Chris Gash

"Cheese," the cheap-as-hell mixture of cold medicine and black tar heroin, is again rearing its head at DISD's Thomas Jefferson High School. The school, which was known by students as the Cheesehead Factory, had reportedly done a pretty good job of ridding if from their hallways.

Now, another student has died of an apparent overdose. According to police, detectives are investigating the death of a 14-year-old TJ student who was found dead at a home in Northwest Dallas. Police are also investigating the death of a 17-year-old Garland boy found dead in an apartment in the 11600 block of Ferguson Road.

Police are waiting on a toxicology report in both cases.
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Photo by Leslie Minora

Anti-death penalty demonstrators plea for Watkins to stop seeking the ultimate punishment.

Rick Halperin, head of SMU's human rights program, has been saying for years what became nationally recognized this week: "Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man," to borrow a headline from the Atlantic. Halperin has spent his career doing the academic equivalent of banging his head against the wall trying to get people to recognize that it is possible to kill innocent prisoners and hosting event after event with death penalty exonerees sharing their stories.

Finally, a lengthy report released this week by Columbia University's law school concludes what Halperin's been saying all along: America killed an innocent prisoner in 1989. Or, more specifically, Texas killed an innocent prisoner in 1989.

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A compressed natural gas fueling station.

Beleaguered is how you might describe efforts to clean Texas air. Emissions reduction plans -- leaning primarily on cutting vehicle exhaust -- have been gutted by the state Legislature. But one provision, passed in the last legislative session and sponsored by Woodlands Republican Senator Tommy Williams, promises a seeming panacea -- to bolster our energy independence from foreign oil; to clean the air; and to spur clean-energy job creation -- all in one $2.4 million stroke.

The idea is to create a "Clean Transportation Triangle" by providing grants to install compressed natural gas and liquified natural gas fueling stations from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, all the way down to San Antonio, over to Houston, and back up to DFW again -- a veritable natural gas highway spanning the state. State environmental regulators just closed the grant round with some 21 applications from entities like the United Parcel Service, Central Freight, the city of Fort Worth, the city of Denton and others. They're planning 10 sites in the DFW area, including one near Love Field, for example.

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Flickr

While some in Congress have raised concerns about Facebook's privacy policies and others are already grousing about the company driving the "biggest Mack truck ever driven through the stock option loophole" with a $16 billion tax deduction, a pair of local congressmen are liking Facebook very much.

Representatives Pete Sessions and Kenny Marchant, both North Texas Republicans, will stand alongside company representatives on May 25 at a pair of local events "to present seminars to North Texas small business owners on how to leverage the world's largest social network," according to a news release from the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce.

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The Dallas Independent School District elections were held last weekend, and as we maybe should have known all along, Elizabeth Jones, Dan Micciche and Bernadette Nutall -- the candidates with tens of thousands of PAC dollars and personal endorsements from the Citizen -- blew out their competition.

The most interesting race, though not the closest, was between District 9 incumbent Bernadette Nutall and her 20-year-old challenger, Damarcus Offord.

Spurred by Nutall voting to close 11 schools and backed by southern Dallas activists Joyce Foreman and Juanita Wallace, not to mention the teachers union, the kid put up a fight. Fiery to the last, he dropped out of Navarro College, sparred with Nutall at every debate (except the D Magazine debate, where he choked more royally than anyone maybe has ever choked in the history of debates), pissed off John Wiley Price, chided The Dallas Morning News, filed an ethics complaint against a Mike Rawlinsg, maybe threatened a lot of people, took on almost $5,000 in debt and was overall just a great guy to call up on slow Tuesday afternoons.

But that's all over, which raises the question. Young Damarcus Offord: What the hell are you going to do now?

"I'm still gonna stay involved," Offord said over the phone, his voice noticeably more subdued. "I'm still going to go to board meetings, I'm still going to fight for the community, stay involved with my constituents. It's not over."

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The Dallas Morning News owes me at least five bucks for all the business I steer their way -- and, believe me, I hate doing it -- but once again they have an op-ed piece in the paper today that's really a must-read for people who care about the city or have any involvement at all with City Hall.

It's a carefully written, closely argued plea from two guys who could be viewed as occupying opposite sides of the tracks in a typical day-to-day context. They're basically saying that subsidized housing for the poor can become a social poison and that southern Dallas needs less of it, not more.

Man, that certainly has been the evidence of my own eyes watching this stuff over the years. In fact, I'd like to see the point taken to the next level: It's time to stop demonizing the honest private-sector landlords who rent to the poor -- stop calling them slumlords, like they made slums happen -- and recognize that many of them provide a valuable service.

Maybe next year.

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SMU

Steve Orsini brought in millions to SMU's athletic department. Why was he fired?

You don't shoot the goose that laid the golden egg. You just don't -- not unless you really, really have to or the goose stops pooping out gold. Which is why SMU's firing of athletic director Steve Orsini yesterday was so perplexing, and why the non-explanation offered by school President Gerald Turner and the unnamed sources in this morning's Dallas Morning News (basically that Turner and Orsini didn't see eye-to-eye) are so unsatisfying.

Both my parents are SMU alums, and growing up my dad and I would go to a handful of SMU basketball games each year, avoiding the football games because I didn't care much for football (Editor's note: What are you, French?), and because I think my dad preferred not to see the Mustangs get slaughtered by third-rate teams in the Cotton Bowl, always embarrassingly empty. The death penalty, which came down when I was a toddler, was always spoken of with some bitterness, when it was mentioned at all.

Then came Steve Orsini.

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Image via BBC World Service on Flickr

As Matthew Haag noted yesterday over at the Morning News' education blog, DISD's Citizen Budget Review Commission made several recommendations at last week's board briefing for how the district might cut costs. The most eye-catching:
consider getting rid of metal detectors in middle and high schools.

The commission's report calls metal detectors "fairly unique to DISD" and suggested that they were largely ineffective, given how many other unguarded entrances there typically are to each building. It added that the staffers being used to man the detectors could probably be better used elsewhere, and that a detector-free entrance might help students get to class on time. Finally, it said, "their removal will make the school appear more welcoming and remove the negative external perception concerns that DISD high schools must use them in order to provide a safe environment."

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Be careful out there ...

Michelle Flores finished her bartending shift at a Dallas nightclub and was driving home to Fort Worth late Sunday night when someone pulled alongside her car, mouthing 'Your tire, your tire ... pull over.' The 35-year-old mother of three would have normally ignored such a warning, but this time pulled over on Highway 183 in Irving, fearing that the construction sign she rolled over earlier that day could have done serious damage to her back tire.

Reflecting back, she says, "It was just coincidental."

She pulled aside, cracked her window and the man approached and told her the tire was wobbly and the bolts might be loose. "I'm so sorry, I don't mean to scare you," he said reassuringly. Nothing about the nice young man worried her. Nothing.

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Wikipedia

Stop means stop. Except in this case, you might want to keep driving.

Every kindergartener with a sense of self-preservation knows not to trust the stop signs that jut out from the sides of school buses, because even though they are the same reflective red octagons as those planted in concrete and the word "STOP" is written in the same white font, people often don't.

"We did a test two years ago," says Larry Duncan, board president for Dallas County Schools, which operates the bus system for the county's school districts. "We installed stop arm cameras on six of our buses and for 30 days we recorded. On every trip for every bus, we recorded at least one violator. Sometimes as many as 10."

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