Yes you will...in November!Originally Posted by columbiasooner
From the TrinityVote Website: "Next, the City has 30 days to verify the signatures to make sure at least 48,000 are valid (registered Dallas voters). We've already checked them, and we have more than enough."
:1stplace:
Consumers are not [the same as] citizens, and when a system pretends that they are, peculiar and even perverse things happen to decision making and democracy... - Benjamin Barber
Yes you will...in November!
Consumers are not [the same as] citizens, and when a system pretends that they are, peculiar and even perverse things happen to decision making and democracy... - Benjamin Barber
I tell everyone...I smile just because...I've got a city love...
patience...patience..
It's all about the marathon. Politics isn't a sprint.
That's a very telling statement. For the pro tollway side its about politics, but for the rest of us its about building a world class park.
why are politics involved with this?
Does that mean we'll be treated a four month "re-education" campaign directed at Dallas voters courtesy of the Pro-Tollway cartel?
Cartel? Snicker....
I love the passion of people in this forum. It's refreshing to see people passionate about something!
How many people voted in the initial election? I was thinking it was around 110K or so. If that's the case, and in November - the same turnout happens (yeah, and that's just about as likely as me winning the lottery), and the signers of the petition turnout... it'll pass... EASILY.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...1.4366f38.html
This is probably the most unbiased bit of ink the Belo Managed Snooze has released on this topic. Don't worry, tomorrows editorial will be about how the road will not flood when it rains alot. Apparently Ms. Colleen McCain Nelson thinks that toll road opponents are using scare tactics by telling everyone that the road will be underwater and what not.
Two snippets really stand out to me:
Those pushing the referendum are expected to be scrappy but outspent.
...
"We now have the opportunity to get the city focused on how much progress has been made on the entire project," Mr. Kirk said. "Our challenge is to educate people. At the end of the day, Dallas will hopefully stay the course and move forward."
The DMN observes that those pushing the tolled highway have tons of money to spend ... on educating the people why a tollway is preferable to a great downtown park.
Imagine that.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont.../vitindex.html
The Belo Managed Snooze does make a good point. Toll road opponents are using scare tactics by saying that the road will be underwater. It is simple math. Somewhere there is an invisible line that is the 100 year flood line. If the road is above that line, it will withstand a one hundred year flood. This is what city hall and the NTTA want to build. It is not what they have depicted in water colors though. Is there anybody on the forum who could produce a rendering of how elevated this road will have to be? What kind of slope will the earth bench have to have to remain stable during floods like the ones recently experienced? This road will act as a third levee in the middle of the flood way. What consequences will this bring? Will the city have to provide (read: buy) more wet lands?
I challenge one of these money proponents to come here and tell us, with evidence in tow, how much this will delay the park, what consequence there would be to making this a normal parkway(as voted upon), what the actual benefit of having a freeway in the levees would be and how they expect it to not flood(and how that will somehow allow enough water to be displaced to not flood it.
I'm waiting. If I can offer this as a public challenge, how would I go about it?
I'd also like to see a debate on one of those primetime channel 8 townhall meetings. I want engineers from the Corps of Engineers to be there to refute each side. This needs to happen yesterday.
something to think about is how much a tollroad would move the 100 year flood line....what I mean is they would have to build the road and build up under the road with dirt, etc to ensure the road would not flood. By doing this, aren't they reducing the amount of water that the levees can hold? Not sure how much this is but I would think it would cause the flood line to be moved even higher.
It would, but at the same time, the plan is to deepen the river, thereby giving the Trinity more power when the river floods..
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2007-0...-your-gut/full
Go With Your Gut
Do you really see a freeway somewhere out in that flood?
By Jim Schutze
Published: July 5, 2007
Trust your eyes. Go with common sense. If you've seen pictures of the Trinity River flooded from levee to levee in downtown, believe your gut: It's a fat angry cottonmouth snake inside your house.
This is Sylvan Avenue looking south across the Trinity River on June 28, 2007.
