Oh, man, I shouldn’t even tell you about this. I guess it’s me and Rudy Bush, “High Noon,” “OK Corral,” all those old movies. One of us has got to wind up on his back in the horseshit with his toes in the air. I promise I’ll let you know…
In President Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father, one passage describes a day when he is still a kid in Indonesia, walking down a road with his Indonesian stepfather. His stepfather asks him how much money he has in his pocket. Then the stepfather asks how many beggars he…
If the editorial in The Dallas Morning News this morning has any credibility, and I am sure it does, HUD has agreed to throw the whistleblowers under the bus in the Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against the city of Dallas. It’s not a surprising outcome, because paying off the two…
This is a first. In an editorial this morning The New York Times is defending Rick Perry. Sort of. They offer major caveats, calling him, “one of the least thoughtful and most damaging state leaders in America, having done great harm to immigrants, abortion clinics and people without health insurance…
Something in the Ferguson, Missouri, story I keep looking for, waiting. My dad’s family is from St. Louis. Sorta. So anyway today I found an op-ed piece in The New York Times that maybe gets to part of it or somewhere in that general direction. Jeff Smith, a professor of…
The other day, I was talking here and Rudy Bush was talking in The Dallas Morning News and Scott Griggs and Philip Kingston were talking on the city council about the $810,000 the city had to pay back to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). I just…
The cops in Ferguson, Missouri, come across as a bunch of untrained, undisciplined bubbas, but that doesn’t put the two reporters arrested in a McDonald’s restaurant last night in the right. These issues: The cops spoke first with the manager of the restaurant and then began to clear and shut…
I now take you back inside the strange world of Dallas city councilwoman Vonciel Hill, who spoke yesterday on one of the most important tenets of her belief system — that public information should never be shared with the public. Explaining why she did not want — repeat, did NOT…
The debate about media sensationalism and moral panic concerning sex offenders is always a tough one for me, mainly because I think most news media chase the public’s interest in stories more than we create it. Our rule usually is that the biggest story is the one the most people…
Michael Morris, the Dallas Forth Worth area’s No. 1 regional transportation planner, guru and playuh, was back in the news over the weekend and today for his decree that knocking down an overhead freeway in Dallas ain’t gonna happen, no matter what the hippie wingdings think (not his precise words)…
Today The New York Times tells me that, while Republicans in the Congress continue to paint the kids at the border as an invading horde of knife-wielding lepers, Republicans with presidential aspirations are maneuvering to win over Latino voters. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey will journey to Mexico next…
Déjà vu, that French term meaning “already seen,” the feeling you get that you’ve been here before, it can be creepy, right? You start investigating your memory to find what it is you’re remembering. I got that feeling when I read about Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez’s so-called shakeup of…
From this rag and that bit of bone, a picture emerges of what Dallas has really been doing with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal housing money all these years. It’s not a portrait of theft or castles in Spain, but it’s not a pretty picture. Instead what we…
The Dallas Morning News has an editorial this morning suggesting that the Dallas school district put a top internal investigator on leave last month to cover something up. The editorial is a development of some good writing Mike Hashimoto has been doing on the paper’s opinion blog, and, for once,…
An unquestioned tenet of local political culture is that white-owned companies that want to do business on the turf officially designated by Dallas as “southern (black, maybe brown) Dallas” must pay a toll. Five days ago I reproduced here a 2009 Dallas Morning News editorial that gave an explicit rendition…
In yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, columnist Steve Blow apologized for calling me a “tinfoil hat” (nutcase) in 2008 when I reported that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was sabotaging a major shipping development in his own backyard while having compromising links to the powerful Perot family, owners of a…
On my way from work to City Hall I drive by the Palestinian demonstrations in Dealey Plaza. At home in the evening I see Texas Governor Rick Perry (not my favorite guy) on the TV news leading a rally for Israel. The anchorman on the TV news shows me a…
Oh, I swore I wasn’t going to respond to the stuff yesterday by Tod Robberson on The Dallas Morning News opinion blog yesterday, but now “Wylie H Dallas,” the scarily well-informed omnipresent pseudonymous blog commenter, has got me all stirred up. This morning he posted an old Steve Blow column…
This is an addendum to a thing I wrote yesterday about the recent indictment of Dallas’ most powerful county officials on bribery and tax charges. One thing we all have to do in order to figure this out is the math. We can talk all day about collective guilt –…
You could almost forget about the indictment last week of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, put it out of your mind’s eye, not even think where it will end and better spend your time thinking about trucking. It’s the more compelling story. Logistics is the business of taking cargo…
Reporters do not gasp, generally speaking, but there were muttered exclamations that might as well have been gasps when Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, age 64, was led into a large and formal federal courtroom this afternoon. His hands were manacled behind his back, his awkward gait in leg-irons…
Arrests by federal agents this morning of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price on bribery conspiracy charges, along with charges against three associates, have set off a new round in everybody’s favorite courthouse whisper game, “Who’s flipped?” Multiple sources this morning say federal agents have arrested Price, who was indicted…
