Photo by Patrick Michels

Back in April, Raymond Crawford and other local environmentalists brought to City Hall the 21-foot-long petition that helped spark the formation of the Gas Drilling Task Force.

From our perspective you've gotten many things right in living up to your charge and Mayor Rawling's vow never to put any neighborhood at risk because of money. But we also know that the chronicling of hazards associated with fracking of natural gas is a moving target and new information can make rules that have not even been codified yet obsolete overnight.

Via.

Municipal Court Judge Phyllis Lister Brown

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District Judge Martin Lowy today granted a temporary injunction preventing the city from removing Brown from her position. To do so would mean her candidacy "will be irreparably harmed by creating negative publicity, a negative perception on the part of voters, and the inability to recover back wages," according to the judge's decision.

Lowy also ruled on the city's claim of immunity to the suits filed by Brown. He said that no, the city can't bow out of this legal quagmire simply by virtue of being a city. Brown's attorney, Ray Guy, tells Unfair Park that the city is appealing this decision. "I don't have a definite time table for the court of appeals," Guy says. City Attorney Tom Perkins has not returned our phone calls.

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On hand to testify today were ERCOT chief Trip Doggett and Texas Public Utility Commission chair Donna Nelson. The problem, they tell us, is that the utilities aren't making enough money to want to invest in more power plants. And since ERCOT, the entity charged with maintaining electrical grid reliability, is operating a deregulated marketplace, that's nothing but free-market magic! See, natural gas sets the margin most of the time, and natural gas is dirt-cheap these days. Fantastic for us! Shitty for them.

There's no small amount of irony in the fact that we're having this discussion roughly 10 years after the state leg deregulated the market based on the begging and clamoring of (no, not you and me)...the industry. Free market competition was gonna lower prices and spur private investment in generation. But prices just went up, until recently. And nobody's* building anything lately. That leads us to exchanges like this:

The Superintendent of Schools shall be a bona fide resident of the District, unless otherwise stated in the original contract or subsequent renewal contracts of the Superintendent.

The Superintendent of Schools shall be a bona fide resident of the District.

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But the same essay ticks off a list of major institutions that have bailed on Fair Park in recent years to relocate in tonier venues in or near the downtown Arts District, far from the dilapidated houses and lounging unemployed outdoor paper-bag sippers who tend to scare off the high-culture clientele.

In fact, at one point Johnson even blames Fair Park for the poverty of the surrounding area: "Because Fair Park is known primarily as a seasonal venue to most Dallasites," Johnson writes, "the surrounding neighborhoods have experienced a prolonged period of steady decline."

His one concrete suggestion for repairing the damage Fair Park has done to the people who live around it is a proposal to move the Martin Luther King Community Center into Fair Park. The center is a place I have visited often both as a working reporter and as an unworking reporter. When I was jobless some years ago, it was the closest place for me to go to sign up for unemployment benefits. It functions today mainly as a distribution center for a variety of social services.

Johnson isn't a bit wrong about the long-term trends at Fair Park. Obviously, all of the main visitor attractions except the annual State Fair are taking hikes one after another, going where their audiences want to be. Some day if Jerry Jones can come up with a way to stage the fair in Arlington, we can expect to see that last supporting icon take off for the 'burbs in about a New York minute too.

But proposing to fix the ills of the surrounding area by turning Fair Park into the world's biggest distributor of entitlements seems far-fetched. How would that help? To change their destinies, people in the area around Fair Park need jobs, not benefits.

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The June 2011 gear-shift in policy was a big one for an administration that deported folks at double the rate of its predecessor. It renewed hope among undocumented immigrants seeking only to make a living, and it prompted cheers from advocates, who believe it signals a more humane, pragmatic turn by the Obama Administration.

Problem is, it took months to see any sign that it was actually happening.

But according to Syracuse's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the first quarter of 2012 saw a six-percent drop in the number of removal orders nationwide. Based on those numbers, they're projecting a 21-percent drop in the number of deportation orders originating from Dallas.

"In my practice, I find that it took some months for the Morton memo to really have an impact. I think ICE was reluctant at first," immigration attorney Furqan Sunny Azhar tells Unfair Park. "Eventually enforcement and removal operations, as well as the Office of Chief Counsel, began to take the Morton memo a little more seriously, and they reevaluated most of the cases for prosecutorial discretion."

PETA

Wearing nothing but underwear during a display of passion that's bound to raise a few eyebrows and turn lots of heads, two PETA members will passionately make out in a bed that will be set up on a street in downtown Dallas. While the not-so-discreet couple is getting it on beneath a banner that reads, "Vegans Make Better Lovers," PETA members will hand out copies of the group's vegetarian/vegan starter kit to gaping passersby. PETA wants people to know that they can do themselves -- and animals -- a big favor by going vegan. ...

"What could be more of a turn-on than snuggling up to someone who's both passionate and compassionate?" asks PETA's Tracy Patton. "It's veggie burgers in the kitchen for a whopper in the bedroom!"

While Dallas County shares some general background questions of fact regarding the formation and operation of the MERS system, there are important distinctions that weigh against including Dallas County in [the Arizona cases]. Most importantly, all existing [Arizona] actions were brought by homeowners or borrowers who brought suit concerning their impending or completed foreclosure. In contrast, Dallas County involves the propriety of the MERS system's failure to pay recordation fees under Texas's recording statutes.

Continue to foster our high-performance public charter schools such as Uplift and KIPP, which are growing and preparing students for college at a record pace. We must find facilities for them to expand.