Wait. Click the pause button. Freeze this. There's a huge point here that some people do not want us to notice. In the last 24 hours, the entire debate about the Trinity River toll road has completely shifted ground.

I was just now on the phone about it with City Council member Scott Griggs. He pointed out that if you read The Dallas Morning News this morning, you are not going to see any mention of the real news.

Up until yesterday, the News has always reported in news columns and insisted on its editorial page that there is no way to fix the old freeways downtown unless we build a new toll road out in the flood zone along the Trinity River first as a construction detour. The News' editorial page has insisted for years that the toll road is the horse and Project Pegasus, the state's plan to improve the Stemmons Freeway corridor, is the carriage to bring us downtown congestion relief.

Over the last few weeks, Griggs and council members Angela Hunt and Sandy Greyson have been questioning state highway officials about that thesis. What they have learned is that it's just flat not true. Highway planners have told them if they need temporary detours, they'll do what they do on every other construction project in Texas and the world and build temporary detours.

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On the one hand, our former mayor and Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate, Tom Leppert, wasn't afraid to break GOP ranks and tell us that his fellow Republican opponent Ted Cruz is a known communist sympathizer. Amazing.

On the other hand, now we also know that Leppert himself is a fellow-traveling soft-on-communism pinko libtard. Astounding! That's the problem with these Republican primaries these days. They're exciting to watch, but they always wind up totally destroying our faith in America.

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Yesterday we talked about The Dallas Morning News and its editorial campaign against allowing children in poor neighborhoods to have ice cream -- more specifically, their call for tough law enforcement measures against ice cream trucks whose low-quality music systems apparently have been causing discomfort to rich people who are trying to relax outdoors. I think I am representing their argument more or less accurately.

There was something else I wanted to talk about as well, but I didn't think it would go too well in a discussion of ice cream, and that's diarrhea. Specifically, what have the owners of the Morning News got against diarrhea sufferers?

Isn't it enough to snatch the Popsicles out of the mouths of babes, now they've got to go on a jihad against diarrhea sufferers?

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This morning an editorial in The Dallas Morning News calls for a crackdown on ice cream vendors:

"... the vendor's presence is rudely announced," the paper complains, "through loudspeakers blaring cheap electronic music like 'Turkey in the Straw' or 'The Entertainer.'"

The editorial calls for tougher law enforcement and points to the suburbs as places the city should emulate in trying to make itself tidier and more orderly.

Well, hell yes, then. I say let's beat the shit out of those ice cream bastards. Let's all get in on it. I think we as citizens should wade in there with baseball bats and broken beer bottles, drag them out of their damn cheap vans and beat them down bad.

Why? Because I think we need to beat hell out of somebody. The ice cream guys are the only people I can think of that we could maybe beat.

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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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Domingo, Domingo, Domingo. You were named after the day of worship. Why do you always wind up using names against other people?

Yesterday, state Representative Rafael Anchia jumped on Dallas congressional candidate Domingo Garcia for calling a black opponent an "errand boy." In a press release, Anchia said, "Calling a black man 'boy' is the stuff of Jim Crow and has no place in modern day political discourse."

Anchia and Garcia, both top Dallas Hispanic leaders, are way-back political rivals. You could chalk this one up to that, if you didn't know Garcia.

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Wow. I wonder how many other ancient mariners of the Dallas public school situation put down their daily newspapers this morning, nodded as I did, and thought to themselves, "So they're messing with Ison-Newsome."

That's serious. It could mean somebody's smart. Or stupid. I'm leaning toward somebody's smart. I'm leaning even harder toward it ain't me.

Shirley Ison-Newsome is the most powerful public school official in Dallas whom nobody knows. She has been right beneath the surface but right at the top for at least 16 years, since a battle over the Townview Magnet School campus -- subject in 1996 of one of Laura Miller's best Dallas Observer stories.

Currently the "interim schools chief," whatever in the hell that means, Ison-Newsome is one of an entire cadre of top school administrators ordered to reapply for their jobs under an edict just issued by our incoming superintendent of schools, Mike Miles.

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Tried to get past these two very irritating issues but couldn't pull it off. Woke up in middle of night last night reaching for the shotgun. Please indulge. Eye and ear protection recommended.

First clay pigeon I'd like to try a couple 12-gauge shells on: a throw-away line in an editorial last Sunday in The Dallas Morning News dealing with the concept of paving over open space at White Rock Lake to accommodate the metastasizing parking needs of the Dallas Arboretum, a pricey private botanical park at the Garland Road (southern) end of the lake.

In its best school-marm voice, the editorial board of the News told us to grow up and get on with it: "There are more than 300 acres of grassland around the lake, and it is unreasonable to expect every blade to be protected in perpetuity given the urban nature of this public park. The arboretum's needs are significant, and addressing them is a priority -- it is, after all, one of the city's jewels."

What a load of unadulterated, in-our-face, utter and brazen, bald-faced, preposterous, infuriatingly galling bullshit.

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WFAA Channel 8 aired a story last night, reprised in this morning's Dallas Morning News, about a series of armed robberies on and around the Katy trail -- three over the weekend and five more during the previous month.

Both stories said Dallas Police had refused to comment on the attacks or to say whether they are connected, even though they sure as hell sound like they are.

There is only one reason for the cops to sit on something like this. They can't solve it. They're embarrassed. Somebody over them is embarrassed. So the warnings that could save a life go unissued.

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Several of you have asked me to explain a point in my column in this week's newspaper about the Trinity River toll road and why it may be unstoppable.

Sorry. Should have done it in the column. And as it turns out, I had this wrong on two scores, one more important than the other.

I say in the paper this week that it would cost half a million bucks to get enough signatures on petitions to force a new referendum on this bad, bad Leroy Brown of a road. That's not right. The mistake is my fault, based on my own misinterpretation of what I was being told last week.

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