Subject(s): levees, Army Corps of Engineers, flooding, Trinity River, toll road If you have driven over the river, I don't have to tell you: That slimey thick-shouldered beast is surging beneath the bridges, shoving its round snout against the mud banks of the levees, searching for weakness.
Think of Katrina. This is the same story—rivers and human tinkering.
In his history of flooding on the Mississippi, Rising Tide, author John M. Barry describes 130 years of Katrina-like disasters that preceded the hurricane of 2005. Again and again he comes back to the same theme: Nature provides the raw force, but man creates the disaster by trying to tinker with the force.
One of the images that sticks with me from his book involves an early 20th-century attempt to make the Mississippi change its course in order to shelter some real estate. Men built earthen levees, as they have done here, to serve as prison walls, forcing the river to turn in a direction it didn't naturally want to go.
When the river flooded, that brown snout found soft soil beneath the levee and scoured it out in a huge tunnel. The river burrowed beneath the levee and exploded straight up into the air in a gigantic geyser inside the neighborhood on the other side.
Today in New Orleans people nurture a fervent hatred of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which they blame for building the levees and canals and flood walls that failed them two years ago. But blaming the Corps is a way for New Orleans to dodge its own responsibility for its demise.
Not that the Corps is blameless. But we have to go back to the way the Corps is set up by law. The Corps can do almost nothing without a "local partner." By statute and by political reality, the Corps can't come into New Orleans or Dallas and build what it wants to build.
I firmly believe—I will swear to you based on 10 years of watching them—that if the engineers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been able to build their own independently designed flood control system in New Orleans, there would have been no Katrina disaster.
But huge areas of New Orleans also would never have been drained, sliced up into lots and peddled as prime real estate. Instead of neighborhoods, those areas would be wetlands today. And somebody would have missed out on big piles of money.
If New Orleans says to the Corps—if Dallas says to the Corps—"Thanks but no thanks," then the Corps can't do any work in New Orleans or Dallas. And the Corps, like all of us, wants work.
Imagine we say, "We're sure that's a real engineer's daydream you want to build there. But it doesn't let us peddle the land. So forget it. We don't want it. We want cheap floodwalls and higher levees and no real control of runoff, so we can make money off the land. And if you won't do that for us, take a hike. We don't want to be your partner."
In that case, the Corps is out of business. It has to have a local partner.
And then you have the factor of both U.S. Senators and every Congress member in sight calling the commander of the Corps in Washington and saying, "If you can't help my friends down there in Dallas a little better than you've been doing, you can sure as hell count on a rough year for appropriations next time around."
So what you get are compromises. The cheap flood walls and worn-out pumps in New Orleans were compromises that New Orleans forced on the Corps every bit as much as the other way around. Generally speaking, engineers don't design things to fail. It's the quick-money guys who do that for us.
At key points along the way, the Corps of Engineers has signaled in fairly plain language that it does not want the city of Dallas to build a high-speed limited access toll road along the river downtown inside the flood control levees.
Early on, now almost 10 years ago, the Corps stated in a study of the overall project that a highway inside the levees would seriously impair any recreational value the remaining space might offer.
More recently the Corps changed its mind about where the road can be built and told the city the road could not be built on top of or into the sides of the levees, as the city had planned to do. The Corps had to know that this edict would create huge new challenges for the road.
Then the Corps told the city the road must be designed in a way that is "hydraulically neutral" in its impact on the overall levee system. That's a whopper. It says the city can put a superhighway down there as long as its presence between the levees does not lift the flood waters between the levees by even a fraction of an inch.
Imagine a footed bathtub full to the very brim and your fat uncle Waldo standing with a towel around his big middle, looking longingly. It's like saying, "You can get in the tub, Uncle Waldo, as long as not one drop spills out."
You know what that really means? Waldo! Use the shower!
Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt, who has become the de facto captain and commander of the anti-highway forces, pushed and pulled and tugged on the Corps recently and finally got them to admit something that really hasn't sunk in publicly yet: If the Trinity River tollway gets built, it will be the first major highway the Corps has ever allowed to be built inside a Corps of Engineers levee system.
