Via.

C'mon, Tom, show us the part where you walk on water.

​Oh, oh, oh -- now I get it. All this time former Mayor Tom Leppert sure seemed to be just a stinking hypocrite, a back-stabbing, forked-tongue phony who turned all anti-gay and old-time religious-y after leaving office and deciding to run for Senate as a Republican.

But no, ol' Tom isn't just some sleazy panderer, the sort of low-life who, as mayor, appeared in two Dallas gay pride parades, employed a gay chief of staff and sought political support from the LGBT community -- then came out against gay marriage or civil unions and sent out a tweet last year condemning the Obama administration's decision not to defend the homophobic "Defense of Marriage Act" in court.

Well, he did do all those things, but that doesn't mean he's a hypocrite. No, indeedy, because the Baptist-joining, gay-agenda-fighting Tom was always the real Tom. Turns out that when Leppert was meeting and parading with all those gay folk, he was just doing what Jesus would have done -- if Jesus were some sort of tin-horn politician.

Attacked over the weekend by his Republican Senate opponent Ted Cruz for being insufficiently anti-gay, Leppert explained that he was simply parading in Christ's footsteps. "Jesus engaged every single group when he was here on earth and I did too," Leppert said. "And what wasn't told is all the different times that I talked about my faith and went out there and every single person in this city understood exactly where I stood."

Sure, that makes sense.

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​While you were busy with all the holidays, another important reason for drinking heavily probably escaped your attention. This month marks 10 years of deregulation in Texas's retail electric market. Hey, put down that chair. No need for violence. This is the free market we're huzzahing here, Bub.

Actually, it was 1999 when the Texas Legislature passed the law deregulating retail electricity in much of the state. It was a couple more years before consumers could actually shop around from various power providers, creating a system intended to harness free-market competition to bring down rates.

Only it hasn't worked like that. In fact, average retail residential electric prices in Texas have been anywhere from 9 percent to 46 percent higher per year than the average U.S. price since deregulation -- at least until very recently, thanks to low natural gas prices.

You may be thinking that 10 years to get Texas's rates back below the U.S. average is not that bad, considering we're talking about government in action here. Well, yeah, except that, according to the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, which tracks electricity prices, Texas had cheaper-than-average power rates before deregulation. Since then, electricity rates generally have been lower in parts of Texas that are still regulated.

And they're less in adjoining states ...

And in most other states with deregulated markets.

We asked Geoffrey Gay, TCAP's general counsel, why deregulation seems to not be working according to plan.

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America needs you, Long Duc Dong.

​So the Morning News on Wednesday reported on a battle brewing in Plano ISD over attendance boundaries between Plano West and Plano East senior high schools. Pretty dry stuff, unless you're a parent who gives a shit, so you likely missed this nugget from the story:

Along with some others, [parent Lily Jiang] believes parents fear that an influx of Asian students will make Plano West too competitive for their children.

Apparently Ms. Jiang possesses a pretty good grasp of non-Asian America's attitudes towards competition with the East. Allow us to summarize it: "Holy shit, how are we going to compete with these people? They, like, study math 'n' shit. No fair! NO FAIR!"

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​Shortly after Pilgrim's Pride announced that its second-quarter results were dismal (as in, "a net loss of $128.1 million"), the chicken-seller delivered some very bad news: It's closing its mammoth Dallas processing plant by September. The plant, on Ferris just south of downtown, employs 1,000 hourly and salaried employees, says the company, some of whom will be allowed to apply for similar jobs elsewhere in the company.

Bill Lovette, president and chief executive officer of Pilgrim's, says, sorry, but he had no choice: "By closing the Dallas facility, we can consolidate that production volume at three other plants and help those sites run closer to full capacity. In addition, we will eliminate the cost associated with transporting live birds from northeast Texas to the Dallas processing plant and shipping offal from Dallas back to our protein conversion plant in Mt. Pleasant." Nothing pleasant about it.

