Taking money out of mass transit to save the city’s dying police and fire pension fund is not a fun idea. It’s nothing to look forward to. But we have to do something, and whatever we do probably won’t taste sweet. “The pension crisis is a public safety crisis now,”…
Two floors down from the real courtroom Thursday morning, a dozen or so mediatoids sit staring at two flat-screen closed-circuit television monitors in a special media-only annex courtroom, all waiting with bated breath and fingertips poised on keyboards for what we all assume will be the opening day of the…
President Trump tweeted two days ago: “The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!” I got so excited when I read it. You mean liberal activists are actually going to do to Republicans what the Tea Party…
Very surreal experience for me yesterday sitting at a white tablecloth luncheon among the mucketies at the annual Trinity Commons Foundation affair. I think they assumed based on my appearance I was a waiter and let me in. I sat there listening to endless blah-blah-blah from three Dallas mayors, one…
All right, now we’ve got this police and fire pension issue where we can see it and where we can begin to make our own personal decisions, thanks to yesterday’s unanimous vote by the board of directors of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension board. This is now a moral…
In the federal corruption trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, which opens Tuesday for jury selection, lawyers will grind on for months through millions of pages of evidence gathered since federal agents raided Price’s home and office six years ago. But for me sitting in the gallery, it…
State Senator Don Huffines, Republican of Dallas County, wants to obliterate an entire school district —blow it to smithereens, erase it, make it go away forever, get rid of it lock, stock and barrel. Terrible, right? No. We should all grab boxes of trash bags and go help him. Don’t…
Larry Gene McCollum was 58 years old in 2011 when he was busted for a bad check in Waco. He was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 330 pounds, with a history of diabetes, high blood pressure and a tendency toward depression. He was sentenced to a year in…
The whole question about Fair Park, our 277-acre albatross that everybody thinks should be turned over to a private entity, is whose entity. Seriously down-at-the-heels but still shabbily beautiful in its own way, this vast “exposition park” in South Dallas is going to become somebody’s baby. Please note quotation marks…
In volatile times, things happen for the first time, things we’ve never seen before. New events explode into view suddenly without prelude or context. We need time afterward to digest. I spent all last week trying to figure out why on the first night of the Trump travel ban I…
Dallas City Council Member Scott Griggs said ruefully to me yesterday, “There are two things in Dallas you’re not allowed to ask about — the Trinity toll road and the State Fair of Texas.” Here’s what happens if you do. As Peter Simek reported in D Magazine earlier this week,…
Nothing could be more plain. The blame for the city’s dearth of low-income housing — expressed politically, in policy, in voting and in what people say on the record — lies squarely with City Hall. Every major action with bearing on this issue taken by the current mayor, the City…
A couple days ago The Fort Worth Star-Telegram published the transcript of a voice recording in which Fort Worth police Officer William A. Martin explained the Dec. 21 arrest of a Fort Worth woman and her two daughters by saying, in part, “This all got blown out of proportion with…
People should start paying me not to write anything positive about them. Just over a week ago I wrote something positive about Jesse Moreno, vice chair of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board, and now I see on this Wednesday’s upcoming City Council agenda there will be an effort to…
Let me go back to an earlier point. I still say the money situation that the city is in right now makes absolutely no sense unless there is a monumental leak or a series of leaks somewhere. And I think the new city manager ought to go looking. Things, after all,…
Hard to know at present if The Dallas Morning News is really going to carry through on its announced plan to move to the George-Dahl-designed building that I remember lovingly from its years as the Dallas Public Library, and less lovingly as a major beacon of rat urine on hot…
We are so screwed. The Texas economy is totally dependent on trade with Mexico. Trump’s determination to stir up his flash mob by insulting Mexico is going to absolutely kill us. But our top Texas elected officials are Republicans who are so afraid of far-right challengers that they can’t do…
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, scheduled to go on trial later this month on federal corruption charges, is still king of the city’s old black protesters. But the old black protest machine’s days as a major political force in the city probably are numbered anyway, no matter which way…
A letter to Enrique Peña Nieto, president of the United Mexican States, from a newspaper columnist in Dallas, Texas. Dear President Peña Nieto: Please don’t pull the rug out from under us. We need your help, and the world needs your help. If you temporize too much with the regime…
Of course Dallas cops and firefighters are furious over the public tone of the pension fund fight, because so much of it accuses the ordinary members of the fund of somehow being at the bottom of the debacle. All of the talk about pension fund millionaires, for example, makes it…
Thursday’s meeting of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board was an abominable disgrace. Most members of the board turned their backs on taxpayers and fought instead to shield their cronies at the State Fair of Texas from public scrutiny. But, remember: There’s one good thing about abominable disgraces. These are…
Why does everybody in the Texas school reform debate think the most important thing to do is lie about it? It’s the great consensus of untruth. No matter what they do, they all want to make sure nobody can guess what they’re really up to. Nothing is more emblematic of…
