she owes an apology to school Superintendent Mike Miles, who had to sic the gendarmes on her, but even more than that she owes a big mea culpa to the board on which she sits, for violating their basic charter and, frankly, making them all look a bit like fools.

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This is the official dogma from The Dallas Morning News. It's wrong.

News media continue to present a picture of Ebola transmission that is significantly inaccurate by omission. They assert much more certainty than the science justifies. The version repeated like a mantra in most accounts -- only direct physical contact with an infectious person -- is wrong on its face and may be contributing to reduced vigilance.

What the science does say: direct physical contact with body fluids is the most common way and the most extensively documented way for the disease to travel. But science does not know that direct physical contact is the only way the disease can infect human beings. Scientists know the virus survives for significant periods of time outside the body, even dried on surfaces such as doorknobs and table tops. It is not known if a viable virus outside the body can infect a human being, because that research has not been done. But public health policy on decontamination assumes some risk, even if only at low levels, from so-called "environmental" (outside the body) Ebola virus.

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