Mayor Mike Rawlings is proposing that we move our local elections from May to November in even-numbered years as a way to do something about our deplorably low voter participation. And we do need some tricks. Short of hanging all the losing candidates, it’s hard to imagine anything that could…
One last thing about the controversial and beleaguered new Santiago Calatrava suspension bridge over the Trinity River downtown: To my untrained eye it’s not a suspension bridge. I went down there over the weekend and got pictures. I don’t know what it is. Maybe the world’s most expensive garden ornament…
Sometimes it’s a good exercise to listen closely to what Dallas City Council member Rickey Callahan says is going on. Take whatever he says. Turn it upside down. Now you’re looking at reality. He’s a coffee table puzzle. Last week at a meeting of the council’s Patronage and Payola Committee…
One thing we should all be able to agree on about now. The Trump debate — against, for — really does not get anybody one inch off the dime. Most of the time, I don’t even think any of us can really remember what we started out thinking we were…
Well, I have to say this for Tarrant County televangelist Gloria Copeland: She has truly steered me back into the Bible. It’s been a while, but I find I am on familiar ground even after all this time. I grew up in a religious household and attended a church-based high…
Last year, WFAA-TV (Channel 8) ace investigative reporter Brett Shipp told a story about poor and abused tenants in Dallas right out of Charles Dickens’ early 19th century London. In a wretched hovel owned by a cruel and indifferent landlord, a Dallas man was unable to defend himself against a rat…
Two cable-stayed structures across the Trinity River, collectively called the Margaret McDermott Bridge, remain closed to traffic for one reason and one reason alone: No one is willing to certify the structures intended for use by hikers and bicyclists are safe for human beings. The difficulty is that no one…
I have a great idea. OK, so it’s not my idea. But it could be. My idea — OK, it’s actually Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax’s idea, technically — is that the city set up an independent agency to analyze the real value of all these huge giveaway deals people…
Within hours of publication by the Dallas Observer on Tuesday of a story detailing flaws in the unopened Margaret McDermott Bridge over the Trinity River, the Texas Department of Transportation fired off a heated response — but not to the Observer. The three-page TxDOT letter sent yesterday, which alleged “inaccurate and…
Oh, no. Not again. Forgive me, but I know this setup so well by now, it’s like my old pal, Count Dracula, dropping by again for another visit from the tomb. I open my Dallas Morning News yesterday and choke on my coffee when I see the front-page headline: “DALLAS…
Two years ago in a gushing “interactive” story, The Dallas Morning News described the new Margaret McDermott Bridge across the Trinity River downtown as “heavy metal ballet,” saying the city’s second cable-stayed bridge, named for a wealthy Dallas socialite, was “as much art as engineering.” Maybe more ballet than engineering…
The race card is real. But it depends on who uses it for what purpose. Local case in point: Ten days ago, Dallas County Republicans sued in Judge Eric Moyé’s 14th District Court to get 128 Democratic candidates kicked off a March election ballot because, according to the Republicans, there…
At this week’s Dallas City Council meeting, one of those very odd moments occurred when the people up onstage seemed suddenly to fall into a weird other language, Martian or something, and the people out in the peanut gallery were all craning around looking, at each other to see if…
Good Lord. I shrink from opening my Facebook page every morning for the heartbreak I know awaits me there. Wednesday’s was actually on my wife’s page, not mine, but she showed me, which is the same thing — a GoFundMe page for a man with kids, a cop, brother of…
Let’s not you and me try to answer the question of whether 2018 will see a huge, biblical, roaring, wrathful, tsunami-sized day of reckoning for Republicans in which they will be abraded from the surface of the earth. For the sake of conversation, we’ll take that as a given. And…
Now that the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area is on the list of 20 finalists for the new Amazon second headquarters, I feel compelled to offer two observations: First of all, there is no such thing as a second headquarters. Companies are like people. It is in their nature to have…
You don’t have to be a parent to get this, but if you are a parent, it will help. You need to look at this video. If this were a movie, it would be called “Saga of the Dumbest Cop on Earth.” This video, released by the Dallas Police Department, is of…
The new Dallas city manager gave the City Council a briefing Wednesday on his new scientific analysis tool for the city. I watched. I have a prediction. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the new city manager will be burned as a witch. Sorry, I am not actually taking…
At some point after Dallas recovers from the current crisis of life-threatening 40-degree temperatures and snow dustings, work should begin on removing the fake kayak rapids that the city built in the Trinity River near downtown in 2011 at a cost of $4 million. And our struggle to figure out…
Housing policy in Dallas isn’t just screwed up. It’s screwed up so deep into the ground that it’s going to take smart people with good intentions a very long time to get it unscrewed. Maybe that’s what’s going on at City Hall, but days like yesterday, it just looks like…
Last Saturday’s false nuclear alert in Hawaii does this for us: It offers a unique window on what you and I will feel like if it ever really happens. To us. Jeff Jackson, who lives on Haleakala Mountain on Maui, and his mother, Mary Nell Jackson, who lives in the…
From this far away, Washington is all kabuki theater. President Donald Trump appears in elaborate makeup with flamboyant hand gestures and pronounces that black nations are shitholes. Behind him, a chorus line of lovely liberals fan themselves elaborately and swoon. Please. Here, where we live, we see this stuff all…
