Mayor Mike Rawlings hasn’t quite figured out his definition of a slumlord, but I suspect he’ll know it when he sees it. Rawlings told me recently that he wants to find ways to pressure large-scale owners of single-family rental houses in southern Dallas to change their business models and upgrade their properties’ appearance. The business model is one that puts a higher priority on profits over the quality of the dwellings they rent to low-income southern Dallas residents.

If you go through Dallas County records, you’ll notice a familiar pattern: Just a few large-scale owners (people who rent out more than 20 properties) account for a very high volume of crummy houses that are dragging down property values and reducing the quality of life for everyone living nearby. These houses are often boarded up when they’re empty, which all by itself is a deterrent to anyone thinking of living in the area. People throw bulk trash in the driveway. Windows get broken. Vagrants and scavengers move in. Code citations build up.

No, it’s not always the owners’ fault that their properties get targeted by vandals. But they make the conscious choice to buy these properties to begin with — normally for just a few thousand dollars at a sheriff’s auction — and do the absolute minimum with paint and patch jobs to make them habitable. It is a formula for degradation. And the people they rent to have zero incentive to keep up appearances, which tends to hasten the deterioration.

I’ve done a database search of Dallas County residential property records, and just four companies account for nearly 700 of the worst-quality rental houses in the county. By worst quality, I mean houses that are listed by the Dallas County Central Appraisal District as being in either poor, very poor or unsound condition. All but a few of those houses are in southern Dallas. I’ve color coded them by condition.

Rawlings wants to look not only at the pattern of renting out low-quality housing but also the pattern of code violations that pile up against certain owners. When they match these criteria, they qualify as slumlords, and he wants to bring the owners in for a stern talk about the damage they’re doing to southern Dallas.

“We would bring each of those folks in, and we would say: ‘This is how many properties you have, these are the properties that aren’t in code. We need you to do X, Y and Z to them. We would like you to do that, but we’re really serious about it because we will come down in a serious manner if you don’t,’” Rawlings told me.

I’d like to offer up four owners for starters – Khraish H. Khraish’s HMK Ltd., the Topletz family, G.W. Works, and Joseph Bevers’ JB III Investments — for a meeting with the mayor. All have a lengthy history of code violations, and you can click on the icons in the map above to see where their properties are located.

I don’t have any illusions that they will dramatically change their behavior. But maybe some should consider getting out of the rental business and find ways to follow the Habitat for Humanity model of fixing these houses up and selling them to residents at very low mortgage interest rates — provided the sellers can obtain the proper mortgage licencing. The idea is to instill the pride of ownership among more people, which will help them take responsibility for the look and feel of the neighborhoods they live in. That’s the first step toward forming neighborhood associations and getting people involved, which is a key goal of Rawlings’ GrowSouth initiative.

Every faith has its rituals. Hopefully these help put us in the mind of being with God and make us more present in our prayer.
Our lives have their little rituals too.

In a recent article,Rabbi Patrick “Aleph” Beaulier wrote about the ritual of a morning cup of coffee.

The coffee is a pleasure certainly, but it is also a moment set aside, at best, for a little peace, perhaps silence and reflection. These moments apart are important to our lives as people of faith, as people who are trying to draw ourselves nearer to God. We have our rituals in our religious ceremonies too, often freighted or filled with symbolism and intended, in their own way, to draw us away from the run of our thoughts and into the peace we hope faith will bring.

How can our little daily rituals bring us closer to God? How can we make sure that, in everyday moments, we are building our path to the divine?

(This question was inspired by panelist Cynthia Rigby.)

Continue reading →

(AP PHOTO)

Many Girl Scout cookie troops will be selling their wares online in the upcoming Thin Mint season.

When the Girl Scouts announced this week that the organization will begin allowing its members to sell their trademark cookies through mobile apps and websites for the first time, leaders stressed that they’ve spent five years working out potential security concerns with girls making website sales.

Not everyone is satisfied. Although the individually created sites will be accessible only through e-invites from their young creators, we know too well no one’s personal info is 100 percent protected once they venture into the digital world.

But after reading the concerns and potential problematic scenarios, I maintain that the online sales experiment is, on balance, a very good thing. What better way to teach business entrepreneurship to young women?

I think Forbes sent just the right message to the young women by reacting with some great e-commerce tips to help the sellers ensure success. The expanded sales idea fits well into a series of business Innovation badges that the Scouts have created as part of their STEM emphasis. (Kudos to the Girl Scouts for also offering a financial literacy series as part of the STEM-oriented badges.)

Some will cry horrors about the idea of 2.3 million Girl Scouts set loose on the internet for potential predators and hackers to prey upon. But how naive is that? Chances are that most of the Scouts are already experienced hands on Facebook or one of the social media tools — whether Pinterest or Instagram — that have pushed Facebook into the background.

Parental control — and adult good judgment — is the key to whether online cookie sales turn into a cause for concern. And as these latest headlines prompt parents to pay a little extra attention to protecting their daughters from trolls, let’s hope they also give some thought to making sure those young women are treating one another fairly in their online lives.

A recent Time piece, pegged to a new study showing that Instagram is the go-to app for three-quarters of teens, dug into some of the slimy ways girls are using the tool to take Mean Girls drama to a vicious new level.

