For me, the relationship between the Dallas Cowboys and Dallas has always been a little bit outside, a few inches over the edge, more like an obsessive love affair than a marriage, so it’s probably a mistake to try to make too much sense of it. And I won’t. But…
Kept my mouth shut until it was said and done. Best I can do for you, conflict of interest-wise. Now I have to blurt it out. I am so glad that damned house near me on Live Oak Street, the “wedding venue,” is down and reduced to rubble at long…
It’s not “balanced” journalism if you compare the right big toe to the left big toe but neglect to mention the elephant. The elephant in the room of school reform here and nationwide has always been seniority pay. With distinguished intellectual defenders like author Diane Ravitch as their standard-bearers and…
Who in Dallas could better express the way Dallas worships things — football and otherwise — than members of the Staubach clan? What they have to say about woman-beating and the Dallas Cowboys football team, specifically player Greg Hardy, is doubly interesting. It tells us something about ourselves. It tells…
Dallas City Attorney Warren Ernst insists his sudden retirement at age 61 after two years on the job isn’t being driven by anything special going on at City Hall at the moment. OK, fine. But I think it has to do with everything happening at City Hall these days. Every…
Given her past woes and some of her past performances, Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk’s appearance Monday night at a community meeting was pretty damned striking. She’s back in the ring, man. Throwing punches. I would even have to go ahead and pay her what may be an old…
You and I saw the stories. Dallas defensive end Greg Hardy’s girlfriend had ditched out on prosecutors so that, even though he had already been convicted of beating her, the court tossed out the case against him on appeal, and he walked. We saw later that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones…
Do you ever pause, put the paper down or look up from your tablet and wonder what’s really going on? Maybe we should all do that. Every day. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott couldn’t find a real sanctuary city to attack in his state, so he threatened Dallas County Sheriff Lupe…
When is being fat a legitimate political issue? Ever? Even theoretically? Is it ever right for a skinny person to get mouthy about other people being fat? I winced, I admit, when I read that Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs was talking about people at City Hall being too…
What to say about Houston, eh? Citizens there voted two-to-one this week to kill an anti-discrimination proposition that would have broadly banned discrimination in housing, employment, city contracting and business services. Opponents won by vowing that a ban on discrimination would allow men dressed as women to sneak into women’s…
Why would anyone step into this? It’s a sincere question. The Confederate flag was at the center of national horror again all summer. Now someone wants to design a new one? Why even touch that? That flag. Three weeks after a white supremacist gunman murdered nine people in a church…
Many of the employees at City Hall are women, and many of those women work in certain areas — Office of the City Secretary, Office of the City Manager, Office of the City Council — where tensions and tempers can run high. Conflict with elected officials is not just probable…
Blue Bell ice cream is coming back to Dallas stores! This is so exciting! I don’t remember this much local fervor a couple months ago for the pope’s arrival in America! The TV stations are offering lists of stores on their webpages where you can go get some! Some stores…
Last April I more or less crashed a big fancy $125-a-plate luncheon (Don’t worry, I wasn’t paying!) about the Trinity Toll road. I left that place in a mixed mood of both euphoria and panic. I always get both things at the same time. I get the euphoria because I’m trying…
Every eye in American higher education is about to be on Austin again. Next Monday, the University of Texas will file a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the latest Abigail Fisher anti-affirmative action case, to be heard by the court in December. The Fisher case — supposed to…
The bigger police unions in Dallas are criticizing the president of the Dallas black police union for sucking up to the chief of police, who is black. So, wait. I’m from Detroit. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get. Before we get into the stuff about sucking up, remind me…
File under mysteries of the soul: that the suicide of the widow is somehow heavier to bear than the savage random murder of her husband. And then again, that’s nonsense. Who are we, strangers, to assign weight or relative value to the death of Patti Stevens, who committed carbon monoxide…
Aha! Answers exist, after all. The argument against requiring a high-dollar apartment developer to include affordable apartments in his or her project is always that doing so will tank the whole deal and cause the developer to abandon America and live out his or her years on a desert island,…
I get that Hillary kicked ass in that Benghazi hearing, but in national politics I’m strictly a peanut gallery guy. I know that The Christian Science Monitor asked recently if it’s already inevitable that Hillary Clinton’s running mate will be Julian Castro, HUD secretary and former San Antonio mayor, and…
First of all, I hope you will at least extend me the courtesy of accepting that I do not want to see the city of Dallas swept away to Galveston on the foaming teeth of a tsunami, especially if it involves me being up there on the teeth in any…
In the old culture of Dallas, the one I hope is half-dead already, it was bad form to try to connect the dots. Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow is gone from those pages now, and I sort of miss him: He always painted me as a tinfoil hat crazy-head…
Oh, we can’t just talk about the f-word 24/7 352 f-bomb days in the year, I know, much as I would like to, but with your gentle indulgence I would like to drop a few more f-bombs here today just to get the f the f out of my system…
