The weekend draws mercifully close, and I feel a need to revisit a couple themes touched on here earlier in the week. We started with Lance Armstrong on Monday. I predicted he would fake-confess and then offer a jail-house rationalization to the effect of, “I didn’t do nuthin’.” I admit…
We assume Lance Armstrong will confess tonight to some part of a years-long juicing conspiracy while head of the U.S. Postal Service bicycle racing team, so we can anticipate at least a few more days of intense conversation about Armstrong. But what about bicycle racing? What is its future? The…
Oh, I do not like nights like this. I just sat through the Dallas school board meeting where they finally got to the bottom of the bad audit on Mike Miles, the new superintendent. Some weeks ago Miles said the audit was a witch hunt. I wrote a column saying…
The Atlantic magazine has stumbled badly on that really hard multiple choice question at the end of the Journalism 101 final exam: “Lying to your readers is: 1) A good thing, or 2) A bad thing.” One pictures them hunched over the bubble sheet, eyes squinted closed and pencil tips…
To: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Dear Mr. Kennedy: You and your sister, Rory, appeared here in Dallas a few days ago as part of the run-up to this city’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the murder of your uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on…
Let me tell you in advance what Lance Armstrong is going to say to Oprah today. And how do I know? Well, obviously, I do not. But it’s just as obvious to me that I do. Everybody knows by now that world cycling mega-star Lance Armstrong of Austin is going…
Ahem. All that I offer is food for thought, food for thought. Something to think about. That’s all. A blog published by The Hill, a Washington newspaper, has floated the name of former Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom we here in Texas don’t even have to say is a…
This country is being hoodooed by the oldest magic show trick in the book — misdirection. The fictional crisis of entitlement spending is just a new version of the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, the latest cheap trick by the super-rich to turn our attention away from the truth. For…
All right, wait, what are we talking about again? The new superintendent of schools and the people he hired and did he follow the right procedures in hiring them and did he pay them too much money and stuff like that. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been talking about, anyway. But…
We are old obit writers at our house who scour the obituary pages by habit every morning, and, yes, we did notice the long obituary in The Dallas Morning News last week for Harriet Schoelllkopf Deison, 65, wife of the pastor of Highland Park Presbyterian Church. I think we both…
Sometimes it feels like we grab the gun issue by the tail instead of the head. It’s always about ultimate constitutional rights and last-ditch defense measures. But the real face of the gun question isn’t some kind of semi-reluctant insistence on a necessary evil. It’s sheer joy. The real issue…
My belated New year’s resolution: I absolutely refuse to read, talk about or use my brain to consider social theories based on Batman movies. Said. Done. There we have it. But. This morning’s romp through the newspapers does provoke certain musings about the erosion of a social consensus around the…
Warren Fagadau, a Dallas ophthalmologist who has been involved in health insurance reform efforts in Texas, has a piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News today about the qualities our public hospital in Dallas should look for in its ongoing search for a new chief executive officer…
So by now it begins to be obvious there are two ways to go on this city-owned private high-dollar golf course being proposed in a poor neighborhood. Not one and a half ways. Not three ways. Only two, and they point in opposite directions. 1) Help the ‘hood. 2) Dig…
An odd sense of kinship came to me recently when I read an essay by New York writer Andrew Solomon about his new book Far From the Tree, in which he examines and gives voice to Tom and Sue Klebold, parents of Dylan Klebold, who with his friend Eric Harris…
New Year’s Day was great — saw The Hobbit with son and girlfriend, came home to prime rib, what could be better? — but I also spent a hell of a lot of time on the iPad trying to find out if I had fallen off a cliff yet. I’m…
Oh, it’s the very last day of the year, and I’m just not going to write about that damned fiscal cliff thing because it makes me so angry, and I don’t feel like ending the year on that note. I want one day off from angry, if you don’t mind…
This is my end-of-the-year lawn, but I’m so grateful to you loyal lawners out there for showing up, I’m going to go you one better. In fact, 100 better. This is “Get Off My Lawn” from the year 2112. So here I am in the year 2112 still cranking out…
A couple of days ago The Dallas Morning News reported that the new Audubon Center, a vaunted jewel in the tiara of the Trinity River project, is sucking wind already, failing to attract the visitors and income the city had hoped for. Being mean to bird-watchers is difficult even for…
This holiday season we are sharing our home with two rescue dogs, and, yes, frankly, I do believe it makes me holier than thou, thank you for asking. I think it makes me a saint. We had a long series of dog deaths, two while walking. Don’t even ask about…
This is the first holiday season I can remember in which people stood around the Yule log talking about the country going off a cliff. No, wait. That’s not the big part. The big part is that some of the people standing around the Yule log want the country try…
Somewhere somehow we just got on the wrong track, folks. All these issues like the public schools, crime, unemployment: We’re still trying to rearrange the furniture when the house is already on fire. For example, as I said here yesterday, that bright shiny new superintendent of schools we just hired…