We usually hear only about the devastating online bullying that ends in tragedy. Far more common is the prevalent drip-drip-drip mean-spirited behavior that young people suffer under in silence. The Girl Scouts have a whole series of badges designed to combat that scourge. Parents of Scouts can do their part by encouraging  their daughters explore those programs and leading the fight to stop stuff like Instagram slam books.

Two-million-plus girls spreading that message would be sweetness every bit as satisftying as that box of Thin Mints.

(Andy Jacobsohn/The Dallas Morning News)

Michael Morris, Mary Suhm and Craig Holcomb at Rafael Anchia's townhall meeting on the Trininty Toll Road

Last night’s townhall meeting in North Oak Cliff on the Trinity River toll road was civil, informative and well attended.

Don’t expect another one.

The pro-toll road speakers were Michael Morris, of the council of governments, former city manager Mary Suhm and Trinity Commons president Craig Holcomb.

Suhm, a person I’ve never known to lack confidence, looked as if she was about to order her last meal. She didn’t say a word until an hour into the program.

On the other side of the stage were planner Patrick Kennedy, council member Scott Griggs and architect Bob Meckfessel.

State Rep. Rafael Anchia was a deft and fair moderator. He challenged assumptions on both sides. Much of what I heard was familiar.

But I zeroed in on three moments. One was a major surprise, one seems just untrue and the last was a huge disappointment.

The surprise came from Morris. For a long, long time, we’ve put the price of the toll road at something between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion, with most people who are smart about the highway business telling us the bigger number is the real number. Isn’t it always?

Last night, Morris said that the road could come in at something less than a billion dollars. I nearly dropped my pen. The transportation director of the North Texas Council of Governments blithely shaved a half billion dollars off the price of the road after years of debate and study have set the higher figure in the public mind. Where did he get this estimate? Not from the work on the road that has been done to date. That would be the 30 percent design that NTTA has completed.

That leads us to the second point, from Holcomb. He told us that no matter what NTTA designs, the final design of the road really rests in the legal power of the city of Dallas and its Balanced Vision Plan. Well, not really. NTTA is designing this road. What it thinks it can build and pay for is what it will build. The design it has so far is way, way outside of what many of us think is acceptable. The city may have power to say no thanks. But if a pro-road council is seated – the sort of council we have now and the sort of council that powerful people want to see seated again – the sort of design NTTA has been building toward is what we will get. So I take Holcomb’s point as a bit of political pirouetting. It is dangerous to believe.

The point that made me sorry came from Suhm. I observed Mary Suhm for a long time at Dallas City Hall. I watched her work herself ragged for this city. She asked a lot of her people. She gave a lot more of herself. Believe it or don’t; it makes no difference. I know she loves Dallas. I also know she’s usually the smartest person in the room. So I can’t understand why she doesn’t get it.

Last night, she said that Dallas needs this road, basically for economic justice. People on the southern side deserve to be able to get to jobs in the north. That’s true on its face. It would be nice to shave some commute times for people in the south. Here’s the problem with her argument though. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THIS CITY HAS DONE FOR DECADES AND IT HASN’T HELPED!

What is Central Expressway? What is the Dallas North Tollway? We built the roads into the north, and farther and farther they ran. Did it help the south? No. It accelerated its decline.

Yesterday, I was in BonTon with Daron Babcock, at the farm he is building near the old Turner Courts area. He told me about men who ride on a bus for hours to get a job up north, the only place they can find work. They lie and say they have a car so they can get the job. If they get the job, they scrap to get the car (Babcock says 30 percent interest is common and I believe it.)

When the car note comes, they can’t pay on the wages they make. So they lose the car. Then they lose the job. Other men in the community look at what happened and say, why try?

Another road north doesn’t fix that problem. Suhm should know that. What fixes that problem? Opening up opportunities that have been shut down in those neighborhoods.

Look at South Dallas. It is an absolutely beautiful part of our city. Have you been on Park? Have you been on South? These are some of our best neighborhoods, covered over in years of neglect and poverty.

What if those precious dollars, those millions and millions of dollars, went not to a new road, but to correcting the mistake of an old one?

What if we looked at Interstate-30 and asked, how can bring South Dallas back into our city? How can we tear down a division that strangled opportunity? How can we help the people who have invested their lives here build wealth from the land under them?

We can do it by committing ourselves to making a long canyon of I-30 and putting decks above it. That would bring us the national attention that some here seem to crave so much. More important, it would spell a new era for a huge swath of southern Dallas. It would give the highway planners some more lanes. And it would unite us in a vision of our future city.

Last night’s townhall was helpful. There won’t be another one. The politics are too obvious. The people of Dallas don’t want this road. The people who do won’t want to face that.

I’ve been fascinated by Gamergate — well, fascinated in the sense that you slow down and try to see all the details of a freeway accident. I’m no expert on online gaming, but I have seen my share of Grand Theft Auto and similarly sexist (or worse) games, which I only semi-successfully managed to keep out of my sons’ hands until they left for college.

You only had to spend a few minutes with one of the iterations of Grand Theft to be deeply  troubled by the way women were portrayed — that is, abused — on the screen.

From what I’ve read about gaming since Gamergate hit the headlines in August — when a female game developer started receiving death threats and other online harassment — the portrayal of women has only gotten worse. (I checked out one game “Dead or Alive Paradise,” where women strip on poles. Good grief!!!!)

Gamergate has involved not just death threats and rape threats aimed at women in the industry but the release of women’s personal information and photos. For the most part, women who have tried to retaliate with words have led their “critics” to double-down in their expletive-laced, violent responses.

