IS THE DMN FINALLY FIGURING OUT BLOGS?

For a while, the only blog worth reading at the Morning News was Dallas Morning Views, the editorial staff blog. That’s because they actually let people like Rod Dreher and Mike Hashimoto argue with folks and put out some less-than-safe takes on the day’s issues. Now, with Josh Benton added to the metro blog, Bold Types, it’s getting better, too. But the really great blogs are the Rangers and Cowboys blogs. It’s beat writers giving all sorts of insidery insight and opinon, and sometimes arguing with fans or other bloggers. Check out all the great notes from training camp, and the interesting debate between Tim MacMahon and Calvin Watkins on who is the better receiver, Terry Glenn or Terrell Owens. Good stuff.

RE: ALL THE ARGUING

A giggling FBvian has much to add to our fisticuffs:

It’s testy on FrontBurner today. I like it.

I’m with you on the assistant swim coach thing. I’d bet dollars-to-donuts that SHE came on to HIM. (This actually happened a couple of times while my brother and I were in high school.) … Should he be fired? Absolutely. But sent to the joint for 20 years? Not bloody likely.

As for the other hot topic — gotta say it’s tough. I’m not sure that Trey and Rod are arguing over the same thing, and Tim’s just being Tim.

Agreed. When I went to high school, a former girlfriend of mine slept with a young coach. She seduced him, she later told me. (She was of age.) The school found out and quietly fired him. He went on to a long career in another district and had no problems, far as anyone knew. I talked to her last fall, and she’s extremely successful, running her own business and traveling, raising two kids. If this had played out in the media, something tells me they would have never had a chance for a real life. IJS.

RE: LEADING OFF (ERIC’S CREEPY SECOND POST)

A poker-table-makin’ FBvian has a solution with which I wholeheartedly agree:

As the father of two daughters, I think I have a reasonable compromise to the teacher/student thing. De-criminalize the act (so long as the student is of consenting age), but also make it legal for the father of the student to beat the living crap out of the teacher at the father’s discretion. I think that’s a win-win situation for everybody.

RE: FARMERS BRANCH, O’HARE, KING, PARKS

Again, attempts to somehow position King as a supporter of O’Hare, now with this painfully forced suggestion that somehow the anti-illegal movement is in the legacy of civil rights because it is trying to spare Mexican workers the burden of jobs unwanted by Americans is at best just wrong-headed. The link won’t work. Let it go.

RE: LEADING OFF (ERIC’S CREEPY SECOND POST)

People, read the post before you comment. Never said it was a good thing. It’s wrong. And he should be fired for it. Just like lots of businesses do. But to make it criminal is absurd. Again, Paul, LOVE that you know circumstances that weren’t reported. So he MADE her do this with the awesome power that only an ASSISTANT SWIM COACH can wield? Please.

RE: FARMERS BRANCH, O’HARE, KING, PARKS

Of course there is an unacknowledged subtext in the pro-illegal argument — we need brown people we can exploit at illegal wages to do jobs beneath us ‘Muricans.

I’m not so sure Martin Luther King would jump on that bandwagon. IJS.

RE: FARMERS BRANCH, O’HARE, KING, PARKS

I’ll just say this. It’s not that councilmember Tim O’Hare can’t continue his barely veiled bigotry in Farmers Branch by saying whatever he wants. That includes the preposterous linking of his anti-illegal immigrant campaign to the multi-decade civil rights struggles that included the efforts of Rosa Parks in the Montgomery bus boycott and the life-consuming work by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, if you recall, was shot to death on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where he had gone to support a strike by garbage workers. O’Hare, a politician, can even lie–no surprise there.

But equating his right to lie with some kind of alleged effort to suppress speech lacks any foundation whatsoever in the world of reality. I don’t know if O’Hare “committed a sin” against “American Newspeak” (what is this, a militia site?), but he is being historically inaccurate. It’s the responsibility of journalists and writers to call out lying politicians for their lies (as O’Hare was called out by Macarena Hernandez at the DMN for saying he hadn’t had any undocumented clients at his law firm prior to all this hoo-ha). It’s not suppression, it’s fact-checking.

There is, of course, zero possibility that King or Parks or any other civil rights proponents, most of whom were physically beaten, bombed, shot, jailed and harassed by police, FBI and corrupt local courts, would ever endorse the O’Hare referendum or anything he stands for. If O’Hare or anyone else around here needs background on the position of King or Parks or the entire civil rights campaign, I’d recommend at least the first volume of this series as a good place to start.

RE: LEADING OFF (ERIC’S CREEPY SECOND POST)

I really don’t know where to begin, Paul. Whether it’s your “it’s okay to destroy this man’s life, because I THINK HE PROBABLY FLIRTED WITH HER BEFORE SHE TURNED 17″ legal argument, or the idea that it’s okay to lock up a 26-year-old man for 20 years for having sex with a woman who could legally spend her every evening quintuple-teaming the 1954 Boston Celtics starting five. No, wait! I think I should start with your extremely well-considered point that you should also brand this man a sexual predator if he has sex with a FORMER student for “one or two years” after that person graduates. Wait, I’ll take on all three: you’re wrong.

C’mon, people, I’m fired up today. Bring it. Hit me with some more genius.