First time. Ever. There we will be—messing with the river in a big way. Gambling it will work, like that time they tried to make the Mississippi turn.
On top of that, you have the city now telling people that the toll road won't flood, because they're going to put a wall next to it. Think about Katrina. Walls don't work. Huge, brown, angry rivers knock walls out of their way like wet paper.
That's why levees are big and fat and sloped—so they can't easily be flattened. The only way to protect that highway from flooding will be with a second levee system inside the flood control levees.
Think of the area between the flood control levees as a pipe big enough to carry all that flood water through downtown without letting any of it spill. Now inside that pipe we're going to stick an entire freeway and another levee system, leaving a space only two-thirds to maybe half the size of what we now have to carry the water.
Back to that idea of making the road "hydraulically neutral." How to get this much Waldo into the tub without spilling? Make the tub deeper. Way deeper. In this case, we would have to dig the river channel out deeper and wider by an amount that would totally offset the mass of the entire freeway and the levees built to protect it.
What's wrong with that? A little issue called "scouring"—just what the Mississippi did when it dug that tunnel and blew up like Vesuvius on the other side of the levee.
For example: I've been talking off and on this week with Corps officials about water releases from flooded lakes upriver from Dallas. At a certain point, the Corps has to release water from those lakes, or the water will overtop the dams and possibly blow them out.
That would be Katrina in Dallas.
But they have to let the water out in trickles because of scouring. If they pull open a floodgate and allow a major release all of a sudden, that water will come roaring downstream and rip down bridges, dig through levees and cause who knows what mayhem.
If you dig the Trinity River channel down into a deep channel, you create huge new velocities and brutal, unpredictable forces contributing to scouring. I know somebody is going to tell me that engineers can do anything. And I am going to point to New Orleans and say, "Yeah, but engineers with politicians on their backs can create havoc beyond imagining."
So back to Dallas. Last week I watched while Angela Hunt and her small army of volunteers delivered boxes of petitions to the city secretary, calling for a referendum on the toll road. Most of these are people I have known for years. They are motivated by all of the issues I have raised here.
I can't prevent the road hucksters from denigrating them as tree-huggers and trouble-makers. But I do know better. These are people who have taken the time to learn about these issues and who are genuinely horrified by the mistake the city seems determined to make with this highway.
On the other hand, we have our newly elected mayor, Tom Leppert, a construction executive who was unknown in the city until he was recruited and funded by the Dallas Citizens Council, a private group that meets in secret. Leppert's stance on the referendum so far has been the worst imaginable, a line that is both utterly irresponsible and crassly exploitative:
Just do it. People want to see some pretty stuff built down there. Just get going. No more delays.
People are stupid.
He ignores the fact that the toll road is slowing down the overall project. Getting rid of it will speed up the rest of the project, not slow it down. He ignores all of the flood control issues. He dismisses Hunt and her effort as a distraction.
Don't worry. Be happy. Just do it.
Leppert is exactly what happened to New Orleans. The difference between Dallas and New Orleans?
This referendum.
Those that fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Well the DMN has just released it's black list, I mean the names of the individuals who contributed to Trinity Vote. Looks like Trinity Commons only spent $44,000 as of June, but have not yet submitted an updated report. I don't think they will be so docile in the next round.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...ns.21ac1a.html
Hopefully, we'll see a similar list of big contributors to Trinity Commons when (...if) the updated financial report is published. I wonder what other organizations are "official opponents" of Trinity Vote.
I dont know if it's possible, but it would be interesting to know how many man-hours used by Trinity Vote to collect 80,000 petition signatures.
If the city council takes up the fight, and there's plenty of indications Leppart will lead that fight. Have the new council members committed to either side of the Tollway?
It will be very interesting to see how the DMN covers the Trinity Commons disclosure form, if and when it shows up.
I hate the way they(and the other news channels) keep saying the Trinity River Project, when the issue that will be voted upon is the roadway.
