There is a silver lining in the David-Dewhurst-calls-the-cops thing. It’s just more fun with Republicans. Nobody thinks it’s terrible that the lieutenant governor called the Allen cops to get his relative out of jail. Anybody would do that. It’s not even that Dewhurst tried to pull rank. Everybody does that…
Wow. What a bunch of junk in the The Dallas Morning News this morning about Rene Martinez, The LeMaster Group and Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles. The whole school reform story in Dallas just gets more weird with every passing day. But should that surprise us? Remember: Dallas County Commissioner…
The Regional Tourism Council of Paris (France) has launched a good manners campaign for French table waiters, urging them to be more understanding of the cultural peculiarities of foreigners. Unfortunately, the manual on how to be nice to foreigners lumps all of us Americans together, as if the rules of…
Oh, no, no, no, Madame Dallas Morning News. You don’t giveth and then taketh away from us just like that. We were absolutely thrilled by your piece Sunday in which you published a big fat picture of U.S. Senator Ted “Take this government and shove it” Cruz’s foreign birth certificate…
Must be more to the President George W. Bush arterial stent operation than we have heard so far. About the only conclusion fair to draw, in fact, is that not all the facts have been made public. The Dallas Morning News has an op-ed page piece in the paper this…
The person who shares living quarters with me is a Dallas native who lets out a small yelp whenever she comes across a mention in the media she thinks is insulting to Dallas. I’m a carpetbagger. I don’t even notice. This morning’s offending mention was in The New York Times…
Last night on WFAA Channel 8, reporter Brett Shipp aired a one-on-one interview with a retired Dallas business executive living in Santa Fe saying that Dallas schools chief Mike Miles needs to be whacked. I’m not accusing Shipp or the former businessman, J. McDonald Williams, of expressing anything other than…
I don’t like the anti-immigrant rental ordinance that the suburban city of Farmers Branch has spent seven years defending in court. I was delighted last month when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down. Last week when I saw white Farmers Branch residents on TV begging their…
So I’m walking into this very faded 1990s airport hotel bar that smells like my vet’s waiting room. It’s 10 in the morning. There’s one customer, an old broad slumped over a beer at a table in front of the TV, her whole head wreathed in cigarette smoke. And I…
A federal district court finding in New York has spurred a national conversation about police “stop-and-frisk” practices ruled unconstitutional by the judge. Even though the judge referred to it in her finding, one key factor gets left out of a lot of the media chatter: It’s never a good idea…
Time out. Wait a minute. Maybe it’s my fault. Now we’re all over the map and flying blind on the Museum Tower/Nasher Sculpture Center thing, headed for outer space. Let’s see if we can’t steer this ship back toward Mother Earth. The protracted, very bitter dispute between two buildings in…
Dallas Morning News Managing Editor George Rodrigue has answered my column in this week’s newspaper about the Mike Snyder/ Morning News matter, and now, sadly for you, I think I need to answer his answer. Snyder is the former news anchor and public relations consultant whom the News outed in…
Most people have no idea what getting convicted of a crime really would do to them. Really. Not like on TV. As a reporter you catch glimpses. The real damage does not have to do with cops or courthouses. It’s not even prison. It’s the kid in the window. A…
We remember what a conversation is, right? More than one voice talking? For the sake of conversation, allow me, if you will, to be the other voice opposed to the unified one-note civic chorale calling for the public hanging of public relations man Mike Snyder, who set up some fake…
The thing about ethnic identity is that it is always, has always been and will always be a dead end in the end. Then again, it’s also in the nature of things that you can’t change a dead-ender. Last night I was watching a TV news story about a city…
Hey. I thought there was a rule. You leave the guy’s kids out of it. Guess not. I see this morning Dallas school board member Lew Blackburn is taking a back-handed swipe at the superintendent of schools for taking his kid out of the Dallas school system. “You have to…
Oh, I guess we had some fun Saturday on the KNON radio version of “Get Off My Lawn,” a program I have been sharing every Saturday at 10 a.m. with political consultant and D Magazine columnist Eric Celeste. We took an on-air call from the elusive pseudonymous Dallas blog commenter,…
Oh, goody. I see the Dallas school board has a “request for proposals” out, seeking a public relations firm to come in as a private contractor and help the public school system (meaning the school board) with its relationship with the public. That’s a big idea. But they need to…
The plaintive tone is so heart-wrenching, the request itself so naïve, that one is tempted not to respond at all. But in the case of the West fertilizer explosion, silence is at least complicity. It may even be the heart of the crime. In an open-letter opinion column on the…
Rereading last week’s leaked investigative report on Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles, I kept getting this little itch. I was sure I had read something about this somewhere else just recently. But I couldn’t imagine where. The report is the work of an obscure entity called the Office of Professional…
In the year 3013 in public squares at the hearts of modest villages and small capitals the world over, there will be statues of a global hero whose original identity is barely remembered, his or her actual existence in doubt and debated among scholars and the faithful. The exact appearance,…
Sorry, all you highway fans, but I can’t help loving the snit Texas Republicans have gotten themselves into over road money. Governor Oops, posing for the last two years with a Tea Party pitchfork, dropped the act yesterday and blasted the medieval wing of his own party after they shot…
