Why is Mayor Mike Rawlings so strong for the Trinity toll road? Several months ago he made sort of a show of thinking about it. Then he announced his support. But was there ever any doubt? As we move closer to the May elections, the focus of those elections is…
If Sarah Palin is the canary in the coal mine, Texas is the bats.
In this town, if you say you don’t think we should build a highway practically on top of the Trinity River through downtown, the people who want to build a highway on top of the river through downtown always say, “Well, what’s your idea instead?” As if that’s the perfect…
Great story in The Dallas Morning News yesterday by Brandon Formby revealing that the toll road agency in our area has been sitting on $1.7 million worth of traffic studies for the one they want to build along the Trinity River through downtown. The North Texas Tollway Authority just won…
Once in a while a really brilliant idea pops up in a relatively obscure place, a diamond in the coal mine. The particular coal mine I have in mind is the letters to the editor section of The Dallas Morning News (why not just put your idea in a bottle…
Last week right after the Texas attorney general released an investigative report on the University of Texas Law School, we talked a little bit about it here on Unfair Park. Reflecting my own journalistic and literary values, I went for the really lurid stuff first, like the former law school…
We have this basic impasse in Dallas where the public schools are concerned. The deal struck by the white and black leaderships 12 years ago was supposed to be that elected black leadership would get to run the school system and hand out the jobs and so on, and the…
This item is in answer to a comment on Unfair Park yesterday that I thought deserved a more detailed response than I could provide in the comments section. Let’s see if I can use more words to make things even worse. This week I have a story in the paper…
The legal event called criminal indictment is a familiar theme in the news of any given day: It’s the step where a grand jury formally accuses a person of a crime and thereby launches the process that will lead either to a trial or a plea of guilty in some…
Last week when the Texas attorney general released a long-stalled investigation of a lucrative off-the-books compensation system at the University of Texas Law School, The Texas Tribune, the on-line news service that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the University of Texas System, blew off the…
Lots of people — and by that I mean Steve Blow — base their faith in fluoridated drinking water on what they believe to be the preponderance of scientific opinion as expressed by dentists. I refer to Blow’s recent column in The Dallas Morning News. The implicit assertion — made…
Selma was on my mind again a few days before Martin Luther King Day, for unexpected reasons. I had to call my old friend, Peter Johnson, to ask him to talk to another journalist. He picked up, but he couldn’t stay on the phone long because he was walking out…
For better or for worse, a fair housing case filed by Dallas plaintiffs will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court next week. It deals with the “disparate impact” doctrine of discrimination — the idea that if you do something that discriminates against protected groups, it doesn’t matter whether it…
Today Dallas is host to a clerical “summit” called “The Reconciled Church: Healing the Racial Rift,” put on by T.D. Jakes of the Potters House in Dallas and Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland. Something about it seems powerfully counter-intuitive. Rift-healer Jackson is a right-winger who…
Normally I don’t talk about this, but I can see the future. I know ahead of time what’s going to happen. It’s better if we don’t talk about how. It will just scare you. But I happen to know, for example, what Steve Blow is going to write in his…
Some years ago I was brutally chastised by a person who lives in my house for an especially nasty column I wrote about Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow and something he said about the Trinity River toll road — that unbuilt monster highway somebody wants to stick on top…
You saw Stephen Young’s piece last week about kids in Irving being taught to “duck and cover” (dive under their desks) in case of an earthquake. You probably have to be of a certain age (old) to appreciate the cultural importance of duck and cover drills. It’s what we old…
Thank goodness, maybe Dallas school board President Miguel Solis has found an honorable, face-saving way out of the school board reform thicket that the mayor led us into last spring. Not a moment too soon. Some members of the so-called Home Rule Commission, charged with inventing a whole new way…
Forget about the end times. The real issue is whether 11 earthquakes in 27 hours is enough to poison the jury pool. Remember? In August 2013, a gas drilling company sued us for $30 million — sued our city, that is — for denying fracking permits close to churches, homes…
Can’t go see it. This isn’t funny. I laughed many years ago when a student at SMU where I was an adjunct teacher said to me, “Everything I know about Vietnam, I know from Sylvester Stallone.” The reference, which I did not think was ironic, was to the then recent…
A crow’s eye view of the stray dog problem in Dallas, especially in the city’s often poor and violent southeastern sector, is daunting. We look down on thousands and thousands of dogs running loose through neighborhoods, many in semi-feral packs that strike out fearlessly from lairs in alleys and overgrown…
Former Dallas Carter High School football player Arthur Muhammad, now a filmmaker, doesn’t know how lucky he is that I failed in my own attempt to get a movie made about the 1988 David W. Carter High School Cowboys. Not that I came close. But it provided me with a…