Here's the other side:
Group spends $163,000 to save Trinity toll road
Dallas: Backers of toll road show strong business support
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...y.2ade553.html
So the totals are:
Pro-tollway: $163,000
The largest contribution, $40,950, came from the Dallas Citizens Council.
Others who made sizable donations to oppose the toll-road referendum included:
•JPI Multifamily Investments, an Irving-based company that is one of the country's largest apartment developers. It gave Save the Trinity $20,000, according to the group's finance report.
In 2006, The News reported that JPI had bought land near where a dazzling new bridge, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, is to cross the river at Woodall Rodgers Freeway. JPI officials were quoted as saying that they planned to build apartments there.
•Crow Holdings, a privately held company that invests in real estate on behalf of the Trammell Crow family and its business partners. It, too, gave Save the Trinity $20,000. Among other holdings, Crow has invested in the Dallas Market Center and the Hilton Anatole, both in the Industrial Boulevard corridor.
Harlan Crow, the chairman and CEO of Crow Holdings, appears in a promotional video on the Save the Trinity Web site. In it, he says of the Trinity River project, "This gives Dallas the opportunity to be a city," instead of just a downtown "office park."
•CH2M Hill, a worldwide engineering and construction concern. It gave $1,500. Last November, the Dallas City Council awarded a $9.6 million contract to CH2M Hill for design of the lakes and other water elements of the Trinity park.
Anti-tollway: $219,000
The largest single contribution, $30,000, came from Ms. Hunt's council campaign.
Besides Ms. Hunt's election campaign, big contributors to the TrinityVote referendum effort included:
• Jeffrey D. Young, a Plano investor and businessman, who gave TrinityVote $20,000 and loaned it an additional $70,000.
• Lee Fikes, a Dallas oilman and philanthropist, who gave $15,000.
• Charles Briner, TrinityVote's treasurer, who gave the group $10,100 and loaned it $15,000.
• Claude Albritton, the benefactor of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary Theater, who gave $10,000.
• Tom Lardener, an Uptown developer, who gave $6,000.
• Harold Simmons, a well-known Dallas investor, who gave $5,000.
• Former Dallas City Council member Sandy Greyson's campaign fund, which gave $5,000.
• The Sierra Club's Dallas regional group, which gave $3,000.
• Windle Turley, the Dallas plaintiffs' lawyer, who gave $1,000. Mr. Turley also contributed space for TrinityVote's headquarters in his Central Expressway office tower. The value of that donation was listed as $2,714.
• Mike McKool, a Dallas lawyer and former Democratic Party official, who gave $1,000. Before running for the City Council, Ms. Hunt worked for Mr. McKool's firm, McKool Smith.
Last edited by dfwcre8tive; 17 July 2007 at 11:26 PM.
Well, that seals it for me. I will never rent from JPI. They take the money their residents give them in rent and spend it on groups that will lower their quality of life.
I find this very interesting. This is what I'm seeing, based on that:
- People that have their hands in the cookie jar are all for the tollroad
- Local investors, developers, citizens and community groups are against the current design of the road
So, one has to ask, is Mayor Leppert going to side with the people looking to line their own pockets, or is he going to listen to his constituents? 80,000 signatures. That's more than voted for him in the main or the runoff election. It's very interesting that this is coming to a head so early in his tenure. It could very well define his relationship with the citizens of Dallas.
Brian
So...how many signatures does it take for a recall? Maybe Mr. Leppert can do the math...
Last edited by BryanSmyth; 20 July 2007 at 12:20 PM.
There seems to be some question as to what side Mr. Leppert is on. Some of the above posts suggest the possibility of Tom Leppert siding with Angela.
-Tom Leppert said from the beginning of the campaign that he opposed the referendum and stated that the city should 'fight this with the design process'.(?!?!) I guess he is going to throw a brick at the blue print of the freeway. "take that!!!"
