Naked City

Quote of the Week: "The court believes things must be better in Mississippi." -- U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks, blasting the Travis and Burnet counties DA's for their mishandling of the Clyde Durbin case (see Austin Stories).

City minority-contracting czar Lino Rivera was reassigned this week after news broke of an ongoing investigation into possible bid-rigging (see Minority Contracts Probed).

A busy week for the State Board of Education, which adopted social studies textbooks (see The Battle of Washington's Bulge), decided against blasting Channel One (see SBOE Spares Channel One), and approved UT's charter school.

The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization postponed a vote on enlarging the transportation body's boundaries to include more, or all, of the Austin metro area (see Austin at Large).

The Bush administration and the party of "small government" won Senate approval of its new Dept. of Homeland Security -- including massive "anti-terrorist" data gathering as well as union-busting provisions against federal employees. A handful of wavering "moderates" who could have stopped the bill said they received "ironclad promises" that certain odious provisions favoring tax-fugitive corporations, negligent vaccine manufacturers, and Texas A&M would be removed from the bill after it's enacted. Don't hold your breath.

Uh-oh. Once again, Austin is on Money magazine's list of "Top 10 Best Places to Live." Many longtime Austinites might argue that previous appearances on the list have made Austin not such a good place to live.