Mayor Miller deserves the credit – or the blame – for this $85 million and counting "pork barrel" project.

Mayor Laura MillerDespite the Dallas Morning News Herculean efforts to portray Mayor Laura Miller as a hardworking mayor who just wants what is best for the city, deal after deal involving millions of taxpayer dollars continue to receive sharp criticism from people in a position to know the difference between media-generated hype and fiscal reality. The latest blemish on Mayor Miller’s media created fiscal acumen is the Mercantile project. Her mishandling of this multi-million dollar project brings into question the very foundation of Mayor Miller’s political existence. For it was this mayor who campaigned on fiscal responsibility and saying no to big ticket, costly developments that ultimately rip off the tax payer. That was certainly her very public reason for sending the Cowboys to Arlington. She violently waved the fiscal reasonability flag when she attempted to stop the Hunt headquarters’ development project downtown. So, why would this same mayor who so opposed fiscal misbehavior be championing one of the most reckless spending projects in this city’s history?

Here is how Mayor Laura Miller took what many at city hall say was a $40 million dollar project to spur redevelopment of downtown Dallas and turned it into an $85 million and counting ‘pork barrel’ like project that has placed the city’s downtown and Uptown redevelopment programs in serious jeopardy.

Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill is one of the very few courageous city leaders willing to go on record about the Mayor’s activities. According to Hill, this deal started out at $40 million a few years ago. Then Mayor Miller took the project and maintained sole responsibility for the negotiations regarding the project. It is a shame that the Morning News allows Miller to paint Assistant City Manager Ryan Evans as the bad guy in this when Hill says Evans had little or nothing to do with the Mercantile project as long as Mayor Miller had sole control of the project. According to Hill, Evans and other City Councilmembers were only called into the project to attempt to save something for the city after Miller had entered into deals with Forrest City, the developer, which could not be changed. These same Miller negotiated deals gave Forrest City unparalleled control of the Mercantile project while forcing the city to spend millions of dollars like it has never been forced to do in Dallas fiscal history. Don Hill is adamant about this point, "Any positives or negatives regarding the Mercantile project are the sole province of Mayor Laura Miller and nobody else. This was her deal."

Now you might wonder how the mayor could get away with this kind of fiscal nonsense. You might also wonder why other city council members did not speak up before now. The answer is simple. The perception at city hall is that Mayor Miller has the Morning News and Ch.8 in her hip pocket. Anyone who speaks out against her will be savaged by the mass media. Here is an example: after 3 city council members came out last week criticizing Miller’s handling of the Cotton Bowl negotiations, those 3 council members were mercilessly lampooned in a Morning News column the following day. The message is clear to those who dare to defy Mayor Miller. You will be hounded by the mass media and maybe even investigated by the FBI if you dare to question Laura Miller or her activities. Meanwhile, big ticket items the Mayor does not like are lambasted in the media as being fiscally irresponsible or even slightly crooked while Miller’s own baby, the Mercantile deal, has the smell of everything Mayor Miller is supposed to be against. At least that’s how we see it from South of the Trinity.

Evil is evil whether it is a designated "hate crime" or not.

Amy RobinsonNotice of Robert Neville, Jr.’s execution came last week in The Dallas Morning News Metro Section, Neville being one of two convicted in the February, 1998 torture-slaying of 19-year-old Amy Robinson.

You may remember reading the original news account. On that 15^th day of February, Neville and co-defendant Michael Wayne Hall intercepted the mentally challenged girl as she rode her bike to work, put her in their pickup – bike and all – and drove out to a secluded field in Grand Prairie for some target practice. Shooting her repeatedly with a pellet gun, they laughed as she begged for her life. Then shot her dead with a .22 caliber rifle.

You let the dispassionate facts sink in, then contemplate for a while. Likely Amy thought nothing of Hall and Neville’s turning up – they had worked together at Kroger’s. The goons probably offered her a lift. You imagine that Amy may have even felt pleased by the gesture. In your solitude, you enter the anguish. That’s all you can give this girl.

You keep looking for something that might shed light on what could bring a human being to such a pass that he will taunt, maim and kill for amusement. It was mentioned that Hall was a convicted felon who had just been fired from his job, but you dismiss that as insufficient. Too small. Come to think of it, any category of human emotion-- hate, vengefulness, lust, jealousy—strikes you as insufficient on its own to propel such an act of brutality. After all, brutes aren’t the only ones who give in to violent fits: We all get laid off, jilted, go broke. To grasp this level of depravity, you have to delve deeper: You have to be willing to acknowledge the existence of evil.

1998 turned out to be a banner year for torture slayings. That June, James Byrd, Jr. was dragged to death behind a pickup in Jasper, Texas; in October, Matthew Shepard was found beaten and tied to a post in Laramie, Wyoming, where he bled to death.

Jasper, you’ll recall, exploded in a racial conflagration, Byrd having been targeted for atrocity by three, fun-loving, twenty-something white supremacists. Shepard was singled out because he was gay.