So 21-year old media and communications student (and video games journalist) Alanah Pearce, in Brisbane, Australia,  decided to fight back in a different way: Talking to the mothers of the internet trolls.

Pearce realized that most of the online abuse she was taking was not from creepy adults but young boys. From The Guardian story:

When Pearce sat down to figure out the best way to resolve the situation, she concluded she was best off contacting the boys’ mothers directly, “especially as most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It’s shockingly easy to find out who their families are.”

Enlisting mothers may not be any more successful, but it’s worth a try. Here’s one result from Pearce’s efforts:

Pearce forwarded a mother a threat her son allegedly made on Facebook: “ill rape u if I ever see u,” followed by an expletive.

The apparently shocked mother apologized to Pearce: “omg little [expletive]. IM SO SORRY.

Let hope these mothers are more than sorry — and that they take action to shut down their sons’ offensive online behavior.

Just as importantly, Pearce’s unorthodox response to the abuse she’s taken is leading to more mainstream commentary (like this one!) spotlighting the widespread misogyny in gaming culture. If you think this is some small niche issue, do yourself a favor and learn more about this billion-dollar industry.

So...So beautiful.

I know where I’ll be this evening. Rosemont Elementary at 6:30 p.m. for a community forum on the Trinity River toll road.

It’s an open deal. Anyone can come. The public is wanted.

State Rep. Rafael Anchia, showing the kind of leadership that people like Jefferson and Washington might have had in mind, is hosting the forum after doing some polling on the toll road. (Survey says no thanks.)

This is exactly the kind of thing we need right now on this project. No matter what you say about votes in 1998 and 2007, this city is still deeply divided over the Trinity toll road. Actually, that’s probably overstating it. My sense of the politics – and I’ve been doing this awhile now – is that an up or down vote on this road tomorrow would sink it like a stone.

That’s why I’m pleased Anchia is hosting this forum. Let the people who believe in this road – the people who live in Dallas – come speak out for it. I want to hear them. I want opponents to sit quietly and listen respectfully. I want them to understand why people in Dallas – not planners, not bureaucrats – think we need this road.

I don’t think we will hear from them. I don’t think there are very many of them. That isn’t a judgment on the road. It’s a judgment on politics and popular opinion.

Anchia’s event is important and more so in contrast to the recent breakfast Mayor Mike Rawlings hosted on the road. Rawlings’ event was an invitation only deal. No pictures please. The audience was dotted with some very well-off people who have quietly had the back of this project for some time. (The really recognizable faces weren’t there, I’ll say.)

It was at this event Rawlings told us that six superstar planners will come to Dallas to re-envision the road. These are the big minds, the pricey thinkers who can tell us what we need to do.

The people at Anchia’s event tonight. Well, they’re probably going to be jus’ folks. Just people who live in Dallas and who are invested in their city and who believe it can be something more than a passing point.

The Rawlings event was an exercise in power fueled by anonymous money. There aren’t going to be many deep pockets at this Anchia event.

But you want to bet where more people will be?

Davidson Req for Recusal Letter

The family of elderly murder victim Marjorie Nugent sent a letter Monday to the prosecutor in the case, Panola County District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson, asking that he recuse himself from appearing before the court for the convicted murderer’s new sentencing hearing. If Davidson doesn’t recuse himself, it’s a near certainty that murderer Bernie Tiede, whose exploits were portrayed sympathetically in the 2011 film Bernie, will remain free despite having received a life sentence for the 1996 murder. First degree murder.

You’ll notice that I got the word “murder” in that first paragraph a lot. That’s because Tiede killed Nugent with absolute and admitted premeditation, and he’s about to walk free forever after only 17 years in prison.

He embezzled millions of dollars of her money. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last week granted a new sentencing hearing over the objections of the panel’s chief justice, accepting Tiede’s assertion that this was an act of “sudden passion” brought on by a dissociative episode relating to his alleged sexual abuse as a teenager. None of this was presented or proven in a court trial.

Davidson has befriended Bernie film director Richard Linklater and embraced Linklater’s campaign to win Tiede’s freedom. Davidson attended the Bernie premier and is reported to have hosted Linklater in his home. This is hardly the picture of objectivity that a prosecutor needs in order to represent the cause of justice.

According to the Nugents, Davidson lied before a judge when the judge asked whether Davidson had notified the family members of the murder victim about the effort to cut short Tiede’s prison sentence. The judge noticed that none of the family members were present in court and asked Davidson specifically if he had notified the family, and he answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

“This was an outright falsehood, and violated your ethical requirement of candor toward the tribunal. As you fully know, neither you nor your office made any effort to contact Ms. Nugent*s family about these new proceedings either before they began, or afterward,” wrote attorney Johnny K. Merritt on behalf of the family, in a letter to Davidson.

Because the family was never notified, they never had an opportunity to argue against Tiede’s release. Which meant there was no one in the courtroom to argue on behalf of the victim. No wonder the proceeding was lopsided in favor of the murderer.

“For the sake of keeping objectivity in Texas’ criminal justice system, Davidson needs to recuse himself,” Shanna Nugent, Marjorie Nugent’s granddaughter, said in a statement. “Davidson is an elected official, charged with keeping criminals in prison and keeping our communities safe. Yet he openly collaborates with the defense team of a convicted murderer. That special treatment for a murderer should frighten every Texan, as well as everyone in Panola County.”

