Last week the Dallas school system saw the most appalling example yet of Scandalgate — the scandalous scandal of skimpy school scandals. Three board members said they wanted to fire the superintendent over a teacher-hiring scandal. But by the end of the week the teacher-hiring scandal had already turned to…
Wait a minute. The story you’re getting from The Dallas Morning News this morning about last night’s Dallas school board meeting is flat not what happened. It may be some deft ass-covering by the News’ lead DISD beat reporters, but it’s not the news. The paper this morning makes it…
A story in The New York Times yesterday about New York’s only Ebola patient and how he doesn’t want to be a hero got me thinking about hero narratives in the news. For every flood, fire, earthquake, mudslide and measles outbreak, there must be a hero. Dr. Craig Spencer caught…
By now it’s clear that Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly lied in his 2012 book, Killing Kennedy, about his own connection to the suicide of a key figure in a JFK conspiracy theory. The evidence is irrefutable. Maybe the more interesting question at this point is why. Who lies to…
Yesterday was another day when apparently I was the villain all the way around. Or, as I think of it, another dollar. Robert Wilonsky, a journalist at The Dallas Morning News, had a piece in which he explained that the mayor never said what I said he said about never…
Dallas is throttled by an icy winter blast, and we have video of the disaster. Dogs run wild.
This game is called Fantasy Downtown: The Dallas Daydream. Imagine first that you live in a really nice downtown apartment, and the rent is substantially below going rates today. Up and down the block from your building’s front door are grocery stores, drug stores, housewares shops, coffee shops, small restaurants,…
As we told you here already this morning, Mayor Mike Rawlings has declared that he will not debate the Trinity toll road issue — six- to 10-lane $1 to $2 billion expressway along the river through downtown — because … just won’t. Take a look at the document below, produced…
To: Mayoral Candidate Marcos Ronquillo From: Concerned Citizen Jim Schutze Concerning: Please don’t mention toll road. Marcos, I see here that you have a mayoral candidate forum coming up next week in Oak Cliff, where you are scheduled to debate Mayor Mike Rawlings on the issues. I know from our…
Things in Texas sure look better from inside Texas than from outside. Judging by the news coverage at home, a recently released report on an admissions controversy at the University of Texas found a few minor hickeys but a generally clean bill of health for the university. People looking at…
Yesterday morning I awoke early, and the hatcam mischief was upon me. Not long later I found myself lurking in a corridor at the Crescent, a fancy building, with the hatcam on my head. Just then, Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston got the big bounce-a-roo, the heave-ho from a…
This is “No Car Week” in Dallas, according to the American Institute of Architects’ Dallas branch. They should call it John Tatum week. Dallas developer John C. Tatum Jr. has been telling Dallas for more than 30 years that it is building its rail system entirely the wrong way, dooming…
The city calls its plan for street improvements in West Dallas “The Three-Hole Punch.” But for David Jensen, who owns a warehouse on those streets, it’s a sucker punch. Three years ago Jensen, a 62-year-old Harley-riding semi-retired fine-art handler, started seeing plans for a major rebuilding of the streets all…
In a 15-minute press conference yesterday responding to an investigative report on sketchy back-door admissions practices, UT-Austin President Bill Powers said he was only doing what his predecessors did, that everybody at other universities does it, that everybody knows about it and that his main accuser, UT Regent Wallace Hall,…
We’ve heard endless talk in the last 10 years about the official admissions policies of public universities and whether those policies deprive certain applicants of a fair shot. But that’s all been based on the publicly acknowledged admissions policies of those schools. What about the secret off-the-books admissions system?…
A TRE is a way for the school district to get out from under the Texas Legislature and its Tea-Party-inspired animus against public education
So sad. Pathetic. Last Friday the bullet train people announced their two preferred sites for a station in Dallas, and none of the elected southern Dallas leadership seems even to have noticed that they just got screwed. See also: Sites Selected for Potential Dallas-to-Houston Bullet Train Station In fact, southern…
Of course the people opposed to school reform in Dallas hope to find scandals that will take down the reform superintendent, Mike Miles. But that takes a good scandal. For starters we need to see secret mansions paid for with cash, an office that looks like a whorehouse, fat guys…
Yesterday morning I had this weird stereophonic experience — reading Eric Nicholson’s piece on Unfair Park about the orthodox synagogue versus the homeowners group in Far North Dallas, while also watching and listening to President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on TV. See also: Liberty Institute…
Yesterday, mayoral candidate Marcos Ronquillo came out with his own take on a topic we discussed Monday — the number of political contributors who have given Mayor Mike Rawlings way more than the $5,000 limit per candidate per campaign. See also: Well-Heeled Donors Flood Mayor Rawlings with Money. Hey, Know…
Last weekend we saw Stagger Lee, the Will Power and Justin Ellington musical doing its world premiere at the Dallas Theater Center. All the way through it I was thinking about John Wiley Price. Elaine Liner has reviewed it for us already, and it wouldn’t occur to me anyway to…
The Dallas school board is scheduled to take up the case of the Instant Messages from Hell today — the matter of a recently resigned personnel director who penned irreverent and even profane messages to colleagues and did so on a computer system owned and operated by the school system…
