The Houston Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security and something called the regional Catastrophic Planning Initiative have produced a public service video called “Run, Hide, Fight,” advising people on what to do if somebody wants to shoot them. I personally wish to nominate this production for the 2012 “No Shit Sherlock…
Basic rule of American democracy: Anybody who wins an election gets 10 seconds of credibility. Let’s hope in the case of Ted Cruz, lionized today in The New York Times as “A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle and Intellectual Heft,” we can make it to the second 10 seconds…
Not trying to be obnoxious. This is not I-told-you-so. But I did told you so. In a column published December 29, I did point out that North Texas was taking all kinds of wild chances with its water supply by refusing to adopt the type of strict safety measures in…
The so-called “New Black Panther Party” in Dallas, now trying to exploit the James Harper shooting in Dixon Circle, always leaves me with the same dilemma. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt like this when they were doing their half-assed ineffectual protest last winter at a South…
Tale of two cities in the morning papers — well, two and a half, if you include Mitt Romney. The Reverend Gerald Britt has a mesmerizing op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News today about the agony of Dixon Circle, the South Dallas neighborhood where a near-riot took place last…
Nowadays every Monday morning at 7 am I’m on KNON Radio 89.3 doing a radio version of “Get Off My Lawn,” pretty much the same thing you see here except that I’m naked. If like a lot of people you find that the effect of “Get Off My Lawn” doesn’t…
Wait. Time out. Take notice. We are experiencing a new form of national crisis. It can no longer be denied. The United States is now suffering from a crisis of Total Wrongness. Most people are going to think the trigger was a mea culpa speech a couple days ago on…
We’re all holed up behind our verbal barricades on this Dixon Circle deal, me among the worst of them, surprise surprise. So maybe it’s worth remembering that Dallas city councilman Dwaine Caraway was out there Tuesday night. He was urging calm among the hundreds of people angry about the fatal…
On the day of his death last February 15, Bandele Tyehimba, proprietor of the Pan African Connection art gallery and book store in South Dallas, spoke to a friend, Aaron Cottrell, about his desire to launch an annual consciousness raising festival on the parking lot of the gallery. Now Cottrell…
I get window shocked every once in a while. I’m in the car going from some pillar to some post, staring straight ahead thinking about stupid City Hall or the stupid North Texas Tollway Authority or stupid Fair Park, and then for some reason I look out the side window,…
In Anna Merlan’s coverage of the disturbance last night at Dixon and Bourquin streets about a mile and a half southeast of Fair Park, one particular scenario leapt out. People in the crowd defended the man who was shot to death by police after a running fight with the officer…
The important image is Jerry Sandusky down there in the shower-room doing it to kids. Somehow a penalty that involves not being able to play in bowl games just seems terribly out of whack. I do get what’s right about it. Sandusky and others in this matter face tough criminal…
You’re kidding me, right? We just sit here like patsies and let the gun nuts tell us we’re not allowed to protect ourselves from the next James Holmes? We know there will be a next one, because we know there was a Jared Lee Loughner, a George “Jo Jo” Pierre…
An “op-ed” page in a newspaper — the page opposite the editorials — is supposed to be a kind of village square for diverse voices, but does that mean it should be a billboard for lies? The case in point today would be the op ed page of The Dallas…
If I had one of those framed crochet mottos on the wall over my desk, it would say, “Give Credit Where Credit is Due, asterisk.” Below the asterisk at the bottom of the frame it would say, “Except for the Dallas Morning News.” Ah, but you know. Sometimes you gotta…
Some readers, not a whole herd of them but a few, objected recently to my suggestion on our Unfair Park news blog that the city should bulldoze Fair Park — a 277-acre expanse of city-owned land in old South Dallas — because no one knows what it is. I thought…
The question I hear more frequently now from people in Texas with functioning brains is, “When do we finally have to get out of Texas?” Or is it functioning hearts? There can only be one answer: Never. If anybody has to leave Texas, make it the heartless idiots. Give them…
Once again, D Magazine Editor Tim Rogers demonstrates that he struggles with severe intellectual and ethical challenges. Or something. In mid-April D Magazine published a cover story called “Towering Inferno,” written by Rogers, about claims by the Nasher Sculpture Center downtown that it is being damaged by reflected light from…
OK, look: if I predict the future, and the future turns out to be exactly what I predicted, I have a right to point that out, right? It’s not bragging. C’mon. It’s more like pointing out that I wasn’t being a total nutcase. So last week in my column in…
The Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky story is like a coffee table puzzle I can solve most of the way but never completely. Maybe you can show me the last moves. The first move is this. Beginning in 1998, according to the Freeh inquiry released yesterday, Paterno, Penn State President Graham B…
Every time City Hall sets about reforming its own court system through the judicial appointments process, I see that same old bad penny coming around again. They want municipal court judges who will do what a bunch of 23-year-old city prosecutors tell them to do. Been there myself. Let me…
From the beginning of the Trinity River toll road debate 14 years ago, one of the biggest hurdles faced by critics of the road has been the unwillingness of urban planners and other so-called experts to publicly speak ill of a project with so much money and power behind it…
