What the...? Dallas Edition

ONLY IN DALLAS

Earlier this week, D Magazine uncovered the photo on the left via MySpace of Charles “Chazz” Redd. While this photo is pretty hilarious, even a shirtless man carrying two handguns wouldn't normally pass for news in this town. The kicker is that "Chazz" happens to be running for the District 7 seat of the Dallas City Council.

He later informed the Dallas Morning News that "he’d been hunting quail and deer and had gotten some blood on his shirt, which is why he removed it for the photograph." Remembering, according to the DMN, that hunting for these types of animals is generally not done with handguns, he subsequently changed his story.

As Scout0820 commented, "That is one way to drop out of a race with style." I on the other hand commend the man for going to such great lengths to prove that he is unquestionably pro-gun. His efforts will not go unnoticed.


IN MORE UNFORTUNATE NEWS
The story of police officer Robert Powell was all over the radio this morning, so I thought I'd pull together a few helpful links for those of you who don't reside in the 2-1-4. To summarize what happened, Officer Powell turned on his lights after watching NFL running back Ryan Moats run a red light. Mr. Moats did not stop his car until he reached Baylor Medical Center in Plano, where all the occupants of the car suddenly exited and started for the hospital entrance. The officer drew his gun in what had to have been a tense moment until he learned that Mr. Moats had run the light because he was rushing to be by his mother-in-law's side as she lay dying.

What would you have done in Officer Powell's shoes? Walked inside with the Moat's family to ascertain the truth? Write the ticket anyways? Here's an excerpt from the 15 minutes conversation that followed (emphasis added):

Moats: "You really want to go through this right now? My mother-in-law is dying. Right now! … I got seconds before she’s dying, man!"

Powell: "If my mom was dying, I’d probably be a little upset, too, but when I saw flashing red and blue [lights], I’d stop."

Moats: "If you’re going to give me a ticket, just give me a ticket. … All I’m asking you is just hurry up."

Powell: "I can screw you over. I’d rather not do that. … I could charge you with fleeing right now. Understand what I could do. … I could make your life very difficult."

By the time Powell finished, about 15 minutes after the stop, Jonetta Collinsworth was dead. As you might imagine, the reactions have been largely against the officer who has been placed on administrative leave as of today:

Dallas Police Chief Apologizes for Conduct of Officer Who Drew Gun

Dallas Police Officer Acted Like a Complete Jerk, But is that a Firing Offense?

IN GOVERNMENT STIMULUS NEWS

The seemingly laughable but in fact highly awesome Woodall Rogers Park concept has received government stimulus funding to the tune of $16.7 million.

A downtown park connecting Uptown to the new Arts District built over what is arguably the busiest stretch of Dallas highway always seemed like a pipedream to me. But then again, sometimes dreams really do come true!

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Video Of Ryan Moats Getting Pulled Over Is Intense And Troubling [Ryan Moats] (deadspin.com)
• Police officer delays Ryan Moats of Houston Texans in hospital parking lot as family member dies (sports.espn.go.com)
• Dallas Police Department apologizes over Robert Powell/ Ryan Moats affair (inquisitr.com)

My First Blog Troll!

Is this a sign of the ever increasing reach of our fair site, or an unfortunate (or fortunate depending on how you look at it) by product of the blogging process? You make the call.

Just in case you don't know what a blog troll is, Urban Dictionary is on the case.

Weekly Readings

1. Go read Jeffrey Gettleman’s article regarding the current state of affairs in Somalia over at Foreign Policy. Here’s a sneak preview:

In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years, I’ve come to rewrite my own definition of chaos. I’ve felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent freezing-cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick, ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world.

The whole country has become a breeding ground for warlords, pirates, kidnappers, bomb makers, fanatical Islamist insurgents, freelance gunmen, and idle, angry youth with no education and way too many bullets.

H/T Matt Yglesias

2. Mother Jones offers a heart rending story about how the working poor survive on $195 a week. Here’s a hint on how it works:

To balance the budget, Edick often skimps on food, some weeks spending little more than $10 on groceries, about one-quarter what the federal food stamp program calculates is needed for three "thrifty meals" a day. She patronizes the grimy discount stores whose prices run even lower than Wal-Mart's, and can tick off their notable sales going back for months. "I had some oranges," she recalls with a self-deprecating smile. "A couple of months ago, they had grapes on sale." And, "If it's less than three dollars for a package of six steaks, that looks like a good deal to me." (She tries not to think too hard about the quality of a 50-cent steak.)

3. William Saletan's article regarding the decision to lift the ban on government funded stem-cell research, is a must read. I personally am torn over this issue, and the article does a good job of providing context to the debate that will continue into the forseable future:

Obama's stem-cell order shows "his commitment to evidence and biomedical hope over his predecessor's ideological distortion of science," says the Center for American Progress. The order will "remove politics from science," says the president of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. It will "keep politics out of science," says the vice president of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. It signals that policy will no longer be "driven more by ideology than by facts," says the director of the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology.

Think about what's being dismissed here as "politics" and "ideology." You don't have to equate embryos with full-grown human beings—I don't—to appreciate the danger of exploiting them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They're not parts of people. They're the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting them, whether for research or medicine, is different from harvesting other kinds of cells. It's the difference between using an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?

4. The NYTimes has a short documentary profiling an 11-year-old Pakistani girl on the last day before the Taliban close down her school in the Swat Valley. Which reminds me that I still need to read “Three Cups of Tea.”

5. No one could have predicted our current economic crisis... oh, now you tell me:

Why Jon Stewart Is Still Relevant

Via The Big Picture and The Daily Dish:

(Having problems embedding the video, so you can either click through to the comedy central page or stream the video through the two sites linked to above.)