Dallas City Hall is like Washington. We have a Deep State, and for all the same reasons. A new regime is in charge here, too. It’s making big policy changes. Those new policies have serious consequences in the real world. Some people in the real world are very unhappy, so…
Just a thought. I’m not a lawyer, certainly not a prosecutor. But after watching the extremely unsatisfying hearing before the Dallas City Council on Wednesday on this winter’s natural gas home explosion crisis, I wonder why authorities are not at least looking at the recent indictment in Wyandotte County, Kansas,…
Because I’m not very good at remembrances — can’t remember — and because Jacquielynn Floyd at The Dallas Morning News just wrote a wonderful tribute to former first lady Barbara Bush that I know I can’t match, I wish I could just shut up, but, you know. Can’t. I have…
Another story this week of a Dallas resident viciously mauled by pit bull dogs: This latest victim, a 35-year-old woman, was attacked early Sunday morning by four dogs but saved by good Samaritans on Hamilton Avenue just southeast of the Cotton Bowl. It’s really hard to see something like this,…
This is how it works at City Hall. The city gives a mixture of city money and federal money to a community group to build affordable housing. The group sucks down the money. But the group barely nibbles away at the construction project — doesn’t get it done, in other…
At the end of last week, I did a Facebook Live interview with Dallas Park and Recreation Board President Bobby Abtahi in which Abtahi gave evasive answers on some key questions. I did not nail down those issues in the interview, for which I blame myself. I do think it’s…
Next year, when it’s time for Dallas voters to choose a new mayor, the good old boys, the inside slicks and the Dallas Citizens Council will do whatever they can to frame the race the way they always have: Their candidate will be the fiscally sound, conservative but very nice…
This week, the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based nonprofit think tank and research bureau, released a report that powerfully confirmed a wave of data from multiple sources over the last year, all portraying Dallas as harshly segregated along ethnic and economic lines. The only question is what to…
Plano, an affluent suburb of Dallas maligned decades ago by finger-wagging liberals (me) as an all-white busing flight enclave, is at the forefront of a whole new kind of struggle for diversity, inclusiveness and enlightenment. Black poverty-cursed South Dallas — the scene a half-century ago of a civil rights struggle…
First rule: I want to talk about how human beings treat dogs sometimes. No fair talking about how human beings treat kids sometimes. I know. Bad. We’ll talk about that another day. But, OK, you brought it up, so let me ask you a question. People have an absolute right…
I don’t make ’em up, folks. I just try to keep up. Sometimes I need to just tell you about a thing — just put it out there on the table and say, “Go figure.” Last week, President Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, came through town as the…
If you think Weird Washington is a long way off, look again. The weirdness has come home to roost. And you know what? It might be good for us in the end. It might force us to grow up. Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins hosted a special committee meeting…
The debate about things would change a lot around here if everybody suddenly knew who’s paying for what. Dallas City Council member Lee Kleinman caught one these jarring little tells and pointed it out at a council committee meeting Monday. See if you agree with me that it’s something nobody…
After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in August, there was enormous shock and dismay when thousands of homeowners learned they had been flooded out not by Harvey but by Uncle Sam. We’re in for the same trauma here someday, and I am doing my best to get ahead of it for…
My beautiful dog, Dorothy, looks gross. I know that. People know that. But Dorothy doesn’t know that. If she does, she doesn’t seem to care. No dog bounces around more, bites at her leash on the floor or makes coyote howls more than Dorothy when she thinks she’s in for…
City Council member Tennell Atkins has called a special meeting of the council’s economic development and housing committee at 9 a.m. Thursday in the first-floor auditorium at Dallas City Hall to listen to the chickens. Why? Because 9 a.m. Thursday is when the chickens come home to roost. Last week, word…
Sometimes, Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston is just flat brilliant. When? I don’t know. But sometimes he is. Yesterday, he gave me an idea that I think may be the kernel of an important national story about the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, although it starts very…
Here’s the straight news story: According to multiple reliable sources speaking off the record, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General will soon conclude a yearlong probe of Dallas City Hall with findings of financial wrongdoing in the city’s housing and economic development departments. Here’s…
In a dispute over an appointment to the city’s Civil Service Board, Dallas City Council member Lee Kleinman told The Dallas Morning News this week, “I hate organized labor.” Wow. Where I came from, that’s almost hate speech. Or crazy speech. Like saying, “I hate CEOs.” C’mon. Which CEO? You…
Pity Joppa. With a deep, proud history as a living, breathing freedman’s town, this little gathering of 500 souls in a crook of the Trinity River five miles southeast of downtown is one of the city’s most impoverished places. Still, so many powerful people are always trying to rob Joppa,…
Confessions of a liberal: I loved it, I swooned, I cheered out loud last week when Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren took a verbal flail to Trump’s HUD secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, at a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. But confessions of an old man:…
City staff is recommending that the city not remove the Confederate memorial next to City Hall, leave it in place instead and ameliorate its effect on the public by placing a plaque nearby with “contextual information.” At Wednesday’s City Council briefing on the issue, it looked as if a majority…
