Here’s an offer you can’t refuse: For less than $12,000 paid to the right people, you can buy the early and absentee ballot vote in eight precincts in Southern Dallas–just enough votes, it turns out, to win you a $125 million taxpayer subsidy for your new sports arena or a…
Gee, I don’t even know how to tell you how much fun this could be. Just pull out your folding chairs, pop up some corn and get the kids out on the lawn. I think it may be time to watch the fireworks downtown. A group of stalwart grassroots community…
Already this year, even before it hit us with the big budget deficit, Dallas City Hall was telling the taxpayers about all the things the city couldn’t afford to do anymore. And guess what? In the middle of all this, we have to pay $4.6 to $10 million in a…
Hey, when you saw the story in The Dallas Morning News last week about how the city council is going to approve a $5 to $6 million settlement with half a dozen demoted police officials, did you happen to wonder what was going on? I know I did. Typical day…
On the 13th of next month, a movie based on a book I wrote will be released in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and about 16 other cities not including Dallas. The birthing of this movie, a five-year process, was a big deal for me. Called Bully, the…
So I put on my thinking cap. And I ask myself: all of this vote-cheating that cropped up in the recent District 6 city council runoff election between Dwaine Caraway and Ed Oakley. Did that just come out of nowhere? Did people just out of the blue start cheating elderly…
Apparently The Dallas Morning News, the city’s only daily newspaper, has no intention of telling you this story, so I will. You need to know that last Saturday’s District 6 city council run-off election was an earthquake. I’m not talking about who won. What made the election momentous was that…
What if the Dallas City Council suddenly developed a base of reasonable middle-class people who cared about the city? Who had their own money? Who had at least a tad of personal dignity and would not fall down in a slavering, social-climbing, dead damn faint if Ross Perot Jr. invited…
Some experts on church desecration, both in and out of law enforcement, are skeptical about the recent vandalism of St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church, a politically influential black church in East Dallas struck by vandals on May 3. A longtime African-American civil rights activist, brought here from Atlanta, told…
If you’re Terrell Bolton and you make $132,000 a year in base salary plus $20,000 a year in overtime as Dallas’ First Black Police Chief, sure, you’re a walking civil rights case. If somebody criticizes you, a bunch of civil rights-style pickets will surround that fool’s house in a hurry…
So many accusations were flying at the end of the District 1 Dallas City Council race, it wasn’t clear who was blowing the whistle on whom, but Dallas County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbet says there is no confusion about one thing: “Someone’s going to get in trouble.” Speaking on Monday…
Maybe we should approach this biblically. In the book of Luke, we are told that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled in a census. Joseph, you may recall, went up from Galilee to the city of David, which was called Bethlehem, because…
Let me tell you a story. Sophia Dembling, a Dallas writer, sends The Dallas Morning News a letter a few weeks ago to make a point. She says in her letter that the words “bitch” and “whore,” directed recently at Dallas City Councilwoman Laura Miller by speakers and protesters supporting…
Does Dallas have a red-light district? Does the Pope live in Rome? It’s 2:30 a.m., closing time on a Sunday morning, and customers are swarming out of the topless bars on Northwest Highway like fire ants somebody just stomped on. They stumble, they fall, they trot, they wobble, squinty-eyed from…
So maybe you figure the Dallas Observer wants to do stories to help Laura Miller get elected mayor because she used to work here. I think the same way–paranoid. If that’s what you think, you’re wrong. Right now Miller and her husband, state Representative Steve Wolens, are officially not speaking…
Far from changing his tune suddenly in the last two weeks to accuse the Dallas police chief of wrongdoing, the main witness against the chief has steadfastly told authorities the same story in detail and under oath for more than a year, a legal deposition shows. Dallas police Lt. William…
In the controversy over police Chief Terrell Bolton, our first black police chief, we need to keep in mind the danger of riot. The white people in the Bachman Lake area are on a pretty short fuse. If they ever pop their corks, they will be joined by a lot…
Next May we will vote in a citywide referendum on whether to pay the Dallas City Council its first full-time salary in half a century. The people who oppose council pay say they don’t want us to have a city council of full-time “professional politicians.” Here’s my question. What do…
This is such a strange town. You could never explain this place to a Martian, or a person from St. Paul, or somewhere like that. The Dallas Morning News is supposed to be the voice of the local conservative business establishment. But for some months, the editorial page staff has…
Brand-new superintendent of schools Mike Moses is getting his first taste of white water in the bulrushes. The problems he is running into are your typical Dallas Independent School District backstabbing and bad publicity–par for the course if you ask anybody who’s been around Dallas more than a couple of…
Consider this: The city’s first black police chief is fighting off an investigation of his own department for racial profiling. The first black chairwoman of the Citizens/Police Review Board is doing everything she can to shut down a racial-profiling investigation by her own board. And the city’s first black mayor…
Did you know we have commie judges in Dallas? At least I think they’re commies. Now look, I could be wrong. They may be Nazis. I’m going to leave that up to you. It looks to me as if either term would be politically accurate. The point is that Dallas,…
