HB 3520 designating a portion of US 75 the George W. Bush Expressway just passed. #txlege #txgop

— Dan Branch (@TexansForDan) May 8, 2013

When State Representative Dan Branch introduced his proposal to change the name of a seven-mile stretch of Central to George W. Bush Expressway, we thought it might be one of those novelty bills that gets a couple of chuckles before dying a quiet death in committee. We hoped it was, at least. We couldn't stomach the confusion of having two North Texas freeways named for George Bushes.

But wouldn't you know it, Branch's bill just sailed through the state House. And this wasn't just a Republican thing. Every single Democrat signed on save for Dallas' Helen Giddings, who wasn't there. The final vote was 147-0. That's an unofficial tally, mind you, so it's a hypothetical possibility that a couple of votes were recorded incorrectly. But not 147 of them.

(Update on May 9: A staffer from the office of Fort Worth Democrat Lon Burnam writes to inform us that the vote was not, in fact, unanimous. "He most definitely voted against the bill," he writes. "The clerk says an updated, official version of the vote should be up tomorrow or early next week.")

Dallas Democrat Eric Johnson made sure to remind his colleagues on the other side of the aisle just how cooperative his party was.

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The North Texas Tollway Authority has been taking an increasingly punitive approach to chasing down toll scofflaws. First came the public shaming, then the lawsuits. Now, it could start impounding cars.

A bill to give the NTTA the power to block vehicle registrations and ban cars from its tollways (this is where the impoundment comes in) has sailed through the Texas House. It still needs a final OK from the Senate and Governor Perry's signature, but those are both formalities at this point. The Senate passed an almost identical version last month by a vote of 29-1.

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We've always assumed that The Dallas Morning News' white-on-rice coverage of the Museum Tower dust-up has been the product of good shoe-leather reporting on the part of Steve Thompson and Gary Jacobson: combing through open records, studying up on the arcane world of public pensions, developing sources on the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund Board, etc.

The Dallas Police and Fire Pension System has another theory. They're accusing Thompson of surreptitiously recording private meetings with their attorneys.

According to documents filed yesterday in Dallas County District Court, Thompson left a digital recorder in the board room following the adjournment of an April 11 board meeting. Thompson left, but the device continued recording in his absence, picking up "privileged and confidential attorney/client communication."

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It's no secret that Councilwoman Vonciel Jones Hill doesn't approve of homosexuality. It's why she's made refusing to participate in the city's gay pride parade an annual ritual, once explaining to the Voice that, while we are all God's children, "there are acts that God does not bless."

Hill is apparently concerned that her position on homosexuality isn't sufficiently clear. If that was the case, she left no room for doubt at the council's Transportation & Environment Committee.

The committee spent much of the afternoon interviewing nominees to represent the city on DART's board of directors. All of today's interviews were with sitting board members (Pamela Dunlop Gates, William Tsao, and Bill Velasco) and were brief. The candidates simply gave a one-minute statement about their service on the board, then answered two prepackaged questions from council members. One was about whether cities should be allowed to join DART while levying a sales tax of only a half cent, rather than the standard full cent, for service. The other was about why DART has hesitated to offer domestic partner benefits to its employees.

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UPDATE: We are now in a system-wide ground delay until 4:00pm CT as we work to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience.

— American Airlines (@AmericanAir) April 16, 2013

American Airlines broke the news a while ago that it's in the midst of a massive, system-wide computer failure. Perhaps it was a glitch? Hiccups from the U.S. Airways merger? Hackers? Former CEO Tom Horton landing on the servers after having his golden parachute snipped?

It's too early to tell why, but the computer problems have caused the airline to ground all flights to be grounded until 4 p.m. (Update at 3:12 p.m.: Make that 7 p.m.) AA has promised refunds to impacted travelers once the computers are back up, but the delay has left thousands of travelers stranded at airports across the country with little to do but tweet impotently.

AA's announcement sparked surprisingly little outrage, at least on Twitter. Snark's probably a better description for it.

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As they try to carve out a permanent niche in the ultra-competitive American car market, Tesla and billionaire founder Elon Musk have had to position themselves as sprightly Davids disrupting the lumbering Goliaths of Detroit and Japan.

They have no other choice. They can't afford the untold billions legacy automakers pour into engineering, R&D, manufacturing, marketing and distribution, and they don't have the scale to churn out millions of cars. To gain so much as a foothold, they have to fundamentally rethink the car business.

Musk was in Austin on Tuesday, where he testified in favor of proposed legislation that would help Tesla do that. Right now, Texas law requires that automakers sell their cars through licensed dealerships. HB 3351 and its companion, SB 1659, would let U.S.-based electric car makers sell directly to consumers.

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Protesters at last night's DART board meeting.

In February, a DART committee gave preliminary approval to a plan to extend employment benefits to employees' domestic partners, both gay and straight, and their children. It was a welcome decision, and it gave hope that, after six month of debate over costs and morality, approval by the full DART board was imminent.

It wasn't. When the issue came up last month, the board punted, delaying a decision until after the Supreme Court rules this summer on a pair of gay marriage cases.

The LGBT community and its allies are not happy. They showed up at last night's DART board meeting in protest, just as they plan to do for every other DART board meeting until domestic partner benefits are approved.

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When I read a story in The Dallas Morning News this morning about a contest for ideas to link the Trinity River to downtown and saw that the contestants were required to include the city's stupid underwater proposed toll road on top of the river in their submissions, my first temptation, of course, was to write something sophomoric, irresponsible, counter-productive and unbecoming of a citizen of my years. Actually, that was also my second and third temptation.

The contest is called the "Connected City Design Challenge," sponsored by the CityDesign Studio, a worthy outfit as far as I know, and the Trinity Trust, a pro-toll road lobby and huckster outfit that I privately refer to as the Trinity Untrustworthy. So how much can we really expect?

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Dallas Trinity Trails

The city of Dallas has been criticized at times for the agonizingly slow implementation of its 2011 Dallas Bike Plan. Two years after its adoption, only about 10 percent of the planned 1,127 miles of bike lanes and trails have been been put in place. That would seem to indicate that the city is behind.

Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan told a City Council briefing this morning that's not the case. The first phase of the program, which cost $1 million and runs through 2014, is fully funded through the street department budget. That means an additional 70 or so miles of bike infrastructure will be laid down within 20 months.

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We knew this was coming. The North Texas Tollway Authority kind of telegraphed it when the agency announced that some 6,000 of its top scofflaws would be referred to an outside law firm for possible litigation over their toll-ignoring ways. And now, it's here.

The NTTA filed more than a dozen civil lawsuits yesterday in Dallas County seeking to collect more than half a million dollars. One assumes that more are on the way, but for now, the lucky, soon-to-be-served drivers are, in alphabetical order:

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