Karl Zavitkovsky, head of the city's Office of Economic Development, wasn't aware of the closure till contacted by Unfair Park. And he acknowledges: It's a big blow.

"Any time you have a facility of that magnitude close, it's not good news," he says. "The fact is there's not a whole lot we can do about that, and unfortunately it's the sort of thing that happens in this part of the economic cycle. I guess we've been more fortunate than most to not have more of this happen, and we have a more balanced economy than most, but it's the sort of thing of thing you can expect and try to mitigate. [But] it's never nice when a big operation shuts down and a lot of people are put out of work."

All your solar-powered water taxis are belong to us, says Dallas City Hall.

​OK, now we're really curious. We're talking to you, Dallas City Hall, about those Trinity River project emails and memos you're fighting to keep us from seeing. What, has someone been unduly candid in his or her assessment of the city's plans to put a toll road between the levees?

No? Fine, City Hall, then just go ahead with that lawsuit you filed in Austin last week, the one seeking to overturn a Texas Attorney General's opinion that the Observer is entitled to see at least some city officials' communications regarding the project. We can wait a bit.

It was way back in February when reporter Sam Merten, who has since left the paper, filed a public information request seeking copies of every paid invoice related to bonds sold for the Trinity corridor project. Our curiosity was piqued by the fact that while City Hall has spent $250 million of the $420 million in bonds approved for the project, we've yet to see a lake or sailboat on the river near downtown. It sounds crazy, but we distinctly remember being promised sailboats and lakes when the project was pitched to voters.

We also want to see all communications during December and January between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Kevin Craig, City Manager Mary Suhm, Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan, former Mayor Tom Leppert and just-ousted council member Dave Neumann, chair of the council's Trinity River Corridor Project Committee.More >>

​Allow me to clean out the been-meaning-to-get-to folder ...

This morning I made mention of Jerry Jones walking out of the Marriott Marquis in New York City last night with two Sports Business Journal awards: Sports Exec of the Year and Sports Facility of the Year. Which is relevant to this chitchat the Cowboys owner had with Bloomberg News following the awards ceremony: Says Jones as league owners and the National Football League Players Association start their negotiations stare-down, stadium costs are directly related to labor costs. As in:

"Think, if you were a player, how neat it would be to run in there and compete in that stadium," Jones said. "Three- hundred feet tall, 3 million square feet. Well guys, we've got to pay for that. Let's put that in the equation of the labor deal."

OK. Remember Greg Meyer? He's the Blockbuster shareholder waging a proxy war with CEO Jim Keyes over a seat on the board come the June 24 shareholders meeting downtown. Anyway, Keyes didn't want Meyer because, among other reasons, he already had another guy in mind: insurance man Jim Crystal. Well, Crystal's done withdrawn his name from the ballot, which you'd think might open up a spot for Meyer. Unh-unh. Keyes sends word today that he's got a replacement all lined up: Kathleen Dore, ex of IFC, AMC and Bravo, among other media endeavors. Question is: Did Crystal jump or was he pushed in favor of someone with more skins on the wall to stave off Meyer's advances? ...

Speaking of videos, the great Elizabeth Hansen, Outreach and Education Coordinator at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, just sent word: How Motor Cars and Other Living Things Can Find Happiness in the Dallas Freeway System -- which redebuted at the Angelika last weekend after John Slate found it on a shelf 40 years after its one-and-only screening in front of the Dallas City Council -- is now online. ...

And, finally, after the jump you'll find two things you can enjoy with your eyes: courtesy our pal Frank Campagna, a new piece just completed by Robb Conover for inclusion in his show-and-sell at Kettle Art, which closes a week from tomorrow; and a YouTube clip in which one Dallas Observer reader reads the Dallas Observer. You heard me. More >>

Spike Johnson

​So, yes, maybe you've heard by now: Things have been busy behind the scenes at the Dallas Zoo. Construction has been underway on that much-ballyhooed 11-acre attraction, $32-million Giants of the Savanna habitat, which Park and Rec director Paul Dyer talked to us about way back in August 2008, in the heat of the battle over Jenny the Elephant. The habitat, of course, will house elephants, giraffes, lions and cheetahs.