-According to today's edition of the Belo Managed Snooze, Tom Leppert made Dallas history with his campaign fund raising, over 3 million dollars. Much of that money came from members of the Dallas Citizen's Council, who are by the way, very much in favor of a freeway next to our riverside.
-Tom Leppert is the former CEO of one of the largest construction companies in the world. Do you guys think that he will be on the side of a rogue city council woman or all of the big ticket developers?
Tom Leppert is not a change of scenery at city hall. Tom Leppert is the status quo for Dallas, Tx. Developers and business men like Leppert are the reason that DT Dallas is a giant office park surrounded by freeways. Guys like Leppert are the reason why Dallas tears down its history and replaces it with crap. Laura Miller was the revolution and we all missed it. She was partly to blame because she could not build city wide coalitions on the council or with voters and therefore was perceived as the problem and not the solution. I hope nobody is holding there breath for Leppert to come around.
Recall - then Angela for Mayor!
COVER YOUR EARS DARLIN!!
Shot at 2007-07-23
Sooner, your last few 'prophecies' were a little anticlimactic. Something about a convicted felon working for TrinityVote went almost unnoticed with the exception of a few bloggers over at frontburner. Then I think you said something about us not having enough signatures. Did you get wind of something at City Hall? Do you still think that TrinityVote is run by a bunch of putzes? Do you think that Angela Hunt is some housewife councilwoman like Veletta Lill or a Rice grad with a law degree from UT? Do you think that TrinityVote is just waiting to see which way the wind blows or do you think they are preparing there own verified list of signatures and anticipating a legal challenge to the ordinance?
Just for the record.. I am getting married in Breckenridge, Colorado next weekend and will be out of touch for a bit.. I look forward to catching up with you guys afterwards..All I can say is "I love it when a plan comes together!"
Last edited by columbiasooner; 24 July 2007 at 02:46 AM.
Remember this post. Who spent more money?? Is it really "He who spent the most money", or..."He who is right prevails?" You guys be the judge. I always say, "He who hires the professionals wins."
Last edited by columbiasooner; 24 July 2007 at 02:44 AM.
oops....
The fact that a grassroots effort with almost zero support from the city or mainstream media can RAISE more money than the corporate opposition should tell how strongly citizens are against the tollway. Trinity Vote wouldn't have had to spend a dime, and I still would have signed the petition.
Sooner -
Only time will tell - and for the record, I predict the existing plan for the road is going to change.
On a different note - have a great time in Breckinridge. My brother got married there - it was absolutely gorgeous.
Brian
here comes the tide.....
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...1.428ca99.html
Many Trinity petitioners were paid professionals
Dallas: Nonvolunteers played a role for both sides of toll road debate
07:50 AM CDT on Tuesday, July 24, 2007
By BRUCE TOMASO and MOLLY MOTLEY BLYTHE / The Dallas Morning News
When Angela Hunt presented her petitions last month to stop the Trinity toll road, she was surrounded in the City Hall Flag Room by more than 50 jubilant volunteers, young and old, black, brown and white, from all corners of the city.
Ms. Hunt, a Dallas City Council member, made a point to thank the small army of volunteers who had helped her group, TrinityVote, gather more than 80,000 signatures calling for a November referendum on the toll road.
Without their long hours and unflagging dedication, she said, the petition drive never would have succeeded.
"We battled the rain and heat, and we debated the issue at every opportunity. ... The passion and hard work of all of our volunteers has simply been remarkable," Ms. Hunt said.
What she didn't say was that the Trinity petition drive, like almost all such signature-gathering efforts, also owed its success to another army, this one made up of mercenaries – at least one of whom had served time for murder.
In Texas and elsewhere, it's common for interest groups that want to get something on the ballot to pay people to gather signatures. These "petition acquisition professionals," in the parlance of the trade, are typically paid by the signature – sometimes a dollar or two per name, sometimes a little more.
Many are migrants, traveling from city to city and state to state, signing up supporters for whichever side in whatever cause will hire them.
And on the other side, the people who oppose petition drives often hire professional "blockers" – or, as they prefer to be known, "education technicians" – to stand outside gathering places and persuade people not to sign the petitions being thrust at them.
