Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk and former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson, two wild and crazy guys, had a shared piece on the opinion pages of The Dallas Morning News yesterday under a headline, “Congestion will worsen without Trinity toll road.” If you asked Kirk and Jackson to produce a…

Last week, barely 24 hours before the Dallas school board was to vote on a complicated school construction proposal, two major media published stories saying the district has been conspiring to strip-mine federal subsidy money out of poor schools and spend it instead on more affluent kids. That’s huge. If…

The kid from Highland Park who got caught singing a racist chant on a fraternity bus at Oklahoma University has apologized, but some of the twitterati aren’t buying it. See also: Highland Park Grad Who Sang Racist Chant at OU Fraternity Says He’s Sorry @GEEPENNIN tweeted: “Pettit’s apology is rehearsed…

OK, here comes a great chance to see what the Dallas school board is really made of. Spotted this on the agenda for tonight’s meeting: The board will vote on a legal settlement for a fired employee who was the board’s own employee, not an employee of the superintendent of…

Last week I attended a community meeting for the La Bajada neighborhood, an old working class Hispanic community at the foot of the fake Calatrava suspension bridge in West Dallas. A new entertainment district is already well established cheek by jowl with the neighborhood, and developers nearby are ready to…

What does it mean to be a product of Harvard and/or Princeton? Does it imply a mandatory elevation, a certain stature beneath which a person cannot sink? Now that Ted Cruz has declared his candidacy for president of the United States, I have been forced finally to come to grips…

Less than a mile from D/FW Airport, brand-new street signs proclaim the names of two newly paved streets snaking through acres of raw dirt — the corner of Al Razi and Al Hazen. In the distance, the first new house in the Al Hamra subdivision soars up off the ground…

Hang on. We had a piece here the other day saying State Representative Rafael Anchia had introduced legislation in Austin to “kneecap” the proposed Trinity toll road project in Dallas, and, true enough, that’s what Anchia’s bills might do. But in addition to blocking certain state funding from being used…

From the very beginning, top Texas legislators and key officials at the University of Texas have offered only one response to revelations of wrongdoing brought forward by UT System Regent Wallace Hall of Dallas — absolute denial, backed up by a yee-haw hog-hunting bloodlust for Hall’s scalp. The more they…

The Trinity toll road mafia recognizes only two positions to be held on the need for a new 10-lane tolled expressway through downtown on the banks of the Trinity River: 1) short hairs or 2) bullet in the face. I talked briefly yesterday to former City Council member and anti-toll…

Years ago, David Spence, an influential developer in Oak Cliff, was showing me around an area of North Oak Cliff where he was successfully re-imagining an early 20th century apartment building — down-at-the-heels and slummy — as a hip urban enclave. I asked him if it wasn’t a problem that…

State Senator Kel Seliger, a Republican from Amarillo, is pushing a measure that we might well dub the “No More Wallace Hall Bill.” In a transparent attempt to shield Texas universities from basic public accountability, Seliger’s meat-ax bill would do serious violence to basic institutional governance in all of Texas’…

Expressions of shock and awe over the OU racist frat boy episode remind me of a party we attended when our son was a junior or senior in high school. This very wobbly lady trying to walk on grass in spike heels came up to me — cross-eyed drunk, windmilling…

Now The Dallas Morning News is in a wad, sort of, because a federal magistrate has ruled that taxpayers must pay some of the legal bills for criminally indicted Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Editorial writer Rudy Bush has personally opined that it’s “moxie” (gentile chutzpah) on Price’s part…

Eminent domain — where the government takes your property — sounds so neat and clean when the government describes how it’s done. We only see the down and dirty when the government actually does it. Assistant Dallas City Attorney Christopher J. Caso, testifying Monday before the Texas Senate Committee on…

One big number the Trinity toll road hustlers don’t want us to see before the May City Council elections: How much it would cost to drive on that dog. You saw the story about the new North Texas toll road where they jumped the rate to $7 to drive four…

You already know how Greg Abbott rolls. Our brand-new so-called conservative (small government, close to the people) governor wants to make it illegal for Texans to pass their own local close-to-the-people laws on fracking, plastic bags or tree cutting — matters he thinks are better left in the hands of…

David Jensen is the guy I wrote about a few weeks ago who owns and occupies a warehouse in West Dallas in the path of a major new real estate development heavily favored by City Hall. His main point in talking to me was to tell the city to tell…

If the lasso tightens around Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly’s neck after all, it will be the Dallas connection that does it. O’Reilly has improbably wriggled out of other whoppers, like saying he covered a war from 1200 miles away, for example, but so far he hasn’t had the balls…

Who you sue is who’s got the right pockets. The contention at the heart of nurse Nina Pham’s lawsuit against Texas Health Resources, owners of Dallas Presbyterian Hospital, is that her bosses at Presby told her her hazmat suit “was safe and that she was at ‘no risk’ of having…

I view of our story from yesterday — about Dallas ISD trustee Joyce Foreman’s troubling voting record and internet ranting — I present the video below, from the late-night wind-up of last week’s school board meeting. It shows Foreman giving her views on “modern education.” They’re telling. I know Foreman…