Which would you consider more horrible? Drowning in the White Water Feature or going permanently nuts in the Water Maze? The most vicious form of bullshit in this world is the kind that wears a necktie, shines its shoes and masquerades as calm, cool and collected. Beware the knife from…
During last week’s failed attempt to fire the Dallas superintendent of schools — at a school board meeting so depressing it made me think of Thanksgiving Day dinner at psycho prison — Superintendent Mike Miles made a speech. See also: Mike Miles Doesn’t Get Fired at Special Dallas ISD Board…
Count on everybody to be too clever by half in this one — trying to figure out why Dallas cops brought felony charges last week against a City Council member because he got into it with a city employee about whether she doing her job properly. And, yeah, they say…
Two stories flew across my path yesterday like wobbly arrows tipped with suction cups. One was about the mayor’s campaign to stoke economic fires in poverty-blighted southern Dallas with a team of privately paid cheerleaders. The other was about City Hall putting a belated bullet in the head of the…
Bunch of things could happen at tonight’s Dallas school board meeting, topmost that Dallas may wind up firing its reform school superintendent, Mike Miles. And that will be a real whodunnit. Miles, hired with fanfare three years ago as a reformer, drew kudos and support early on for battling the…
Strictly from a newspaper point of view and comparing today with maybe 40 years ago, current events are re-writing the basic rules of what we in the business have always called call “story sense.” Forty years ago it would have been major front-page news for researchers to find a geological…
Yeah, Steve Blow definitely got my attention yesterday with his column in The Dallas Morning News about an anti-pitbull organization, maybe because I just got my socks scared off again yesterday afternoon by the Amazing Flying Pit Bull From Hell in the alley across the street from me. I walk…
Dallas school trustee Mike Morath sent me a link to an Ira Glass “This American Life” radio show about testing and the ability of children to succeed in life. I thought it spoke to a lot of the blowback I get from teachers mad at me for sticking up for…
Wait a minute. Before we all just go tripping on down the road, we need to go back and sort out a particular aspect of last week’s nasty city council meeting about the Trinity River toll road, the multi-lane, high-speed, limited access highway some people still want to stick on…
Right after the Trinity Commons luncheon early last week, there was something close to euphoria among hardcore opponents of the Trinity toll road, the limited-access, high-speed highway proposed but unbuilt for 18 years along the Trinity River downtown. They spoke to me off the record, because they assumed negotiations lay…
Oops. Had to leave town early last week for a wedding. Almost let a good one slip by. Do you mind if I go back and pick it up, if a few days belatedly? Three weeks ago I told you about the case of Don Smith, an internal investigator at…
Told you so. Curtis Lockey and Craig MacKenzie, the downtown tower redevelopers who accused Dallas of practicing deliberate racial segregation, are back with a brand-new federal lawsuit against the city. These guys won’t go away. See also: Nobody Has Counted to 10 Yet in that Lockey/Mackenzie vs. City of Dallas…
The muscle is on, Chicago-style in Dallas. The mayor and the people he carries water for on the Trinity toll road do not want you to see, hear or talk about their so-called “Dream Team” plan for the toll road before they can get it underway. That’s why they will…
All right, the only thing I’m doing here is hitting the button to start the half-life timer on the latest installment of Scandalgate. At the end of last week, Brett Shipp at WFAA TV and the education beat reporters at The Dallas Morning News launched a new Dallas school district…
R.G. Ratcliffe, former investigative ace for The Houston Chronicle and long one of the top reporters in Texas (maybe the top), has a wonderful piece up this week on the Texas Monthly politics blog about Bill Hammond, chief executive officer of the Texas Association of Business (state Chamber of Commerce)…
Be right with you. Sorting through some stuff here at home. This is the room that has become the unofficial warehouse. Ah, here it is. The box of keepsakes from our child’s first days. Yesterday I attended an event at City Hall where Mayor Mike Rawlings announced the pending announcement…
Shiggy bops drawbacks. I’m serious. I have been searching through basic literature on both vaudeville dance steps and the major propaganda techniques. I will explain. I wanted to find a basic category of propaganda for the position taken by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and the Dallas Citizens Council on the…
In watching the battle over school reform in Dallas, it’s worth keeping in mind sometimes that Dallas is far from being the Lone Ranger. Issues similar to our own are stirring strongly parallel responses in cities around the country, the best example at the moment being Chicago, where today the…
Guess what. To my own absolute amazement, that stupid toll road — you know the one! — turns out to be the one thing people want to hear about in this election. Otherwise, they’re asleep. Typical timing for me. I had just gotten to the point where the words, “Trinity…
You know the story about the new Dallas County District attorney, Susan Hawk. She covered up a stint in rehab when she was running for election. It all came out recently when she went through some dramatic office turmoil. See also: Dallas County DA Hawk Chats at SMU, Says Little…
Wow. You really have to be careful these days what to make of things people tell you about Dallas School Superintendent Mike Miles and school reform. A few days ago somebody told me Miles was going around town giving speeches saying he wants to fire all the teachers who have…
News bulletin from Corruptdrunktown: a grand jury under the drunk lady who is the Travis County district attorney in Austin has declined to indict University of Texas Regent Wallace Hall. The drunk lady’s grand jury devoted months to finding some way to criminally indict Hall, who is from Dallas. Hall…
