The Church of Scientology’s local Celebrity Centre, in case you haven’t been, is in a spacious, three-decade-old office building in Las Colinas with lots of floor-to-ceiling windows. It moved there in 2009, having outgrown its previous digs, in a pink stucco mansion in East Dallas. How they settled on that…
It’s official. Wendy Davis, the Fort Worth Democrat who rose to national prominence during her summer filibuster of abortion legislation, is running for governor. She made the announcement just now in the Haltom City auditorium where she graduated from high school. Already, pro-life groups are readying ads that will portray…
There was a time not so long ago, back when the country wasn’t perpetually teetering on the brink of economic collapse, when bitching about the federal government was fun. Washington was that crazy unemployed uncle who was always hanging around, irritating as hell but otherwise harmless. But now that his…
The most memorable scene from April’s protest against the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center came when two men wearing comically large Bush/Cheney masks were handcuffed and marched to the back of a squad car. An overreaction, perhaps, but not a huge miscarriage of justice. They had wandered…
Four months ago, Ladar Levison was just another dude running a small business and really enjoying beach volleyball. Then, in May, the FBI left a business card on his doorstep. He, and eventually the rest of the world, would soon find out why. Levison, an SMU grad, runs Lavabit LLC,…
There was a time, back when manual transmissions were the only option and the slightest incline could potentially transform any car into an unstoppable projectile, when it made sense to have a law requiring drivers to use their parking brake. Those days have long since passed. Automatic transmissions are now…
There’s no shortage of bacon at TGI Fridays. The restaurant drapes it on just about everything — burgers, potato skins, salads, you name it. Nicole Queen, as a practicing Muslim, avoids the stuff religiously, as do the friends with whom she recently dined at the outlet in Garland’s Firewheel Town…
Troy Aikman’s concussion in the third quarter of the 1994 NFC Championship game against the San Francisco 49ers is now just a footnote on the team’s march to a second consecutive Super Bowl victory, which itself gets lost in telling of the mid-’90s golden age of America’s Team. Aikman’s injury…
UPDATE: After this item ran, we sent a question to Texas Department of Criminal Justice public information director Jason Clark, asking him — not to put too fine a point on it — why Texas doesn’t just switch to an alternative method of execution altogether, like the electric chair. The…
For the past two-plus years, the Silk Road has been the go-to place for tech-savvy drug users — and entrepreneurial drug sellers — looking for a safe and anonymous way to get their fix. Weed, cocaine, LSD, heroin, you name it — it could be at your door in a…
It’s a rare thing to catch Senator Ted Cruz looking sheepish. There have been no documented cases since he swaggered onto the public stage during the 2012 Republican primary looking cocksure despite plenty of occasions (see: shutting down the government) where it might have been appropriate to show some regret…
Just as God led Moses to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, so He led Faith Christian Center pastor Gene Lingerfelt to 6900 U.S. Highway 287 in Arlington, Texas, to become the bearer of His Word. As befits the digital age, He has swapped stone tablets for Twitter and…
Dr. Melba Ketchum, the East Texas veterinarian turned Bigfoot-hunting geneticist, is at a loss to explain why the scientific community refuses to take her research seriously. “It’s been rather painful,” she explained in an exclusive, one-on-one interview with WFAA. “I was naive when I went into this. I thought science…
In the heat of the moment, while the country is heaping much-deserved blame upon Senator Ted Cruz for forcing a government shutdown and mourning the resulting loss of the nation’s premiere panda cam, it can be easy to lose sight of the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file federal employees whose…
When EchoLight Studios launched a couple of years ago, it registered as a minor blip in Christian media while being roundly ignored by the mainstream press. Things were different a year later when, relatively fresh off his failed 2012 presidential run, former Senator Rick Santorum announced that he was becoming…
When it was first announced, all the way back in January, the Frisco Gun Club billed itself as the nation’s largest indoor shooting range. Nine months later, as club prepares to open this month, it has dropped that claim, focusing instead on its luxurious VIP lounge and culinary offerings. There’s…
Update on October 2: William Gomez and his two children have been found safe in Wisconsin. Original post: William Gomez drove away in his family’s white Jeep at about 2 p.m. Sunday with his two grandkids, 7-year-old Marcus and 8-year-old Dominique, ostensibly headed for Carrollton’s Rhoton Park or Lewiville’s Vista…
So far, the turn-Texas-blue group Battleground Texas’ primary public function has been to serve as a Kim Jong-un-like bogeyman for Republican politicians to campaign against. Leave it to U.S. Senator John Cornyn, desperately trying to convince us that he’s just as crazy as junior colleague Ted Cruz, to take this…
The robocalls from Alliance AFT; the misleading mailers hastily called up at the last minute by God (and a Houston PR firm) only knows; the scathing “research paper” by arch-nemesis Don Williams; the chastisements of John Wiley Price, they all failed to convince Dallas ISD’s Board of Trustees. On Monday…
The cover story for Governor Rick Perry’s feud with California Governor Jerry Brown, his job-poaching trip to Missouri and his visit to a Maryland gun manufacturer the day after this month’s Navy Yard shooting, is that he’s bolstering the Texas economy by spreading the state’s low-tax gospel and wooing people…
Now that the war in Iraq is officially over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, the Department of Defense found itself facing a conundrum. It had just spent billions of dollars buying heavily armored personnel carriers designed to stand up to insurgent attacks only to find that it had…
BREAKING: PP, @ACLU, & @ReproRights have filed a suit in federal court to stop #HB2 from taking effect in TX. #StandWithTXWomen— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) September 27, 2013 Long before Wendy Davis laced up her pink Mizunos and stepped onto the floor of the Texas Senate for her historic filibuster, the…