Davidson has no business standing before the court in this case. A woman was murdered in cold blood, and the prosecutor is now standing in defense of the killer. That’s twisted Texas justice at its worst.

(City of Dallas)

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings

So Mike Rawlings will stand for a second term as mayor, bringing to an end the will-he-or-won’t-he parlor game that has been Dallas politics the last year.

It’s hardly a surprise to anyone who has seen Rawlings in the role. Sure, the council horseshoe aggravates him. It aggravates everyone. But that’s one day of seven of being the mayor of Dallas. The rest of the time is where Rawlings really thrives – the global trips where he sells the city, the high-level, big shot meetings around town where he hustles and cajoles, the community forums where he usually steals the show.

Rawlings’ strength has always been that he’s the guy who’s comfortable in any setting. He is who he is, whether the people around the table are billionaire bankers or the poorest people in Dallas. He’s Mike.

That sense that’s he’s a genuine guy, that he isn’t selling you a bill of goods, is at the heart of Rawlings’ political success. The bottom line is, people like him. And they like him because they think he’s real.

It probably doesn’t matter now who runs against him. Barring some unacceptable act on his part, he will be re-elected mayor.

The question is, will he be able to keep up the very thing that led to his success? Will he be able to just be Mike?

I wonder. The recent business around the Trinity River toll road is a clue to how savvy Rawlings can be. The road will, once more, be the singular political issue in this town. The question in the May election is going to be, do you want it or not?

Rawlings’ problem will be if people on either side of the debate don’t feel he is being honest, that they feel they are being manipulated in some way.

This city has benefited in many ways from Rawlings’ leadership. He has been a stable force in an unstable time at City Hall.

His power rests in large part on the sense many have that Mike Rawlings is an honest and decent man. And there’s something more. It’s this feeling that even though Rawlings issues from the city’s elite, that he’s welcome among the country club set, he’s really one of us.

If he loses that, if he puts his hand on the scale for the well-off and the entrenched, he will lose what makes him loved. And he will leave this second term diminished.

I’ve been moderately surprised by the reaction of some readers to my column and blog posts on Ferguson. For the most part, the tone is the following: I must be for criminals if I’m not for no-holds-barred policing. And there is an undercurrent that because I’m African-American, then I must be for criminals of color.

The logic escapes me. This isn’t a binary choice. Every neighborhood needs police officers, some more than others. But all neighborhoods deserve officers who aren’t excessive and are wise enough to know that pulling a service weapon is the last option, not the first.

So having said that, I’m curious what ideas — and I mean constructive ideas for improving police/community relationships — others might have to offer.

No “get rid of the criminals.” Of course, a community without criminals is better than one with criminals, but that comment alone is empty effort. This is a nation of laws so criminals are entitled to due process and non-criminals shouldn’t be made to feel as though they are criminals simply because they live in a certain part of town.

Today’s DMN editorial mentions some of the things that can be done from the law enforcement side to reduce violent interactions, or failing that, providing in the case of body cams, a video record. Studies show police act differently when they are on video.

Other ideas include increasing minority recruits, school programs to give students an opportunity to interact with police officers in nonthreatening settings and creating a diverse citizen review board on police conduct. None of these are perfect. Many have been tried before, but not in all jurisdictions. These ideas the low hanging fruit in this debate. But doesn’t it make sense to try those? I also would include ideas for improving  prosecutorial conduct on this side of the equation.

But I also want ideas from the community side of the equation. Not long-term fixes, like jobs and better education. Those are givens. I am talking about something that can begin to happen in relatively short order to reduce years of mistrust and confrontational attitudes.

The Ferguson case is closed. The issues that shape destructive police/community relationships are not.

(DMN Staff Photo)

A Save-a-Lot grocery is tentatively coming to a leased space in southeast Dallas.

Today’s DMN article on the city’s latest plans to bring a grocery store to southeast Dallas is evidence of just how difficult community-building can be in long-neglected and underserved neighborhoods.

The city has determined that the best option for getting a grocery store of any sort into southeast Dallas is to:

– Spend $1.5 million to buy and prep the land (near Simpson Stuart and Bonnie View roads) for construction. (This has already won approval.)
– Spend $1.3 million more to build a store on the site. (This will go before council next week.)
– Plus assure $1.1 million in bank financing to the builder.

For that almost $4 million price tag, what does the community get? A Save-A-Lot discount grocery chain, which has agreed to operate the 15,000-square-foot store.

Nothing against Save-A-Lot; for residents in this part of Dallas, a discount grocery is better than no grocery. But I haven’t found any proof that this grocery will spur the kind of positive development around it that another type grocery might. And community meetings in this part of our city have made clear that what residents are looking for is the kind of development that multiplies into more and better options.

My intent here isn’t to pick on Save-A-Lot, but rather to suggest — before City Council approves the next $1.3 million next week — there might be a better way forward .

As an editor/writer who has been on the “Bridging Dallas’ North-South Gap” project for seven-plus years, I’m definitely an advocate for “over-investing” in southern Dallas. But over-investing doesn’t preclude the smartest possible investing. Southern Dallas can only catch up — both in quality of life and in tax base — if every dollar spent translates into real results.

Which brings me to Impact Dallas Capital, a new not-for-profit organization working to stimulate economic development in southern Dallas. This initiative hasn’t gotten a lot of buzz beyond what we wrote, editorially, about it in the top of our latest GrowSouth assessment.

