Republicans. If you want to dismiss me as an ignorant hippie libtard, I will understand. You have your reasons. Sometimes I look in the mirror myself in the morning and silently mouth, “Oh shut up, you ignorant hippie libtard.” But I urge you to believe that my question today is…
Because we have this weird “city manager” system of government in Dallas, where no one person is actually totally in charge of anything, Dallas City Hall always assumes it can get away with dodging responsibility. The mayor’s not really the mayor. The city manager’s not really the manager. The city…
Before we get into a whole thing about it, let me just ask a question. If a formerly down-at-the-heels inner city neighborhood is becoming more middle class, which way should house prices be going, up or down? Well, wait. Two questions. If the city wanted to promote middle class housing…
The word, hater, has come to Dallas City Hall. Let’s hope its a temporary infection. This is anecdotal, not scientific, but use of hater really does seem to have grown in frequency, the most recent bump coming from the harrumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. He used it three…
Serious effort here on my part. Really. I shall approach the story of our local mentally ill district attorney from a more positive perspective than in the past. Ahem. Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk has returned to Dallas from yet another institutional sojourn associated with mental illness – I…
Another painful moment lies ahead for Dallas as the city struggles to deal with an issue most of the nation probably thought was long shut away in the history books – formal racial segregation by policy. It’s not history here. Segregation is about to be news again. But first, there…
On the map, District 2 for the Dallas school board looks like a mini-Texas with a big white hole in the center, which, in a sense, it is. Right at the heart of the city, District 2 swings up from East Dallas, takes in Preston Hollow and runs over to…
Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez announced on Memorial Day he intends to resign at the end of January, telling a TV crew he wants to get his “life back.” I don’t know any more than that, so I am bound, however grudgingly, to take what he says at face value. But…
Here are some observations that may help you put the city’s projected budget shortfall of $19 million for 2016-2017 into a proper context. In a total city budget that was something over $3 billion last year, a $19 million shortfall will amount to about 0.6 of one percent of the…
Somebody slipped me a copy of a 2-inch-deep, loose-leaf binder being circulated to members of Dallas’ park board, who are stalled on what to do with Fair Park, the city’s 277-acre post-apocalyptic exposition park two miles south of downtown. No wonder they’re stalled. This week was supposed to be the…
There’s nothing funny about the affluenza defense. I’m not trying to be funny. I’m serious. A light bulb came on over my head this morning when I read a letter to the editor. In all seriousness, is there not some sense in which the affluenza theory could be applied legitimately…
On the one hand, naming a linear park on an old bridge for a former mayor seems like something that would fall somewhere between a nice thing to do at best and at the very worst harmless. But it’s the misdirection that counts. When you look at what some city…
How much has Dallas really changed since the 1950s? Deep down? At heart? Last Friday The Dallas Morning News ran a mish-mash editorial that finally wound up apologizing for and defending the city’s recent semi-official association with Robert Jeffress, pastor of Dallas First Baptist Church. Jeffress you know. He is…
Uh-oh. Grab your wallet. The Dallas Morning News editorial page wants you to know about a very exciting City-Hall-run real estate development on Lancaster Road across from the Veterans Administration hospital, six miles south of downtown: “This is an important project,” the paper said this week. “It’s prime property on…
Dear Texas Kid: I was going to address my letter, “Dear Transgender Texas Kid,” but then I thought about it. You don’t think of yourself as a transgender kid. You just think of yourself as a kid. And you’re right. That’s my main message to you. I’m sure you don’t…
Oh, man, sometimes I think I’m walking into a serious conversation about Dallas City Hall. Then I hear what people down there are saying. I just want to stop and say, “Oh, excuse me, wrong venue, I guess. I thought I was walking into City Hall. Obviously I took a wrong…
Bernie lovers, I love you. But some of you are now officially out over your skis. You probably don’t get what just happened in Waco — the public humiliation of Ken Starr at Baylor University. But you need to figure this one out. The arc of Starr’s public career provides…
Editor’s note: Jim Schutze will be back in action next week. In the meantime, we’re reaching into the archives for some columns of his that deserve another look. Today’s was originally in July 1999, which given this week’s news out of South Carolina, isn’t as long ago as it sounds…
Editor’s note: Jim Schutze is taking some well-earned time off, so we’re digging into the archives to bring you some of his hits. This one, from August 2013 is about Farmers Branch’s ultimately failed effort to outlaw undocumented immigrants and seems particularly ripe for a revisit. Schutze writes: “In the…
Leave it to local Democrats to play the Susan Hawk mentally ill district attorney story exactly wrong. I swear the local Dallas County Democratic Party could turn the second coming into a debate about immigration. Hawk, as you know, is our recently elected Republican DA who went on a covered-up…
A picture is emerging — very slowly from the fog of local politics — of the way Dallas probably is going to address its desegregation problems with the federal government. The city is under major pressure to redress decades of bad behavior by putting more “affordable housing” (code for racially…
What am I supposed to feel here? Grief? Wrath? A strong desire to go fishing? I wish I could remember my Greek mythology better. What was that guy’s name? Sissy Fuss? Last week the Dallas City auditor gave a committee of the City Council a deeply depressing analysis of how…