What happened was that the emphasis in the Byrd and Shepard cases quickly moved from their distinct set of horrific particulars to sacred mythologies to be leveraged on behalf of the diversity racket. If only we were more tolerant of each other’s differences, went the conventional wisdom, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. A clamor arose for the creation of hate crimes legislation that would strengthen penalties for crimes committed against protected consitutencies. The NAACP demanded that the U.S. Senate craft a Resolution of Apology to atone for racially-motivated lynchings that occurred in the pre-civil rights era. Then there was the Nightline broadcast. Frontline. The TV movie starring Jon Voigt and Louis Gossett, Jr. The book by reporter Joyce King. The J. Erik Jonsson Central Library exhibit of portraits of those who tried to keep the peace in Jasper, and photographs of the notorious chair and chains.

Meanwhile, the Matthew Shepard story was dramatized in "The Laramie Project" by New York’s Tectonic Theatre Project. The Matthew Shepard Foundation Website went up with links to Lambda Legal, P-FLAG, and the Anti-Defamation League, among others. You can book Judy or Dennis Shepard – Matthew’s parents – for speaking engagements. Purchase purple "Erase Hate" wristbands, three for $10.

What about Amy?

Other than the occasional update in connection with the trial, the Amy Robinson case faded into obscurity. For me, that was enough to expose the speciousness of hate crimes legislation: As if you could come up with a diversity multiplier to calculate the awfulness of a crime. So…what, you get more points for your homicide if you’re black or gay? You’ve got to wonder how that went down in the Robinson household.

I can understand the desire to address the unique sense of injury felt by a collective when one of its own gets singled out for assault simply because he’s a member. The problem with that is it sends a message to those of us outside the collective that "You couldn’t possibly understand."

Clearly there are deeds so vile that they constitute an affront to civilized society and demand commensurate punishment: I just don’t think that creating a special class of victims represents a step in the right direction. It’s just plain delusional to suppose that mankind will cease committing atrocities if only we would implement a national program of sensitivity training.

I’d like to think the reason that the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Bill failed to find footing in Texas back in ‘01 was in part because its proponents overlooked the fact that we’re no longer living in an America in which three white guys can chain a black man to a chair, drag him to his death behind a pickup, and get away with it.

It took a mostly white jury 2 ½ hours to send John William King to death row in 1999. His accomplice Lawrence Brewer was sentenced to death by an all-white jury the same year.

This is what’s required of us: that we assert the will to confront evil and pluck it from our midst. So when news comes that the first of this lot has been put down, I find I’m okay with that.

Adios, Joe. You, too, Charles and Margaret

A friend e-mailed me at daybreak Saturday to say that Joe May had died some hours earlier after collapsing from an apparent heart attack. I hate those e-mails. Like I hate those phone calls.

I guess the general public was acquainted with Joe May as a Dallas School Board Trustee since 2002 who most recently stirred the community cauldron by advocating the Board’s consideration of employing undocumented educators to fill a void in the bi-lingual teaching ranks of the DISD.

Joe MayThat final proposal was just more of what those of us who knew Joe always came to expect of him: Thinking fresh, perhaps controversial thoughts, or what others call “thinking outside the box.” The mental wheels never stopped turning with him, and as agitated as some might become about this proposal or that, everyone I knew was always intrigued by and attentive to whichever of his thoughts were placed upon the table for our tasting. Whether you were for or against, no one ever wanted to get up and go home without hearing him out. They knew, as I did, that Joe could always justify his positions—positions he truly believed in. Although his appearance might have said otherwise, there was nothing pedestrian, quotidian or common about his mental capabilities.

Nor about his dedication and action, because Joe was not just a thinker and an advocate, he was an actor, too. A tireless one, I might add.

It was in the 1970’s when I met Joe May. I was a kid lawyer involved in employment law and he, if I recall, was an investigator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with the enforcement of most of our employment-related civil rights laws—those prohibiting, among other things, discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex and religion. Joe believed in his job—something I wish I could say about some of the people who hold that same job description today. Later he went to the Small Business Administration, where it seems he had been forever.

I don’t know when we first realized we shared a mutual interest in politics, but I know that we have been allies in countless political campaigns and efforts—with a couple of exceptions—for over two decades. We might quibble over the placement of a precinct here or there in one of Joe’s many proposed redistricting plans, which he was clever and superb at crafting, and yes, there were the nasty shots we took at each other, even publicly, over the placement of an Albertson’s grocery store in the center of our adjacent neighborhoods. But that was only two minutes out of a 24-hour day. And neither of us was much concerned about it, for those types of scratches quickly scab over and vanish. When it came to viewing the forest and not an occasional tree, I was always certain that I would be walking into one of his political meetings, or he would be walking into one of mine, to lend support.

I certainly didn’t know Joe as well as others did, but I knew him well and for a long time, and we shared many hours and causes, not to mention all the cigarettes and bebidas back in los días pasados.

