LAURA MILLER

If there's one thing I hope people are certain of it's this: I'm looking out for YOU - the taxpayer.

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.

But despite the challenges, I love being your Mayor.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Others like City Hall the old way, when they could make deals behind closed doors with your tax money.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

From my very first day in the Mayor's office, I have worked closely with the Council members who share our vision of a city hall that really protects taxpayers and cares... yes... about the little things that make a big difference in people's lives.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.

Together, often by unanimous vote, the council has worked quickly to get positive results.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

It's wasteful spending like this that not only forces tax increases and cuts in vital services... but also really make you wonder: who is City Hall looking out for?

And we did it because it's time for City Hall to stop looking out for City Hall and start looking out for the people like you and me who are footing the bill.

Given the way some fought for the status quo when I authored the new Ethics Code and created the city's first Ethics Commission, we are going to need your strong support to get an even tougher Ethics Code passed this year.

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

There's still is a status-quo group at City Hall who likes things done the old way, behind closed doors.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date--one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.

There is so much chaos and dysfunction going on with the federal government that Dallas can't wait any longer for federal help.

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.