Forgive me. Force of habit. Earlier this week, I wandered slow-wittedly into what I foolishly mistook for an ancient and easy standby in the newspaper business, a story known by a newsroom shorthand as “Dog Bites Kid.” I see my error. The real story was “Dog Is Kid.” I thought…
This last week has caused me to think about something that really never occurred to me before. Maybe it should have. So now I wonder whether U.S. Reps. Joe Barton and Blake Farenthold are bigger hypocrites than former President Bill Clinton. Are they the same grade of hypocrite? Are they…
From gritty bars to the courthouse steps, a great cry of the collective human heart went up in Dallas last week for a dog named Lamb of God, slated to be killed by the city because she bit a child badly. But this really is not open for debate. The…
I more or less pay the rent by telling you what’s wrong with City Hall. So I’m a little worried. Not sure how this is going to work out. It looks as if I may have to tell you what’s right with City Hall. I ask only this: A couple of…
We all know this. When a poor person disappears, it’s less an event than when a rich person does. The police are less likely to be stirred to action. The media will pay less attention. Black, white or Hispanic, that’s not even what counts. Poor and nobody. That’s the epitaph…
When somebody takes a hard-line position on a City Hall issue and won’t say why, it’s no big surprise to find out later he had something in his pocket that he didn’t want to share. But in East Dallas, I believe I have found a tribe of people who may…
If there is ever to be an autobiography — I, Joe — the moral issue to be addressed in it will be whether Joe Barton, a 32-year member of Congress from Ennis in the 6th Texas Congressional District, was a hypocrite. Somehow, a woman not his wife got her hands on…
Every time I see a reference to FBI agent James Hosty and the burned Lee Harvey Oswald memo, I feel this twinge somewhere in the vicinity of my wallet. I guess I’ll go to my grave thinking I should have made at least a few bucks off that one. Hosty…
Response to the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston is, sadly, a great example of the severe political entropy and impotence at the top of our political system. But don’t look there. If we look not up but down, to the level of grassroots, we’re going to see where the…
If a former FBI agent now working as an investigator completes a months-long probe of a local unit of government and says in his final report that Larry Duncan, the top elected official and a well-known political figure in the city, may be guilty of bribery, is that not a…
Dallas has been paying attention recently to some compelling research showing that racial segregation is bad for poor minority children. Truth. But only as an aside, no big deal, just me up here in the bleachers mumbling to myself: I’d like to point out that segregation probably isn’t too good…
Here’s a decent little window on the wars within our sprawling urban school district right now. The big news is stunning. The small news is infuriating. A couple of weeks ago Dallas school district executives gave the board of trustees a full hard-numbers briefing on outcomes from the district’s 3-year-old…
Our new city manager is saying and doing all the right things. I’m watching to see how long it takes them to get rid of him. By new city manager I mean, of course, T.C. Broadnax, who came from Tacoma, Washington, in February to take the reins as the first…
The way the news is these days: In the middle of a storm of disgusting national stories about male sexual predators, we get our own local countercase — a fired Dallas County assistant district attorney, sobbing on camera, offering every conceivable excuse in the book for her terrible behavior with…
It looks as if Dallas City Hall may finally get itself out from under a billion-dollar sword of Damocles by resolving a bundle of police and fire back-pay lawsuits. After two decades of failure to get it done, what has changed? People on both sides of the dispute, speaking to…
Calling in outside experts never was the Dallas way, sadly.
The other day in the daily paper, there was an item of a type I call a bathroom-wall story. By bathroom wall, I mean you read it and sort of get what they’re getting at, but there’s a lot of context missing, and you’re not sure why you’re reading it…
Dallas County voters cast ballots Tuesday to kill a school district — kill a school district — by a margin of almost 17 percentage points. What does that mean? All right, you and I know the backstory on this particular so-called school district — not a real school district, quarter-million-dollar…
These are strange times, indeed, so I find myself having to say something here at the beginning that I don’t think I could ever have imagined uttering a long time ago: I am not writing this column in order to mock, disparage or make hay somehow of the shooting deaths…
Do you ever get the feeling the whole purpose of the news is to convince you we’re all screwed by problems so huge that we might as well give up and binge-watch cable until the end comes? I do, and I write news. But every once in a while, thank…
Very hard to know from our vantage point here in the boondocks how President Trump’s swamp-draining operation may be going in Washington, but we know how it’s going here. The swamp is full. We’ve got what may well be hundreds of millions of dollars in missing and misspent money given…
If you go to the polls Nov. 7 to vote on the city’s proposed bond, you’ve got a job ahead. It’s not going to be just a straight up and down yes or no deal for the whole ballot. If you did that, you would make some bad mistakes. You…
