Kind of a hilarious war of words going on right now between me, Dallas political activist Rene Martinez and a UT Austin Education School professor named Julian Vasquez Heilig. Heilig has threatened to call the cops if Martinez emails him again. I think Heilig might do better calling his mom…
Mayor Mike Rawlings and the new city attorney Warren Ernst want to hold a secret closed-door City Council session tomorrow on a question that has everything to do with the public interest. Watch closely to see how your council member votes. It’s a big window. Yesterday we talked about some…
Eric tells us this morning we have two southern Dallas clergymen, Stephen C. Nash, pastor of Mount Tabor Baptist Church, and Jerry C. Christian of Kirkwood CME Church, stepping from the pulpit to the street to denounce as racist plotters the company called Uber, which provides an app-based car-ride service…
The papers are crammed these last few days with thoughtful essays about the split in the Republican Party. I read them all with a certain shrug. Yeah, fine, but what about the split in my life? Earlier in the week I ran into a lady I have known for 30…
Louie Steven Witt, are you still out there somewhere, alive? Would you tell me if you were? You know you’re back in The Dallas Morning News this morning, but only as a ghost. I wonder if you really are a ghost yet. I can’t find you with Google, which may…
A couple weeks back, a retired Dallas businessman named Don Williams published a set of three academic studies he commissioned at his own expense, all claiming to present evidence that Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles is a failure. I was impressed that Williams was able to commission a study by…
The school reform debate has a way of flipping the words liberal and conservative around like pinballs, but somewhere running deep beneath the surface is a new orientation that needs new words. North of the line are people united in the belief that children from the most brutal circumstances are…
Well, I see that Jerry Patterson, the state land commissioner, has accomplished his goal: The New York Times today is flouncing its long skirts and stamping its high-button shoes over a nutty gun rally Patterson has helped organize for next Saturday at the Alamo. Called “Come and Take It San…
The acting city manager who would be king, A.C. Gonzalez, has always been the inside favorite. And if there is an issue in his way, it’s that. Just ahead for City Hall is a decision to make somebody the permanent city manager. But just behind it is a series of…
Former Dallas mayor Laura Miller has a great piece today on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News about the absolute insanity of hiring yet another city manager for Dallas from within the inbred, cultic, code-talking clan of apparatchiks usually described politely as “city staff.” She cites the example…
So the Dallas ISD Board of Education, which decided at its last meeting to keep but humiliate its superintendent of schools, will meet again tomorrow, locked inside another closed-door “executive session,” to decide whether to keep, fire or further humiliate the superintendent. A person looking on as those doors swing…
Two interesting and ironically paired stories in the daily paper this morning — one about an expensive planned do-over for the failed Victory Park development, a monument to the perils of great-man leadership, the other about a planned museum exhibit honoring J. Erik Jonsson, one of the city’s most notable…
I am a little ill at ease for the moment. I am looking ahead to my manslaughter charges and trying to plan, not that I intend to manslaughter anybody. In the extremely unlikely event I should be charged with causing someone else to slip on a banana peel at the…
Hey, look, all you fellow libtard lifelong Democrats out there, and I am talking to both of you, I want to believe in Wendy Davis as much as you do. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? I’m singin’ it now. But there’s one big wave on this ocean that can still toss…
This is a conservative town, generally speaking, would you not agree? Dallas may even be a bastion of belief in the private sector and the rights of the individual, not to mention skepticism of government. So I wonder how Dallas will react to the story of its own citizen, Ladar…
On November 5 in the Dallas school board’s District 8 — sort of a big wobbly east, west and northwest Dallas gerrymander — voters will choose between two candidates, both of whom are exactly the kind of people everybody always says we need more of on the school board. Kristi…
Dallas Morning News City hall reporter Rudy Bush had a good piece in last Sunday’s opinion section about the qualities we need to look for in a new city manager. The only pause I found in reading it was a question I run into whenever I try to talk to…
In the wee hours of today, maybe a dozen of us media people, half a dozen teachers union officials and another half dozen bitter-enders sat waiting in a semi-darkened auditorium at school headquarters while the school board was in “executive session” — a closed-door meeting in another part of the…
If you spend a lot of years as a reporter, you get to know a lot of people, none of them well. It’s all about popping in and out of lives quickly when something makes them newsworthy. Maybe later you wish you knew more. I had that regret this morning…
I can’t believe people are saying the new Big Tex is Mexican. I would be fine with that. But it’s so obviously not the case. The new Big Tex is a Muslim Pakistani. How can people not see that? The face of the new giant Big Tex statue, erected this…
What a difference a Williams makes. This morning — on the day Dallas school trustees are supposed to decide whether to pull the rug from under reform Superintendent Mike Miles — I looked at two sets of reports on the school district, one from Don Williams, the retired real estate…
OK, enough about you, let’s talk about me for a change. I had the very weird experience last week of covering a Dallas school board meeting where a lot of the story I was covering seemed to be about … well, you know … me. Yours truly. It was sooo…
