No, trust this

No, trust this: Buzz has a deal for you, Dallas voter. For free, we will come by your house and do an inventory of things that need to be repaired, replaced or added. It'll be a long list--face it, if you're letting Buzz inside your home, it's a dump--but we'll post it online where you can see it. If some of the descriptions are vague or tough to follow, that's OK. Buzz has thought about it long and hard, and you need this stuff. (If you see things on the list you don't need, too bad. This is an all-or-nothing deal.)

Oh, and we'll need your credit card to go buy all the goodies. Don't worry. Rumors that Buzz has both smack and gambling problems are almost entirely somewhat less than completely true.

How dumb do we think you are? Not sure. Let's wait till November when you'll likely be asked to approve a $1.35 billion city bond package.

We know. There goes the Dallas Observer being negative again, you think, but that's not the case. We're all for new roofs for firehouses and smoother streets and less flooding. But when the city council, as it did Monday, slips another $71 million into what is already a humongous, complicated proposal, and some council members get upset at Mayor Laura Miller's suggestion that they discuss the additions in a bit of detail, we get suspicious. "We've reached a consensus," council member Leo Chaney objected. Council members have chatted amongst themselves about the additions, he said. No more talk is necessary. "We've worked very hard. Everybody's happy."

Leo's happy. Don's happy. Everybody's happy but maybe Angela and Laura, and she's never happy. So why sweat the details? If you want details, you can find them on the Internet. (Which is true, if you're highly fluent in City Hall bureaucratese.)

You'd think at this point the majority of city council members would understand that when they say everybody's happy--meaning themselves--a sizeable number of Dallas voters break into cold sweats as words like "pork," "waste," "FBI" and "holy shit, we're screwed" come to mind. (Angela Hunt seemed to get it: "We don't want to convey any message that we're trying to hide anything," she said.)

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!" Robert Burns wrote in a poem titled--appropriately in this case--"To a Louse." O wad that were true.