There’s that emptiness we feel when someone well-intentioned and important to this community leaves not to return. Some of us miss those people even when we’ve made a lifetime of disagreeing with or fighting them, which was by no means my relationship with Joe. Even when they are controversial in the classic sense, we’d rather have them here than gone when put to the choice. That is because we are certain these people believed in something—had ideas—that they thought would benefit us all, and they were consistent and able in their efforts to support their beliefs in the social and political arenas. Those beliefs and actions were not mere fads or products of convenience.

So often these people take their leave without headlines or fanfare, unlike Joe. Thus, this Saturday morning was a particularly empty one for me when, after reading that e-mail about his death, I opened the ayem paper, as Carolyn Barta calls it, to see the obituary photograph of my friend Charles Timms, union Steelworker, former leader of the local chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, side-by-side veteran of countless Democratic campaigns, and much, much more. A persistent advocate for justice in general and voting rights in particular. A friend I and all of you will miss, whether you know it or not.

Then to the left there was the photo of Margaret Baillargeon, a Republican activist I had met only a few times in my many years here. Although I have fought her Party and its proposals all my life, no one can dispute the authenticity of her beliefs and actions, nor in any way impugn the legitimacy of her activism, even if one disagrees with its purpose. All three of these people were soldiers for our community. They all believed and knew why they believed. They had opinions they could back up, whether you liked those opinions or not. You just can’t say that about everybody these days, where opinions are a dime a dozen but their foundations are few.

Adios, Joe. You, too, Charles and Margaret.

This year’s 32^nd congressional district campaign likely won’t reach the cost or national attention of the Pete Sessions-Martin Frost contest in 2004, but Republican Sessions nonetheless could have a fight with Will Pryor as the Democratic candidate. Pryor doesn’t have Frost’s negatives and given this year’s political climate, voters might take a serious look at the newcomer, a mediation lawyer. Given a stroke of luck – or maybe a stroke of lightning – Pryor has a shot.

Pryor’s campaign recently announced that he raised $69,000 in less than three weeks before the end of the year. That’s chicken feed compared to the more than $4 million each candidate spent two years ago in the third most expensive House race in the country, but enough to show that Pryor has some support.

Still, it’s obviously an uphill battle. Sessions got 54 percent against Frost’s 44 percent with the rest going to the Libertarian two years ago – a wider margin than Frost and his Demo supporters expected in the matchup between the two congressmen. It was also the first test in the new 32^nd District, after the re-redistricting. But, compared to Frost, and in a different political year, Pryor has the advantage of being a fresh face and someone without the political liabilities of an entrenched Washingtonian.

In his announcement speech in January, Pryor asked the rhetorical question: “So how are we going to win this race? Ann Richards used to say, ‘don’t tell me why you want to run, tell me how you’re going to win.’”

Then, answering his own question, he said: “We have to be smart. We have to spend our money wisely. And most importantly, we must work very, very hard. No one will work harder than I will.”

OK. So we know you’re a smart guy, Pryor. You’re a well-known, high-powered lawyer. You served as a judge, and you come from a famous Arkansas political family. But, now, tell me again: How are you going to win?

To win, Pryor would have to pick up at least six percent more of the vote. In 2004, he would have needed 20,000 more votes against Frost. If it’s doable, it will be because of the different political climate and because he’s not Frost, who was around long enough to have as many detractors as supporters.

As for the climate, various polls show the disapproval rate for incumbents in Congress at a high, and particularly for the Republican leadership. (Tom DeLay has a negative rating in his own district of 60 percent.) People see the country as going more in the wrong direction than right. The generic ballots – unnamed Republican vs. unnamed Democrat -- favor the Democrats, and the Jack Abramoff lobbyist scandal has increased voter fatigue with corruption in Washington.

These are all the reasons that Democrats hope to make gains in the mid-term elections. But what about the 32^nd District, a solid Republican district?

Pryor will have to make a case that Sessions is part of the “culture of corruption” by being close to DeLay and Abramoff. The case he’s expected to make is that he has made a career of bringing people together to solve issues – that the problem of undue influence in Congress will not go away until legislation is passed to correct it, and that he can help repair a broken system. He hopes to distinguish himself on issues such as the environment, health care and fiscal restraint.

Pryor has had his sights on a political career since boyhood. He grew up in Dallas, although his uncle, David Pryor, was governor and U.S. senator from Arkansas.

He spent his last two years of high school as a congressional page during the Watergate years, including serving as personal page to the House Speaker. His undergraduate degree is from Yale, his law degree from Harvard.

His resume is impressive. He served as an appointed state district judge before barely losing a race for re-election, and later was first assistant attorney general in Texas. While in practice in Dallas, Pryor was cited three times as a Texas SuperLawyer by Texas Monthly, twice listed as one of the Best Lawyers in Dallas by D Magazine, and he’s been recognized for pro bono work. (He met his wife, Ellen – now an SMU law professor – while doing volunteer legal services for the indigent.)

There’s no question that Pryor is a quality candidate. The question is whether Sessions is ripe for the plucking and whether enough swing and new voters can be persuaded to take a chance on a newcomer to turn out a deep-rooted Republican in what was crafted by the Legislature to be a reliably Republican district.