On Tuesday night, state Senator Wendy Davis’ staff announced that someone had set a small fire outside the door of her Fort Worth office using bottles filled with lighter fluid. The senator wasn’t there at the time, and no one else was hurt during the incident, which badly scorched the…
Over at the Morning News’ Trail Blazers Blog, Christy Hoppe pointed out late yesterday that Rick Perry’s Facebook page has been “inundated by angry women” unhappy about the end of the Medicaid Women’s Health Program. Perry’s Facebook bomb is actually part of a larger effort to “sarcasm-flood” the pages of…
All this arguing we’re doing about contraception is getting a little tiresome, isn’t it? Sure, we get to use the word “sluts” repeatedly in a national conversation, and we’ve watched several elderly male politicians state their understanding of how birth control works, explanations which often deserve bonus points for creativity…
We realize you’re probably too busy side-stepping puddles of green puke to give much of a shit about what’s going on in Austin. Nonetheless, we feel obliged to note that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a lawsuit late yesterday against the federal government over its decision to withdraw federal…
What prompted Governor Rick Perry’s frenzied bout of outraged tweeting about the Women’s Health Program yesterday? As much as we’d like to speculate that it was a bad batch of PCP (and will continue to do so privately, purely for our own amusement, not because it’s at all true), it…
As long as we’re on the general theme of “unpleasant events that are somehow related to the Medicaid Women’s Health Program,” let’s throw this one in there too: Abby Johnson, who was until a couple of years ago the director of a clinic that was part of Planned Parenthood of…
Surprise! And by that we mean in a development that’s no surprise at all to anyone, DPD just sent out a news release announcing that they’ll be conducting another No Refusal DWI Initiative this weekend: This initiative will begin at 6:00 P.M., Friday, March 16, 2012 and will end at…
The first few months after her husband died, Heather Boulware was fine. She didn’t feel fine, of course, but she managed to keep taking the medications she’d been prescribed five years before to treat her bipolar disorder and continued to care for the couple’s three children. “I was doing what…
In this week’s cover story, we wrote about Dallas’ boarding houses, which are home to thousands of the city’s mentally ill, elderly, and disabled, as well as people recovering from alcohol and drug abuse. The homes aren’t regulated by any state agency, and despite a law passed some three years…
Pro-life groups in Texas are in an awkward position these days, as the Medicaid Women’s Health Program fights for its life. On one hand, they celebrate anything that they perceive as a blow to Planned Parenthood (which Catholic Pro-Life Committee of North Texas Executive Director Karen Garnett once memorably described…
If you happened to stumble upstairs at the Londoner last night, you might have wondered just what the hell was going on. Why were so many of these men wearing suits to the bar? Is that a sweater vest in the corner? Everyone’s throwing the word “santorum” around with such…
Back in February, it was semi-big news when a group called One Million Moms called for a boycott of Dallas-based J.C. Penney. The reason was the company’s new spokeswoman, Ellen DeGeneres, who you will be shocked to learn is gay, and thus obviously unfit to sell pleated Dockers and window…
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, who worked as a nurse before heading to Washington, dropped by Martin Bashir’s show on MSNBC to denounce Governor Rick Perry’s stance toward Planned Parenthood (and to call Rush Limbaugh “un-American”.) “I don’t even know this governor anymore,” the congresswoman says in the clip above. “I…
Update, March 10: Federal Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced late Friday in Houston that federal funding to the WHP would be cut. She said the program will wind down over the next several months, and that the feds are considering funding Planned Parenthood directly. In response, Allison…
Let’s just call it: Everyone in town is running for Congress. Okay, not everyone, but the race for the newly-created, much-argued-over Congressional District 33 has gotten very, very crowded, especially on the Democrats’ side. Last night we watched as former Dallas city council member — and mayor pro tem, state…
Back in January, Robert watched as the DISD board, which has the amazing skill of stretching out any conversation to 10 times its natural length, debated the qualities they’d like to see in a new superintendent. Last night, Resource Center Dallas CEO Cece Cox sent the board an open letter,…
The Dallas Police Department’s downtown patrol is about to get a whole lot more, well, motorized. That much we can safely say. DPD announced yesterday that 7-Eleven was donating four new T3’s to the department, bringing the total to eight. They were so excited about the whole thing that we…
If you’ve been hiding under an especially sturdy and soundproof rock for the past month, perhaps you missed out on the increasingly bitter national debate over contraception coverage. Lucky for you, U.S. Representative Ralph Hall has taken a break from doubting global warming and talking about how incredibly safe fracking…
What’s in your drugs? Well, not your drugs, obviously, or ours, because we’re law-abiding, tax-paying, speed-limit-driving good citizens, one and all. But as anyone who may have a purely academic interest in this sort of thing might like to know, street drugs are often very, very impure (shocker), and perhaps…
A few days ago, we told you that Texas’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program appears to be on death’s door, which could leave some 130,000 low-income Texas women without vital medical care. We also mentioned that Gov. Rick Perry’s administration appeared eager to blame the program’s end on the feds broadly…
The first thing we need to remind you about the impending Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge Celebration this weekend is that there will be “mammoth puppets.” If this information makes you feel the need to stay home, perhaps under the bed, that’s fine and understandable. For the rest of us, there…
The Medicaid Women’s Health Program provides some 130,000 Texas women with vital medical care: family planning, birth control, cancer screenings and annual exams. And for that, of course, it must die. That, at least, has long been the case as far as Republican lawmakers are concerned. And after last week,…
