Late yesterday, just before finally answering my days-old question about it, the city manager sent a memo to the City Council characterizing $800,000 repaid to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a kind of technical accounting error and no big deal. Most of it involves money stolen by…
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 8 2014: The Search for Mary Suhm Heats Up with Rumors of a Trinity Road Goon Squad ORIGINAL POST Is the former city manager still at City Hall? Maybe, maybe not, but her spirit still reigns. Last week I made a new hat-cam movie for our news blog…
I wanted you to know that I am still trying to find Mary Suhm at City Hall, and I need your help. Last week I made a movie based on my hunt for the former Dallas city manager, who is rumored still to be lurking somewhere in City Hall. It…
Reaching for a badly mixed metaphor, I guess I would say those of us personally involved for a long time on the opposition side of the Trinity roll road issue feel right now like we’re breathless flies on the wall with our fingers crossed and our dukes up (flies have…
WOW. Looks like bigbexardaddy knows whereof he speaks. Little over a week ago bigbexardaddy commented on an item I had posted here about the Bexar Street boondoggle, giving away a lot of detail that sure sounded like it came from inside City Hall, including a claim that Dallas, even in…
The Austin American-Statesmanand The Houston Chronicle this morning are reporting that Governor Rick Perry will hold a press conference this afternoon to announce he’s sending 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the Mexican border to defend Texas against an invasion of unarmed Central American children. This, of course, goes nowhere…
As a lifelong reporter, I can’t help looking at the babies-at-the-border story and worry about the way my own craft tends to tilt a narrative like this. And don’t think I think I’m Goody Two-Shoes. If anything I know the drill too well. A front-page story in The New York…
Tuesday was a very strange day for me — an experience I am sharing with you today (or inflicting on you, never quite sure) both here on the blog and also in a short film I made called “A Note for Mary.” I made it with my hat-cam, a small…
Yesterday’s ruling by a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding race as a criterion for admissions to the University of Texas at Austin comes on the heels of another big UT-Austin story — the alleged role of under-the-table political influence in admissions at UT and…
That Texas redistricting trial that started up yesterday in federal court in San Antonio? Watch that one. It could be third side of the magic triangle that turns Texas blue. The trial is not about whether the tea-tinged Republican-dominated Texas Legislature gerrymandered the vote maps in 2011. Asked and answered…
Sloppy handling of deadly viruses at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, including shipping a deadly virus to a lab by mistake, has spurred calls for an independent investigation of the agency. The head of of it concedes in a New York Times piece this morning there may be a…
At the risk of repeating myself, every time I see, hear or read Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins speaking about the immigrant kid issue, I’m struck by something dramatically new, almost shocking, in the way he frames the question. He starts from the heart. The heart. We don’t get much…
Maybe I need to do a mid-course correction. Beginning last Sunday, Dallas Morning News City Hall reporter Steve Thompson had what anybody would consider a terrific series of stories in the paper about an ill-fated slum clearance and renovation project on Bexar Street in South Dallas in which the city…
For six years we have talked about an accusation that Dallas practiced deliberate racial segregation in redeveloping downtown. In the last six months we have talked about City Hall’s absolute defiance of that charge. So, imagine my surprise when assistant city manager Theresa O’Donnell told me the city is no…
First thing, Dallas shouldn’t take its rebuff by the Republican Party so personally, because … because Dallas shouldn’t take everything so personally. Sometimes I feel like we’re sitting at one end of the bus, a woman gets on and sits at the other end, and we shout at her, “What?…
Blame cannot be un-owned. Like money, blame has to go in somebody’s purse. It can’t be left on the table. If the responsible person is able somehow to cleverly skate on the blame he deserves, that just means somebody else has to be the scapegoat. Witness the grand saga going…
Let’s say the kids do come. What does that look like on Day 1? Crazy? Or not? It’s all about anger management. Dallas County Commissioners Court Judge Clay Jenkins, with backing from all but one of his fellow commissioners, has vowed Dallas will take responsibility for as many as 2,000…
Something recent and specific must be driving the surge of unaccompanied immigrant children across the Texas border with Mexico. It’s reasonable and prudent for government to try to figure out what’s behind it in order to stem the tide. But that’s one thing. The other thing is this: The offer…
One way or another, the Robert Groden situation in Dealey Plaza will fester and erupt again in months ahead. You know who I mean. Groden is the Kennedy assassination expert who sells books and videos there on weekends. The city has been trying to get rid of him forever. Funny…
The big show-and-tell meeting between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, scheduled for today, has been postponed, according to reliable sources. We have a call in to Price’s attorney, Billy Ravkind, for word on why. Ravkind had predicted previously that the feds would show Price…
Culture is the most confusing thing. In today’s Dallas Morning News, a state representative from a northern suburb is quoted objecting to a proposal for tolled lanes on U.S. Highway 75, the main road north from the city, saying, “We’ll basically be a gated community.” Wait. I thought that was…
Always fun for me to read The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, or, as I call it, Pravda Day. That’s when the big think-pieces come out in the special “Pointy Section” of the paper … oh, ‘scuse me, it’s really called the “Points Section,” but you get my point. It’s…
