At the very warmest and most satisfying moment in Thanksgiving Day dinner yesterday, when all was right with the world and I felt truly thankful for my good fortune, a thought struck my skull like a hammer against a church bell. “What about the commenters?” On Thanksgiving Day, Hanukkah, Christmas,…
Dallas Schools yesterday released copies of the complaints against school system trustee Bernadette Nutall that have spurred an ongoing external investigation of her conduct. The complaints include a reference to something I reported here a week ago having to do with Nutall socking somebody. See also: Nutall Probe Will Include…
Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The Dallas City Council, local grocery chains and the Texas Retailers Association go at it for two years about a plastic bag ban. Last March at the end of a long, agonizing process, the council passes a deeply compromised ordinance that doesn’t…
Two moments caught my ear last week when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings addressed a well-heeled, smoothly coiffed crowd about the latest effort to get a new highway built along the river through downtown. He’s hiring a panel of experts to help redesign the road, months before a final federal ruling…
Couple weeks ago just before leaving town on vacation, I told you the city of Dallas won big and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs lost big in a settlement of the 5-year-old HUD complaint against the city for racial discrimination. Wouldn’t you know, court papers were filed…
Sharon Grigsby of The Dallas Morning News editorial page posted an interesting item on their opinion blog yesterday saying the paper’s pontification board had just met with Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles, that Miles wouldn’t tell them anything and they support him. I agree. He won’t tell me anything, either…
Results of the Trinity toll road public opinion poll released yesterday by State Rep. Raphael Anchia are so devastatingly obliterating, so thermonuclear, in fact — 94 percent of Dallas zip code respondents opposed to building it – that they direct a hole-burning focus on the obvious correlative question: OK, so…
Wednesday the mayor is holding some kind of meeting to see if people can come up with “design tweaks” to make the Trinity River toll road plan more palatable. Well, yeah, if shooting it in the head is considered a design tweak. This idea — to build a fat new…
For what it’s worth – not much, probably – nobody’s sadder than me about the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund and the saga about to unfold around it. I know the history. It was one of those crumbs that poor black South Dallas had to wrench from a fat callous…
I’m headed out of town for a week’s vacation. Spent a good deal of yesterday thinking about the outcome in the HUD case against Dallas. As you know by now, HUD folded a couple days ago and withdrew its racial segregation allegation against the city. If you were here yesterday,…
City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed yesterday by HUD and the city (see below)…
We took a pretty bad hiding over Ebola here when Dallas became the first city in the United States to harbor the disease. How much of that we deserved and how much we did not will be fodder for somebody’s doctoral dissertation someday. Right now it’s worth noting that a…
The city auditor’s new bad report on a 27-year-old economic development fund in black South Dallas talks about technical problems with paperwork and mumbles on about the need for better “performance measures.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when, Mr. Auditor, were you going to tell us about the missing five million…
New York Times media writer David Carr, who’s almost always right about everything, has a piece in today’s paper about sponsored (paid-for) journalism, in which he singles out The Texas Tribune in Austin for having avoided the obvious pitfalls. I’m not too sure about that. Carr kicks off his piece…
The Dallas ISD school board is supposed to meet soon to discuss an incident from a couple weeks back in which the superintendent ordered district police to forcibly evict a school board trustee from a middle school. I hope they also talk about the school. At first blush, Dade Middle…
It has taken me a long while — I was slow — but I guess now I sort of get why some people think the “Ebola House” is funny. Sort of. Still working on it. Decorated for Halloween as an Ebola disaster area and located in a rich part of…
Just when we thought we could never show our faces again, thank goodness for Chris Christie. We owe him. Only the governor of New Jersey could make Dallas look good on Ebola. Look, we won’t be bragging any time soon about the day Ebola hit Dallas. It was a mess…
Sorry, everybody else, but this is one of those times I have to go all-in, full-tilt, do-or-die East Dallas on you. East Dallas! Listen to me! They’re going to take Tietze Pool away from you! Tietze Pool! One reason you moved into the Greater M Streets Area, also known as…
Amy Silverstein’s cover story here last week, “Road Runners,” exploded one of my own favorite and time-honored paradigms; the city versus the suburbs. Silverstein exposed a scenario in which people in the boondocks are getting reamed in exactly the same way and even by the same people as folks in…
A little over two years ago The Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit support group for Battery Park at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers on the southern tip of Manhattan, decided that it needed a new chair. The conservancy wanted a new park chair that would be light enough…
Hoping it’s not bad luck to say this so soon, knocking on wood, rubbing my figurative rabbit’s foot (my wife won’t let me carry a real one), but I think this city and maybe even the nation deserve praise for overwhelming equanimity in the face of the first American Ebola…
Talk about mixed feelings this morning. On the one hand thanks to a youthful experience I would rather not recount here in colorful detail, I know exactly how Dallas school board member Bernadette Nutall feels about getting rousted by the cops earlier this week in a Dallas school building. My…