The folks I’ve talked with — some of whom are not “rah rah, whatever the Mayor says” types — think Mike Rawlings and his team are on to something with this innovative idea.

While commenters on our editorial labeled the editorial “bizarre” and expressed immediate contempt for the Impact Dallas strategy, my sources don’t see anything sneaky about the plan. I’ve been told by some trustworthy folks that everyone involved in Impact Dallas has the right intentions.

Experience leads me to support business leadership’s strategy for southern Dallas economic development over what often comes out of a well-meaning but not always well-conceived City Hall staff strategy. There’s something about this Save-A-Lot plan that feels more like throwing money at a symbolic, but unsatisfactory, solution.

So here’s what I propose Mayor Rawlings and the Council do before going forward with exchanging $2.8 million for a Save-A-Lot lease: Why not run this proposal by Impact Dallas? The list of its board of directors and investors indicates that some of the best financial and investment minds in the city are participating. What do they think? Is this the best answer to what is undoubtedly a severe food desert? Is there something that Impact Dallas, which is amassing investment capital, could drive more effectively?

(Jabin Botsford/The New York Times)

President Barack Obama speaks before pardoning Cheese, the National Thanksgiving Turkey, as his daughters, Sasha and Malia, right, look on during the 67th anniversary of the National Thanksgiving Turkey presentation in the Grand Fourier at the White House in Washington, Nov. 26, 2014.

I don’t know what is the source of so much vitriol surrounding anyone with the last name Obama, but it was truly inexcusable for Elizabeth Lauten, communications director to Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), to tweet out her decidedly unclassy critique of President Obama’s daughters after last week’s turkey-pardoning ceremony.

Lauten wrote on Facebook that the Obama daughters, Sasha and Malia, should have shown “a little class” at the pardoning ceremony. “Rise to the occasion. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at the bar. And certainly don’t make faces during televised, public events.”

“A spot at the bar”? Was Lauten suggesting that the girls were dressed in attire inappropriate for girls of their age, or worse, that they were dressed like bar hoppers? If I’m not mistaken, Sasha is wearing what looks like a school uniform under a high-collar pullover. Melia is wearing a dress and long sweater.

Sasha is 13 and Malia 16. They are teenagers whose faces clearly indicated that they would rather have been somewhere else at that particular moment, as seems to be the case with teens of those ages wherever they are when it involves their parents. They don’t like being on a stage with everyone looking at them. Any right-thinking adult (or left-thinking one) would know that it’s way out of bounds to publicly call out kids in such a situation, whether it’s the president’s children or the next-door neighbor’s.

But Lauten let it fly, I guess because the prevailing anything-goes mentality among her partisans is that it’s open season on Obama. If the attacker can get in a dig on the father, then the kids are fair game for sacrifice, I guess.

Lauten apologized after praying on the matter and, apparently, hearing from her own parents about the wisdom of her posting.

Today, she resigned. After a series of missteps that convey an utter void of class in Lauten’s professional demeanor, this is one step in the right direction. It would be even classier for her to send a hand-written note directly to the two girls telling them how sorry she is.

Texas Tech freshman Regan Elder helps drape a bed sheet with the message " No means No," over the university's seal on the Lubbock campus Oct. 1. Students put up the bed sheets at three locations to protest what they say is a "rape culture" on campus. The women's actions came a day after university officials sent an email to students and faculty that called activities at a recent off-campus fraternity party “reprehensible.” A picture of a banner at the Sept. 20 Phi Delta Theta fraternity gathering, briefly posted online, read, “no means yes, followed by a graphic sexual remark.

You can always count on Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a National Review Online contributor, to come through when you want to stir up outrage. A quick look at her NRO archive and you’ll see where she’s coming from — the hard right. (By the way, a broader look at all NRO writers indicates that this “rape epidemic is a fiction” is a favored topic of several of the writers.)

It takes a lot of poking for me to go into full outrage mode, but I’ll admit it: Reading her cover piece on Points Sunday on the “feminists’ crusade” regarding the college sex scene left me speechless — and sorry that we published it without an opposing point of view. It was, IMHO, that over the top.

Mac Donald’s purpose in the piece is primarily to gloat that feminists, in their zeal to stop the so-called victimization of women, are in effect crusading for a return to sexual modesty on campuses, something she thinks is a great thing.

OK, that’s counter-intuitive, something our weekly Points section prides itself on. No problem there.

But it’s the way she builds her case that caused my head to explode. She equates attempts to combat the very real problem of rape on college campuses nationwide with “making males the guardians of female safety” and “portraying females as fainting, helpless victims of the untrammeled male libido.” In my opinion, she’s just using a lot of fancy writing to say the same thing that various college presidents have set more straightforwardly — and gotten in hot water for saying. For instance, here and here.

I’m not here to argue that there’s an “epidemic” of rape or even a “culture” of rape on campuses. But I will say strongly that articles like this one undercut efforts to stop blaming the victim and to keep our young people safe.

Here’s the incredible leap Mac Donald makes: “The new order carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex while combining it with legalist caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue.”

So, in Mac Donald’s world, it seems that if you either wait until marriage to have sex or, well, you deserve whatever you get in the way of sexual assault. In her world, there is no middle ground.

She goes on to derisively mock drunken women and the campuses that seek to protect them. For instance, “Harvard, also assuming that delicate co-eds cannot summon the will to say no, now allows females unfettered discretion after the fact to allege that they were sexually assaulted by conduct they silently regarded as undesirable.”