In Dallas, the principal group fighting Ms. Hunt's petition drive, a group calling itself Save the Trinity, hired people and stationed them outside Dallas polling places where Ms. Hunt's forces were collecting signatures.
"Our folks' job was to go up and say to citizens before they signed, 'Understand, there is another side to this issue,' " said Craig Holcomb, the former Dallas City Council member who runs Save the Trinity.
"We needed to have a presence at those polls. And, frankly and honestly, they needed to be professionals, people who understood that their job was to go up and start talking, before the person signed."
Ms. Hunt, whose council district includes parts of downtown, wants a referendum on whether to scrap the Trinity toll road, a key element of the city's planned Trinity River Corridor Project. She and her supporters say a toll road inside the levees is incompatible with the downtown park that is another central feature of the Trinity project.
They say a referendum on whether to kill the toll road is only fair because many Dallas voters didn't realize, when they approved $246 million in bond money for the Trinity project in 1998, that a high-speed multilane highway was what transportation planners had in mind. The '98 ballot measure spoke of a "Trinity Parkway."
TrinityVote submitted more than 80,000 signatures to the city secretary on June 29. The city secretary has 30 days to review those signatures. If 48,000 of them are certified as belonging to registered voters who live in Dallas, a vote on the toll road will be scheduled for November.
'Part of the process'
The use of hired guns on both sides "is part of the process of democracy," said Bryan Eppstein, president of the Eppstein Group, a Fort Worth political consulting company.
"In any political process, you're going to have paid participants and volunteer participants."
The Eppstein Group was hired by Mr. Holcomb's organization to furnish petition blockers at key locations.
Tom "Smitty" Smith, executive director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, agreed that professionals are necessary, even in grassroots referendum campaigns.
"It's just about impossible to go out and recruit enough volunteers who can devote the time that it takes day in and day out to go door to door or stand in shopping centers gathering signatures," he said.
"In the end, almost every campaign that's tried it has had to rely on paid petition-gatherers."
Still, hiring mercenaries is not without its pitfalls. Ms. Hunt learned that lesson when her group was forced last month to fire one petition-gatherer, 42-year-old Joseph Carter, after discovering he'd been convicted of second-degree murder in Florida in the early 1990s. Mr. Carter served 10 years in prison before his release in 2003.
Last year in Lincoln, Neb., Mr. Carter was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace while gathering signatures in a petition drive to limit state spending there, according to news accounts. He reportedly got into a tussle with a 20-year-old petition blocker.
His name also surfaced in connection with a lawsuit in Oklahoma over a petition drive to limit state spending. According to testimony, he was brought in from out of state to assist in that petition drive. The petitions were thrown out last December by the Oklahoma Supreme Court because of "illegality and fraud in the signature collection process" and "a pervasive pattern of wrongdoing and fraud."
Mr. Carter could not be reached for comment. He is apparently no longer living at the address listed for him in TrinityVote's financial report, an apartment on Park Lane east of Greenville Avenue. According to the report, he was paid $7,795 in fees and travel and hotel expenses before he was let go.
Ms. Hunt said Mr. Carter was terminated immediately when she learned of his criminal background.
"We didn't want this ancillary, irrelevant issue to distract in any way from our campaign," she said.
In what may be an indication of the transient nature of the job, Mr. Carter had worked for a few days for the other side before joining up with TrinityVote.
Tim Reeves, who heads the Dallas office of the Eppstein Group, said a subcontractor hired Mr. Carter to be a blocker but fired him when he failed to show up at a polling place where he'd been assigned.
When he next surfaced, he was gathering signatures for the opposition.
Big job, little time
In all, according to TrinityVote's finance report, the group spent more than $161,000 for professional signature-gatherers. That, together with $19,800 for travel and hotel expenses for those gatherers, represents more than 80 percent of all money spent by TrinityVote in the first six months of this year.
"We had more than 200 volunteers who were out collecting signatures," Ms. Hunt said. "But we simply had to augment that with paid workers.