Zoo officials, who gave media a sneak peek yesterday, want zoo-goers to think of this as a wild-safari adventure in the shadow of downtown. More than that, though, it's intended as a tourist attraction: Officials like to tout the involvement of top horticulturists, wildlife specialists and zoologists.

None of that, of course, will endear the Dallas Zoo to the friends of Jenny; we've already received a handful of letters from elephant lovers complaining about the addition of two new elephants to what they claim is still a woefully inadequate space.

The exhibit is set to open Memorial Day weekend. See more photos from the advance tour here.

Abstinence-only sex education doesn't work. You know it. Bristol Palin knows it. Shoot, anyone who has ever been or met a teenager knows that telling them to "just say no" is the best and possibly only way to get them to says yes, yes, YES!

Still, it's nice that the folks at the Texas Freedom Network, a group that aims to counter the radical religious right, went to all the trouble to come up with their most recent report, Just Say Don't Know: Sexuality Education in Texas Public Schools. Drs. David Wiley and Kelly Wilson at Texas State University surveyed the state's public school districts to find out how the schools are meeting state mandates for teaching teens about sexuality. So, how are we doing?

Let's see: Ninety-four percent of districts provide abstinence-only information, and 2.3 percent simply ignore the state requirement altogether. Such information as is provided is often inaccurate, misleading and includes religious indoctrination. (One official in a rural district told the report's authors that his school didn't need to teach about human sexuality, because his farm-bred students can learn all they need to know by from their farm animals. We presume he meant by watching them.)

Oh, and Texas ranks third-highest in teen pregnancy rates in the nation. Surprise!

The report is long -- infuriating in parts, hilarious in others. Best of all, some locals who provide teaching materials to 150 districts statewide get a special shout-out:More >>

If you haven't carefully checked the fine print in the city's proposed high-crime apartment ordinance, which the Dallas City Council will take up today, you might have missed this little gem: Apartment owners whose properties become too crime-ridden according to the city's calculations will be required to collect credit reports on future tenants and make those reports available on demand to the cops. Apparently, City Hall has found there's a correlation between credit-worthiness and crime. Unfortunately, it looks like the city has it backward. Bernie Madoff, for example, probably had a way better credit score than anyone forced to rent in one of Dallas' more dangerous apartment houses.

Kathy Carlton, director of government affairs for the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas, knew exactly what we were talking about when we called to ask about the curious credit-report thingy. "We had a lot of questions about that, and police tell us they are not going to be looking at [the credit reports] but want them to be done," she says. Yeah, we didn't buy that either, and Carlton didn't sound too persuaded herself, but as she points out, it's "a fine line we walk" these days trying to balance individual privacy with security. There's much more in this week's paper version of Unfair Park.

Man, I never thought I'd say this, but I kinda liked Steve Blow's and James Ragland's little dialogue on race this past week in The Dallas Morning News. Of course, the bar there is set pretty low -- at least they weren't writing about their love of Luby's.

I'm not saying I didn't cringe some when reading it. That was, um, mighty white of Blow to apologize on behalf of all white people for the historical wrongs done to black people. Taking the sins of a people on his own shoulders ... there was another guy that did that once, and Blow's not him. (I know plenty of white people who aren't sorry at all, including a few relatives and the state of West Virginia, for instance.)

Still, their exchange, while not exactly loaded with original substance, was much riskier and entertaining than what usually graces The News' Metro page. Risk-taking by columnist, what a concept. More please, News. Give us more. In thanks for the series, Unfair Park would like to offer the boys a little musical send-off. Here you go ... --Patrick Williams

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