Mac Donald also states as fact that there is no epidemic of campus rape, rather “a squalid hook-up scene, the result of jettisoning all normative checks on promiscuous behavior.”

I would very much like to know what statistics she was looking at to be so sure that “real” rape rarely occurs, but rather women “drinking themselves blotto precisely to lower their inhibitions for casual sex, then regretting it afterward.”  Or whether she interviewed young women or spent any time on campuses.

Perhaps Mac Donald never made a misstep in her collegiate years, but most of us are human. So I’d much rather see universities erring on the side of over-protecting women than under-protecting them.  And I’d rather see more time spent on supporting young women, rather than tearing them down and making fun of them, which Mac Donald does plenty of in her piece.

Just rereading this piece make me ill. A piece like this reinforces such 19^th-century stereotypes – I kept waiting to get to the point where Mac Donald recommended just stoning female accusers.

Pieces like this distract from important action that needs to continue to assure that campuses are safe for men and women.

(David Woo/Staff)

ACE Cash Express at Abrams and Skillman

Earlier this month, there was an ugly controversy at City Hall over who should do the collections for the city’s municipal courts.

We had to agree that the city should take a deal with a new vendor, MSB, over the incumbent, Linebarger law firm, because MSB made a wildly better offer.

Of course, the whole thing was salted with local politics. it was anything but simple, but in the end MSB won the case.

Then I got some concerning news that I wish I’d have uncovered first. Around the state, MSB uses the company ACE Cash Express for a lot of its collections. Payday lending is a major part of ACE’s business.

Given the city of Dallas’ push against payday lending – and ours for that matter – I was concerned and urged the city not to let MSB send Dallas customers to ACE on fear they will be urged to take out a payday loan and exacerbate their troubles.

That prompted a call from ACE chief executive Jay Shipowitz, who wanted the chance to defend his company. That’s entirely fair, and I want to give him that chance now.

Shipowitz noted that only the tiniest fraction of customers who enter ACE’s to pay collections end up taking out a loan. He cited the figure of 3 of 10,002 last year. No question, that’s a small number. Shipowitz went on to add the following.

There is a commonly held misconception about the relationship of walk-in bill payments and providing short-term credit at the same location. We have been answering, perhaps well-meaning, but misinformed assertions about taking utility and other payments at locations where ACE also offers payday loans for many years.
ACE issued a statement in 2007 to refute the irresponsible “report” issued by the National Consumer Law Center. They have been silent on the issue ever since. I encourage you to read our statement.

The fact is that walk-in bill payers don’t take out loans. Conflating the two transactions does not serve anyone. Denying access to neighborhood retail stores that have expertise to efficiently handle cash transactions will add cost and inconvenience to both the vendor and individuals making their payment.
In the case of MSB, ACE processed walk-in payments for 10,002 customers during the last 12 months in multiple states. Of those, three customers subsequently got a loan.

As the facts clearly show- the misconception that consumers will be lured into payday loans if ACE holds the MSB contract with the city is simply not true.

I remain uncomfortable with the idea that the city would do business with ACE, even through a third party. There is a dissonance in the message. But I accept Shipowitz’s explanation of the two sides of the coin here and hope it informs you on the debate.

(Lara Solt/The Dallas Morning News)

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins (seated right) and his Republican opponent, Susan Hawk, listen to the moderator during a debate in October over the issue of domestic violence at The Dallas Women's Foundation. Hawk won the Nov. 4 election as public concern mounted over Watkins' displays of highly questionable judgment.

The current Dallas County district attorney, Craig Watkins, seems to think that the forfeiture funds generated from drug seizures and other criminal assets should go toward paying for the legal messes he creates when he does stupid things like ram his car into another, at high speeds, on the Dallas North Tollway. If the driver of the other car indicates a talkative bent, well, $50,000 in forfeiture funds can encourage him to keep his thoughts to himself — and, more importantly, out of the news media.

That’s Watkins’ ridiculous interpretation of the state law that limits the use of forfeiture funds for “law enforcement purposes.” Since Watkins was heading to give a speech in his official capacity at the time of the crash, the expenditure of forfeiture funds was appropriate, he believes. After all, the whole reason he was on the road at the time — looking at his phone, and with his 14-year-old son in the car — was for “law enforcement purposes.”

That dubious explanation helped raise enough doubts about Watkins’ judgment that Dallas County voters appropriately booted him out of office in the Nov. 4 election. Susan Hawk, a Republican, will take his place in January. But she’s already thinking of better ways to use those forfeiture funds.

She said yesterday that she will look into using those funds to purchase uniform cameras for Dallas police officers so they can record their actions and help avoid the kinds of confusion surrounding the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and rioting when his killer, officer Darren Wilson, was not indicted by a St. Louis County grand jury this week.

“When it comes to a tragic issue like a police shooting, the biggest challenge is the unanswered questions,” she said in a story by Dallas Morning News reporter Tristan Hallman. “That’s why for the good of our citizens and officers, there’s no doubt that police should be wearing body cameras that will eliminate the guesswork that looms over so many of these cases, and add a level of accountability – especially in cases where force is used.”

This, my friends, is a real, honest-to-goodness law enforcement purpose. Not only that, it would be a use of funds for an unchallengeable, good cause — as opposed to a usage designed to minimize political fallout for a reckless district attorney when he’s trying hard to cover up the embarrassing, high-speed crash that he caused.

