Story in The Dallas Morning News this morning touts Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington as the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country between July, 2011, and some unspecified date in 2012. Hold on, Dallas. That’s not us. In fact the sad saga of our own city’s growth, not mentioned in the story,…
A few weeks ago I had coffee with a guy from another state who was here looking into some local political issues. At one point he kind of bent forward across the table and said in a lowered voice, “I understand there used to be some group here called ‘The…
So this is easy, isn’t it? Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins himself will prove whether he’s a crook or not by refiling or not refiling his big case against Al Hill III. What’s it going to be? Either he does follow through on his threat to refile, because he…
So Trinity East, the gas drilling company that did a secret deal with the Dallas city manager to drill on city-owned parkland, is threatening to sue an environmental group because the group demanded more transparency about previous drilling operations. The drilling company has threatened to sue the Texas Campaign for…
There are signs — hints, indications, wisps of smoke in the wind — suggesting we might get out of the JFK 50th observations in one piece after all. I’ve been quick to suggest Dallas would blow itself to smithereens with a bizarre compulsion to shut down free speech at Dealey…
So who is this Democrat judge, Lena Levario, who not only stands up to Democratic Party golden boy Craig Watkins, our embattled district attorney, but holds him in contempt of court? Does she not understand the most basic tenet of Dallas County Democratic Party philosophy — that Dr. King died…
I’m trying to think if there is a way the latest news about Plano-based JC Penney could be any more depressing. I was already pretty depressed when I read about the billion dollars in 2012 losses on a four billion dollar drop in sales this morning, and that was before…
Nothing could be crazier or sadder. It is the continued determination of a small group of people in Dallas to tightly control public observations of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here. They want to banish the public from Dealey Plaza where it happened so that no one…
The big news in local politics today is supposed to be that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has publicly slammed Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins over how his office handled a civil suit. Yeah. Sorry. Somehow this doesn’t rise quite to the level of man-bites-dog for me. More like…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is pushing a personal and public agenda against domestic violence, which used to be called wife-beating. Of course the TV news had to do a story about husband-beating to keep everything correct, and I’m against that, too, along with journalist-beating, French-people-beating and pan-flutist-beating. But let’s concentrate…
A signed essay in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News by editorial writer Tod Robberson suggested the historical lock-step loyalty of black southern Dallas voters to the Democratic Party has done them little good. It’s safe to say something has done southern Dallas little good. In recent decades the overall saga of…
In the very wee hours as my eye first opened to the light of this day, I thought I heard a rushing of wings aloft. I caught my breath. Was this …? And then distinctly as if from the next room, I heard the oinking of pigs. Only later with…
This is a little embarrassing. Nobody wants to say it. It’s sort of rude, I guess. Uh-oh. Sounds like my job. OK. Here goes. Dallas City Council member Vonciel Hill is a mean-spirited, spiteful suck-up to the rich who is also increasingly unhinged. Ugly-talking. And way over the top out…
Several minor political brush fires sent up smoke at the Dallas public school system after a tough new reform-minded superintendent took over the reins last July. But in two months the whole woods will be on fire, with Superintendent Mike Miles in the middle of it. Does he survive? I…
Scott K. Parks has a pretty good OK story in The Dallas Morning News today. It’s the good-enough-for-Belo version of a story we brought you two weeks ago about the city’s use of eminent domain to seize a privately owned parcel of land near the Trinity River, sandwiched between the…
And here we go with the discussion of cheap housing for artists in that triumphal and glitzy array of Mussoliniano mausoleums that we insist on calling our “arts district,” even though art has the same chance of surviving there as a cockroach in a microwave oven. Say this for the…
Wanted to go ahead and let you know, since apparently nobody else is going to do the story, that Robert Groden, the Kennedy assassination author, has won yet another legal victory in his fight against the city’s years-long efforts to muzzle him. And, sorry, certain commenters here, but that’s what…
Tale of two dailies today, I guess. Our own Dallas daily, the Morning News, takes a kind of hey-why-not approach to a bill introduced by Houston GOP state Senator Dan Patrick that would divert more money from state funding for public schools to charters. The Austin American Statesman, meanwhile, gives…
It looks like Okon Metals, a fourth-generation-owned scrap recycling company, may have found safe haven after all. If nothing else, at least Okon’s proposed move to a site even more isolated than its current address on an island between downtown and the river will put it out of the prying…
Wait. Take five. That’s all I’m asking. As we approach mosquito season in Dallas, the conversation about aerial spraying for West Nile once again begins to sound like free beer day at the ballpark. Last week The Dallas Morning News published a story with a triumphal tone saying, “Aerial spraying…
A new court order in the federal corruption probe into John Wiley Price tilts the case in the county commissioner’s favor, maybe just a little, maybe quite a lot. We all recall that in 2011 the FBI seized $229,590 from a safe in the Dallas County Commissioner’s Oak Cliff home…
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins started out with one question to answer. Now that he has defied a subpoena, he’s got at least a couple more. Last week Watkins was ordered to appear in the court of state District Judge Lena Levario to answer an accusation that he brought…