"The city of Dallas allows only 60 days [for a referendum petition drive], and we had to gather almost 50,000 signatures. That is really an impossible task to do with only volunteers."
Save the Trinity, according to its finance report, spent $103,700 to hire the Eppstein Group, the consultant that provided petition blockers. That was nearly 90 percent of Save the Trinity's total campaign expenditures. In addition, a related organization, the Trinity Commons Foundation, spent $40,000 with the Eppstein Group.
Mr. Eppstein said fears that professional signature-gatherers will cut corners to make more money – forging signatures or signing up people who aren't eligible voters – are largely unfounded.
"A good petition company is going to have a protocol and a process and a procedure for validating signatures," he said. Those companies won't keep getting business if they don't do quality work, he said.
"A petition with invalid signatures is worthless."
btomaso@dallasnews.com;
mmotley@dallasnews.com
duplicate post
Last edited by columbiasooner; 24 July 2007 at 10:21 AM.
Tide? You mean the Belo company line. Pretty soon the DMN will be nothing but wire articles and pro-tollroad screeds.
"Ultimately, helmet laws save a few brains but destroy many hearts."
- T.J. DeMarco
duplicate post
We aren't to the good stuff yet...
Patience...
I can't wait... there's something really special about watching the back room moneyed elite putting the screws to the people.
Truly "good stuff," as you say!
That's a pretty sad tide. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Dallas Morning News is losing credibility by the day, not just on the Trinity River, but on everything. Just look at the circulation figures and revenues, both of which are falling like a knife.
Today's article was just plain silly... blatantly one sided, featuring a curious obsession with one guy who had been convicted of murder years ago (one had to read the article very carefully to see that he had actually been employed by the other side, first).
The far more interesting backstory would be knowing how the Sink the Trinity folks came into possession of this one guy's criminal background history. Do they have private detectives on retainer trying to dig up dirt wherever they can find it?
Just for fun, if the toll road gets yanked, I'd like to propose a public Crow Eating for ColumbiaSooner since he's been so vocal and adamant about this thing getting defeated. I wonder if they'd put that on DMN? HAHA - yeah, right, they'll just cut it down even after TrinityVote wins.
....
My bet is that he is somehow related to the Eppstein group. He is no different than the hired guns gathering signatures.
I just find it so odd that people could adamently support building a tollway, apparently mostly because they stand to make money on it. It's almost incomprehensible to me. Someone needs to make an objective documentary on these people so that the rest of us can better understand them. It can't simply be about the money, can it?
Consumers are not [the same as] citizens, and when a system pretends that they are, peculiar and even perverse things happen to decision making and democracy... - Benjamin Barber
let all sing....
Money makes the world go around,
the world go around, the world go around,
Money makes the world go around,
it makes the world go round.
A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound,
a buck or a pound, a buck or a pound,
Is all that makes the world go around,
that clinking clanking sound,
Can make the world go round.
http://www.ocap.ca/songs/moneymon.html
I laughed out loud when I saw this on the Local page today, especially at the headline's alarming large font...
DMN dramatics aside, there's still a clear difference between paying people to ASK voters to sign the petition (voluntarily) and paying people to TELL them not to sign (ie. think for themselves)
Many Trinity petitioners were paid professionals
Dallas: Nonvolunteers played a role for both sides of toll road debate
07:50 AM CDT on Tuesday, July 24, 2007
By BRUCE TOMASO and MOLLY MOTLEY BLYTHE / The Dallas Morning News
When Angela Hunt presented her petitions last month to stop the Trinity toll road...
^ I guess the headline "Mostly Rich People who own land near River or stand to make a bundle off of the boondoggle hate this petition" wasn't available, so they used the next best thing.
Founder of dallasprogress.blogspot.com/
I look at it as the difference between one side trying to enable a democratic process (a November referendum) and the other side trying to disable a democratic process. That's a huge difference.
Think wright amendment and you'll have your answer.
A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something. - Plato
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