If this is the kind of solid judgment Hawk will exercise in office, it means the dawn of a fresh new era, not just a political handoff, in the district attorney’s office.

(AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad/Getty Images )

Karen Gold paints on a boarded window of her store in Ferguson, Mo. Clashes erupted for a second night after agrand jury's decision not to prosecute officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown.

One does not have to live in Ferguson, Mo. or to have known Michael Brown to be dismayed by the complicated intersection of race and the legal system.

Encounters with the criminal justice system are problematic in just about every city in America. Race is a factor, as it always is in America. But race aside, the criminal justice system itself remains confusing and threatening, a roll of the dice that doesn’t always yield clarity, let alone, justice.

The great unspoken truth is that minority communities fear police and police fear minority communities. This runs counter to the textbook notion that bad guys are arrested and go to jail and good guys don’t, and it runs counter to the pursuit of justice.

In Ferguson, this paradox spiralled the criminal justice system into a vortex of missteps. St. Louis County District Attorney Robert McCulloch, a man with family ties to law enforcement, resisted calls to step aside in favor of a special prosecutor, a decision I understand since it is his job to prosecute, not yield to community pressure.  But when he didn’t step aside, and most important, decided to conduct a pseudo-trial in the secrecy of the grand jury chambers, he fed suspicions that he was a reluctant prosecutor. He made no recommendation on whether to indict Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson, but flooded grand jurors with mountains of evidence to determine whether there was probable cause to file charges against Wilson.

I’m sure the grand jury was made up of hard-working citizens. But given the vast amounts of conflicting witness testimonies about where Brown and Officer Darren Wilson were throughout their confrontation, the grand jury probably should have returned an indictment so that Wilson’s version of events could be cross-examined. The same outcome might have been reached but a trial would have been the proper venue for sorting out the conflicts.

In turn, McCulloch’s unorthodox approach became another thumb in the eye to residents’ legitimate concerns about the circumstances of Brown’s death and past policing practices. And it also became an excuse for opportunistic thugs to overturn and set ablaze cars and stores in the distorted name of social justice.

President Barack Obama is right: police-community distrust is a national issue. However,the solution rests not with federal commissions on police-community relations but with local police departments, prosecutors and neighborhood leaders finding local solutions.

Locally, there  are example of how this could work. Dallas Chief David Brown involvement on the scene in 2012 to put a lid on rumors about an officer-involved shooting in Dixon Circle.  More recently, he began putting information about past police-involved shooting on a website. This need for transparency and accountability in the eye of the public is why Dallas County District Attorney-elect Susan Hawk favors equipping Dallas officers with body cams.

Credibility matters.

This is a 1996 file photo provided by the Panola County Sheriff's Department of Marjorie Nugent, right, and her former escort Bernie Tiede. Ms. Nugent's body was found wrapped in a white sheet in the deep freeze at her home near Carthage, Texas, in August 1997. Tiede had been serving a life prison sentence for her murder but is now free on bond while a judge reviews a new argument related to his sexual abuse as a child.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has opened the way for a new punishment hearing for convicted murderer Bernie Tiede, while upholding a lower court’s decision granting Tiede “relief” from completing his sentence. It effectively means that an admitted, premeditated killer gets to walk free, for reasons I’ll explain below. This in spite of overwhelming evidence that Tiede killed his elderly companion, Marjorie Nugent, in a well-planned, premeditated shooting as various people were discovering he had embezzled more than $3 million from her. He stuffed her body in a garage deep freezer in her home in Carthage, then went out and continued to party on her money for months afterward.

With the help of Austin film director Richard Linklater, who produced the film “Bernie” about the events leading up to Nugent’s death in 1996, Tiede was released from his life prison sentence earlier this year on the claim that Tiede committed the murder while in a dissociative state brought on by alleged abuse as a child.

This claim was never made by his defense attorney during his original trial, and anyone who closely examines the evidence and timeline leading to the murder would understand that Tiede killed Nugent in cold blood to prevent her from telling others about the embezzled money. I am fully sympathetic if he was, in fact, abused as a child, but the homicide he committed decades later as a clear-headed adult had nothing to do with that abuse. And in spite of the sympathetic way Tiede was portrayed by actor Jack Black in the film, in real life, there is no sugarcoating his murder motive. He stole her money and was willing to kill to cover it up.

Because of the appeals court decision, it is now up to Panola County’s prosecutor Danny Buck Davidson, immortalized in Linklater’s film, to seek a new punishment trial. That’s unlikely, since Davidson is a friend of Linklater, entirely sympathetic to Tiede’s abuse claims, and entirely blind to the evidence trail pointing that he himself introduced in court to win Tiede’s conviction. Davidson has already made clear he won’t contest the earlier court decision freeing Tiede for time served, which means it’s unlikely Davidson will urge the court to send him back to prison. Which means Tiede will remain free, and free to kill again.

“There is no happy ending here. A confessed, convicted murderer is free. And any chance for justice for my grandmother is likely gone,” Shanna Nugent, granddaughter of Marjorie Nugent, said in a statement. ”

A family spokesman, Ryan Gravatt, added: “Danny Buck Davidson is starstruck and he needs to recuse himself. A simple Internet search shows him arm-and-arm with the Hollywood celebrities who have been paying attorneys for two years to get Tiede a new trial. In light of this, does Davidson really represent the views of Panola County residents? No, he does not. The Texas Attorney General’s office should handle the re-trial.”

