Let me see if I get this. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is already paying Texas 75 percent of its costs for cleanup in West and making $8 million in low interest loans to individuals. But because FEMA ruled recently that Texas is capable of picking up the balance…

You guys are killing me. I’m a four-hyphen guy, a commie-pinko hippie-liberal nanny-state bleeding-heart libtard. I thought Dallas was supposed to be ultra-conservative. You’re supposed to have at least one hyphen. But you keep putting me on the wrong side of the hyphen. Today The Dallas Morning News has a…

Plans for the 50th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy at Dealey Plaza in Dallas just got weirder by one whole magnitude. Yesterday Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings unveiled a process that will make security much tighter for the ceremony next November than security would be for a…

Take two things. One, five years ago the Dallas City Council told City Manager Mary Suhm not to allow gas/oil drilling in city parks. A few days later she signed a secret deal with a gas/oil drilling company to allow drilling in parks. Two, last year the council gave Suhm…

Interesting story in The Dallas Morning News today by Selwyn Crawford about growing national popularity for Juneteenth, a holiday originally thought to be strictly a Texas thing. Juneteenth marks the official emancipation of slaves in Texas in 1865, two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. My family just visited a…

Oh, tinfoil hat, all that stuff about how I’m paranoid, go ahead, say it, get it out of your system. I’ve got to be ready for it by now, right? But let me tell you something: There’s a big difference between paranoia and clairvoyance. And in the matter of the…

The easiest thing to say about Dallas City Council elections would be that no one gives a shit. Voter participation in the council run-off election last weekend, counting everybody who mailed in a ballot or voted early, was 4.21 percent of the people who were registered to vote. That would…

Wrong. I said the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dallas would be no big deal. It will be. And it looks as if Dallas, to the delight of many, will step right into the middle of that big deal looking guilty as sin of something or other. The…

From 1998 when the Trinity River Project was first presented to voters as a racially unifying parks project, there has been a tension, to put it very politely, between the promise and the real agenda. As a matter of fact, I don’t really use the word tension. I prefer lie…

Highland Park police say they shot and killed a man Tuesday after he escaped from handcuffs while locked inside a patrol car, shot out the back window of the car, attempted to escape and got into a gun battle with them on a crowded shopping center parking lot where other…

Heard an interview with some actress on the radio recently talking about how she chain-smoked and behaved badly in college, causing her to lose a lot of weight and wake up incredibly beautiful one day. She said it gave her the confidence she needed to become a movie star. I…

Now that we’ve given up hope that state or federal governments will ever do us any good, the focus is on cities. So what about Dallas? The Brookings Institution is offering us advice as part of its “Global Cities Initiative,” telling Dallas to concentrate on education, exports and sister cities…

If you were a Martian visiting Dallas for the first time, you might have trouble even believing how obscure the issues are in City Council elections here, as if we were always voting between one guy who ties his shoes left to right and another one who goes the other…

Good read by Jay Root in The Texas Tribune today about whether Governor Oops will run for re-election as governor of Texas or run for something else, who knows what, president of France, whatever. Root suggests it will be the governorship again for Oops, and he talks some about other…

Oh, no, wait a minute, please. You’re telling me The Stonewall Democrats of Dallas are shocked and amazed because Delia Jasso, the City Council candidate they endorsed against Scott Griggs in North Oak Cliff, turns out to be a spineless flip-flopper? They thought she was going to be what? Abraham…

We can be proud of our glittering Vegas-scale Arts District and still be honest about how it came to be. Right? I hope so, because maybe if we look at that history frankly and think about it for a bit, we will be better equipped to gauge what’s going on…

Occasional correspondent Bill Marvel, who defends the high holiness of art, sent me the following headline this morning, “DIA’s art collection could face sell-off to satisfy Detroit’s creditors,” along with a personal note: “I know this will warm your heart.” The DIA is the Detroit Institute of Art, their big…

Look, life is not football. It’s more important. I do get that. But, sorry. At a certain point in last night’s Dallas ISD board meeting, a big scoreboard flashed in my mind. MIKE MILES, 7. JOHN WILEY PRICE, 0. Very, very superficial of me, I know. But, hey, I am…