Want a pretty good indication where things stand at Dallas City Hall? A majority of the members of the Dallas City Council have decided the city needs to stop keeping a record of where the council gets its campaign money. Gee. What could they have in mind? I stumbled into…
The Dallas Morning News ran a piece earlier in the week about a bad-blood feud between Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston and Bobby Abtahi, president of the Park and Recreation Board. The story made it sound like a nice guy versus mean guy thing. Make no mistake. At least…
This part is easy for any of us to get. You have a loved one, partner, spouse, kid, weird neighbor — somebody whom you love and count on to be a regular part of your life. You sit down to the dinner table, and that chair is empty because, as…
How times have changed.The worst threat posed to poor minority kids in Dallas once came from a callous white leadership. Now poor and minority kids get shafted by a callous black Southern Dallas leadership that cares more about preserving its good-old-boy political patronage system. You may not agree with me…
Three things to say about the death of the Trinity toll road project, authorized by city voters in 1998, killed by the Dallas City Council three weeks ago — Thing 1, Thing 2 and the Big Thing. The first thing, you will find obvious, the second less so. The Big…
The Confederate statues debate is coming at us so fast that nobody in Dallas should feel embarrassed about having to change footing, alter or even flip a previous position. I know I’m not. Did what I said about it a month ago even make sense back then? I wrote that…
The fun thing about being a reporter, the payoff, is getting to talk to interesting people. So that’s what I have been doing lately — calling people and getting them to talk to me without a specific agenda. Mariana Griggs, a 40-year-old mother of two young children, is a longtime…
The fun thing about being a reporter, the payoff, is getting to talk to interesting people. Often I hang up after an interview and think, “I wish I could call that person back some day and just get him or her to ramble on about whatever. I bet it would…
Liberals, friends of affirmative action, champions of diversity, all of you, my people — please, let’s catch our breath. Can we all quit the knee-jerk belly-aching over the Trump Justice Department’s interest in revisiting higher education admissions schemes for five minutes? Take it from Texas. This is not going to…
Pearlie Mae Brown, 80, still doesn’t have her house fixed. An engaging smile breaks across her face, then disappears, subsumed by worry. Rocking on the front porch of her small beige cottage on Crossman Avenue in West Dallas, she seems too tiny, too delicate to be the fulcrum in a…
When the ESPN report on the 1988 Dallas Carter High School tragedy airs, I, for one, will be pinned to the screen. It’s a story that has haunted me since it happened, in part because it’s a story most mainstream media outlets have had a hard time telling. The program…
The argument against leaving all those gaudy Confederate memorials in their places of honor in the city is that they amount to a corrupted version of history written by the losers. I could make the same argument about this private outfit that the mayor wants to create to rule a…
There’s a happy ending. But we don’t start out there. First we have to get through an explicit and disturbing account of Dallas’ racial past and present, published this week as part of an extraordinary document (copy below) calling for radical change in the way the city views Fair Park…
Two upcoming City Council votes, both technical and arcane on the surface, will go to the heart of the city. The moment draws nigh. With two simple votes Aug. 9, the Dallas City Council may leap across an immense chasm in time and usher in a new era. Or not…
In multiple court hearings last May, Assistant City Attorney Melissa Miles complained that the city just couldn’t quite trust West Dallas landlord Khraish Khraish, who was selling many of his rental houses to his tenants. The city didn’t know if the deeds were kosher. The city was afraid he might…
If I utter one single encouraging word about charter schools, I get this instantaneous backlash from people, many of them friends, insisting that charter schools are part of an elitist plot to undermine and one day do away with public school education and, by the way, I am an idiot…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wants the City Council to hurry up — hurry up! — and sign a pile of documents creating some kind of a private thing to control the new park we want to build on the Trinity River downtown. Former City Council member Angela Hunt has her…
Sometimes we have to go back to the old-fashioned used-car lots that used to line Ross Avenue if we want to know how to handle things. You don’t sign a check to buy a car if the guy won’t let you drive it around the block first. Walk away. You…
Yesterday. I am staring at a Dallas Morning News online story telling me that the Texas Association of Business would start running ads on Texas radio stations today warning that, if the special session of the Texas Legislature passes a bathroom bill, it could cost Texas the NFL draft. I…
Forget all the small-bore stuff like the Trinity toll road, Fair Park and so on. It’s more and more clear that we are at a major crossroads in the city, a place calling for real regime change. Total. In what we in the print business call a full-page “bleed” —…
Hey. Be careful what you say about Detroit. I don’t know anything about this new Dallas police chief coming down here — U. Renee Hall, a deputy chief in the Detroit Police Department — but I do know a little bit about her hometown. Judging by some of the comments…
So let me get this right. Fifty years from now, some young doofus reporter from Detroit moves here, looks around town and thinks, “Oh, just like Indianapolis.” He not only does not see that this city’s economy was created by slave labor before the Civil War, but he also doesn’t…