If Davidson truly is committed as an officer of the court to upholding justice, he must recuse himself immediately, appoint a special prosecutor, and let that person decide the next steps.

Folks, it doesn’t get more absurd than this. Our justice system in Texas now rests in the hands of a prosecutor blinded by the limelight of Hollywood. Linklater makes great films, but the ugly reality of justice in a murder case should never be subjected to the whims of a film director as the final arbiter.

It is worth noting the language in Justice Sharon Keller’s dissent. She notes that the appeals court pretty much ignored the amicus briefing filed by Nugent’s family, which clearly lays out a persuasive argument why Tiede should go back behind bars to serve out his full sentence. “The Court acts in accordance with the prosecutor’s [Davidson's] recommendation, but in doing so, it grants relief without articulating a rationale, without mentioning the fact that the family of the victim has proffered an amicus brief arguing that relief should be denied, and without addressing the arguments in that pleading,” she writes.

“Especially given the serious nature of the offense of which applicant is admittedly guilty (murder) and the questionable factual basis of applicant’s claims (his own self-serving statements), the Court ought to articulate a clear and persuasive rationale for granting relief. I suspect that the Court does not because it simply cannot.”

Keller cites the same written confession that I’ve noted in previous blog postings, where Tiede told investigators about how he planned Nugent’s killing:

“I had moved the rifle into the bathroom near the garage. [Marjorie] had walked out into the garage towards my car. I took the rifle and Ishot Marjorie in the back. She fell face first. Marjorie was still breathing heavily, so I shot her again. I may have shot her one more time. I didn’t want her to suffer. I then dragged Marjorie by the feet from the garage to the freezer. I had taken the food from the freezer. I placed her into the freezer and covered her with a Land’s End brand white sheet. I then covered her with the food. I took a water hose and washed the blood from the garage. I swept up the bullets along with some leaves and threw them away.”

“These actions hardly sound like applicant was “incapable of cool reflection,” as required by a sudden-passion defense,” Keller writes. “Applicant’s use, twice, of the past perfect tense in the statement seems to indicate that he had moved the rifle and the frozen food ahead of time, although his trial testimony offered an explanation for the rifle and indicated otherwise as to the frozen food.”

(Whitney Curtis/The New York Times)

A police officer and K-9 stand guard as an AutoZone store burns nearby on West Florissant Avenue following the St. Louis County grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo.

I’ll reserve my harshest thoughts on the Ferguson grand jury, district attorney, rioters and the president for sometime in the future when I can take a more dispassionate view of this case. For now, my anger is directed to all four for playing to stereotype.

The Grand Jury: I’m guessing these are hard working people who tried really, really hard to figure out the reams of evidence tossed their way with apparently no guidance from the District Attorney’s office. They reacted as a jury in a trial might react. When faced with confusing information, they opted not to indict. Frankly, I understand that tendency. It is human. But stopping a further examination of the circumstances before it gets to a public trial doesn’t seem the right way to sort out conflicting information. If conflicting information is the standard by which a person brought before a grand jury is to judged, then let’s open the jails right now. A trial might have produced the same outcome, but it strikes me that the grand jury process went badly off the rails.

The District Attorney: Based on his post-decision speech, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch seemed to have forgotten that he represented the state, or more to the point, was charged with making the case for why Officer Darren Wilson should be indicted for Michael Brown’s death. What I heard was a DA making the opposite. I find that peculiar since in the Q&A after his speech, McCulloch said he didn’t know what the grand jury thought was most significant. McCulloch emphasized the conflicting eye witness testimony, chided the media and didn’t mention Wilson’s testimony. That is reason to press for a trial.

The Rioters: These folks aren’t protestors; they are opportunistic thugs who took advantage of a tense situation. Everyone knew that the crowd would be a mix of troublemakers and legitimate protesters. So why release the grand jury’s findings at night? It put an added burden on police to protect property and gave rioters an advantage that they would not have had in daylight.

The President: Talk about a disconnect from reality. He said the right words, but when rioters are in the process of overturning police cars and looting stores, a presidential lecture on the history of race and  policing is very, very tone deaf. The split screen most networks used told that story. If he had to do it again, I would hope the president would have decided to deliver the same comments this morning when someone just might be listening to him.

( AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

A protester squirts lighter fluid on a police car as the car windows are shuttered near the Ferguson Police Department after the announcement of the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo.

The prosecutor in the Ferguson case had every reason to seek and win an indictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown. But it’s clear from prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s lengthy and exhaustive description Monday night of how the grand jury proceeded with its investigation — including parsing and scrutinizing the conflicting eyewitness accounts of what happened — he didn’t get that indictment he claims to have sought.

The question is whether McCulloch truly wanted an indictment, or whether he was going through the motions in order to apply a patina of justice to a foregone conclusion, that Wilson was never going to face trial for this killing.

The only way we’ll know whether McCulloch did his job correctly will be by reviewing the evidence and testimony that he says he will release publicly.

People outside the courthouse didn’t seem to care about the specifics or justification not to indict before resorting to some isolated acts of violence. So what’s the point? If, by peacefully gathering and awaiting the decision, you tacitly accept that the judicial process has to run its course, then why start shooting weapons and smashing cars when the decision doesn’t go your way?

So now the tear-gas cannisters are flying. There are reports of looting. Riot police are advancing on protesters. It’s going to be a rough night in Ferguson.