News media continue to present a picture of Ebola transmission that is significantly inaccurate by omission. They assert much more certainty than the science justifies. The version repeated like a mantra in most accounts — only direct physical contact with an infectious person — is wrong on its face and…
News that Ebola virus had escaped Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and invaded the city in the body of an infected nurse was the last straw. It’s not the virus that’s going to drive us crazy. It’s the officials who keep making stupid promises that they have no ability to fulfill…
Big teachable moment right now in the Dallas school system — huge! — and the school board and superintendent should rush to take advantage of it. I’m talking about the deal I reported here yesterday in which the superintendent called school district cops to physically evict a school board member…
Yesterday morning Dallas school district cops forcibly removed school board member Bernadette Nuttall from Billy Earl Dade middle school on Grand Avenue in South Dallas after Nuttall told them, “Go ahead and arrest me.” They didn’t. They just put her out of the building. But both Nuttall and a school…
Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, speaking on 7/31/2014: “It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards.” “We have quarantine stations at…
Before I get on my high horse, I usually check back upstream to see what sort of feet of clay I may have myself on an issue. Great thing and terrible thing about the Internet. It’s all still there. So this morning before leaping to the saddle to whack people…
One great service Dallas could render to the rest of the country, should the dust ever settle on the local Ebola story, would be a thorough, no-holds-barred post mortem on information sharing. I am already hearing from people behind the scenes, speaking off the record, that there has been significant…
The weird shadow government nobody knows about but that runs everything, called “THE COG!,” headquartered near Six Flags amusement park in Arlington, is cooking up a plan to ram a new highway down the city’s throat even if the city votes against it. Well, that would be my interpretation of…
The commenters are already whetting their knives on Stephen Young’s piece here a bit earlier reporting that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price has raised the issue of racism in the treatment of Ebola Patient Zero, Thomas Eric Duncan, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. But maybe we could all acknowledge…
The Lockey/MacKenzie federal whistle-blower lawsuit accusing Dallas of deliberate racial segregation, dismissed last year because the judge said I had already blown the whistle, is back in court in all new clothes, filed Friday, this time with less of me and more of former City Council member Angela Hunt and…
There has been much more talk in Dallas the last few days about the dangers of panic than about the dangers of Ebola. In the meantime if we are paying attention we must notice by now that our vaunted Western industrialized defenses against contagion are riddled with holes. We know…
A major theme — a very dangerous one — in the reaction here to the arrival of Ebola is the notion that we are protected by our cultural and economic superiority from the kind of contagion now in Africa and that all we need to do is remain calm. I…
There’s a power-story making the rounds — I just heard it for the first time a couple weeks ago — about why people in the business community are changing their minds on the Trinity River toll road. It goes like this: “Oh, no, Angela Hunt was not right. Absolutely not…
Today in multiple stories, our only and always comforting local daily, The Dallas Morning News, reiterates the official public line of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control: that physical contact with a person suffering symptoms of Ebola disease is the only mechanism of transmission by which the Ebola virus can…
I have a column that hasn’t quite been published yet that I would like to withdraw in advance. Well, not withdraw. More like re-draw. I don’t think it’s possible to correct something you haven’t said yet, is it? So let’s think of this more in the vein of an expansion…
Old hippie, nanny-state, fault-finding, problem-centric, negative-minded, knee-jerk liberals — and I speak only of myself — were quick enough to jump all over Highland Park school district last week for banning seven books from the high school curriculum. Now I guess we’re under some kind of obligation to come back…
Just heard a good one this morning about another visit by the toll road goon squad. The back story is about a prominent person who let slip recently that she had changed her mind on the proposed 10-lane Trinity toll road through a park cutting off downtown from the river…
Ah, you hate to see it. Ben Sandifer, the bicycling nature photographer, has always exuded a certain purity of heart. But on the way back from a city-sponsored tour of a recently decimated portion of the Great Trinity Forest, a colleague and I speculated about him. We both thought he…
“There’s nothing sure. The rich get rich and the poor get poor. In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” Van and Schenck, 1921 Hate that lyric. Always did. Don’t think it’s true. The most recent big upward mobility study found that, while mobility…
Transportation projects are like the rest of life. Sure they offer benefits, but they carry costs, as well. Powerful Dallas City Council member Vonciel Hill, chair of both the council’s transportation and legislative lobbying committees, stops meetings to introduce the rich people whose families will have bridges named for them…
All weekend long I was pondering great moments in leadership. And then I thought about Dallas Fire Chief Louie Bright III. Dallas firefighter Stanley Wilson burned to death May 20, 2013, when a building he and other firefighters were searching for survivors collapsed. Surviving firefighters said they were ordered to…
Here’s a nice little moment when the truth comes home to roost: Yesterday Stephen Young shared with you here a memo sent to Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs by council member Vonciel Hill in which Hill basically called a Griggs a liar. Hill accused Griggs of distorting the facts…
