God may still be in his or her heaven. I’m not up on that. But I think he’s about to vacate the regional headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Since the 19th century we Americans have believed that engineers are just a little bit better at building stuff…
Wow. I came home late last night from the Occupy Dallas camp at Pioneer Plaza downtown and couldn’t get to sleep for the longest. Something about what I had seen down there was tearing me up, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. While I was there last night,…
At 1:20 this morning Boston police stormed an Occupy encampment in Boston Greenway park, hauled off more than 100 protesters in cable-tie cuffs and tore down their tents. Everybody in the Occupy Dallas encampment I talked to at about noon today was aware of what just happened in Boston. They’re…
Start the countdown. How long will it be before Dallas City Hall decides to evict the Occupy protest campers from Pioneer Plaza? You know it’s coming. If the Occupy Dallas anti-corporate-greed protesters continue to camp out in a park just down the block from City Hall, political pressure will build…
I walked for a while yesterday with those Occupy Dallas people. I don’t care what anybody says. They’re cool. You know why? Because they’re awake. People were all over the map about their specific issues. Some of them talked to me about Timothy Geithner and President Obama’s failure to put…
In his quest for the presidency, Texas Governor Rick Perry says three things: His state’s economy is better than America’s. Low taxes and small government are the reasons. He gets the credit. Almost none of that is true. The Texas economy isn’t stronger than the national economy, and it may…
Well, students, the last Dallas City Council meeting was a bad one for you, but like a lot of bad days, this day was important. I’m speaking to those of you who came down to City Hall from Paul Quinn College to lobby the city council. You wanted to stop…
Tea Party people say they hate Washington and its top-down style of governance. They’re the political version of eat-local. Everything should be grassroots. Here in Texas the Tea Party loves Governor Rick Perry, but if you talk to people who’ve gone up against Perry on local issues, they will tell…
So what is all this anger among the old white people really all about? Why are old white people wearing odd costumes and hating the president all the time? We old white people all know exactly what it is. But nobody will say it out loud. It never comes out…
Wow. I think Dallas Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan broke a major national story at today’s meeting of the Dallas City Council Trinity River Corridor Project committee. She told the committee that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the quasi-military agency in charge of the nation’s flood control levees…
Well, pardon me for making myself important, but I feel like I do bring a certain perspective to the Rick Perry N-word story. For one thing, I just finished a long stretch of reporting on Perry. I have a story coming out his week in the newspaper that’s pretty much…
I had a big light-bulb moment this morning while reading both daily newspapers. We just price things wrong. We need to stop thinking of clean air in terms of dollars and cents and start quantifying it in our heads by cancer cases. Governor Rick Perry keeps telling us that EPA…
Too bad everybody can’t come downtown and hang out in the lobby outside the city council chamber every other Wednesday, because that’s pretty much the only way to understand what the hell’s going on. Yesterday the council rammed through this “flow control” thing, ordering by law all commercial trash haulers…
Property owners on Lower Greenville got snookered. They agreed last year to new regulations governing late-night hours for bars. They didn’t agree to get put out of business. They were snookered by the neighborhoods. I should love that, because I love neighborhoods. But, you know, snookered is snookered. In the…
Angela, I was there. I saw everything. I know what they’re doing. I am on my way. One way or another, I will get there, and I will exert myself and do whatever it takes to rescue your husband, even if it means waking up the next morning with extreme…
It’s not just that Rick Perry screwed up in a debate. He is asking supporters to invest millions of dollars in his campaign. When savvy big donors have their phones in their hands about to send the money, they’re all asking themselves the presidential timber question: Has he got the…
How would you like to have a federally designated wild and scenic river within a 90-minute drive from Dallas? That could be kind of a life-changer for a lot of us. We wouldn’t have to be satisfied with donning a Hazmat suit and a motorcycle helmet, signing a new will…
In the wake of a multimillion-dollar civil jury award to the family of a girl who testified she was seduced at age 16 by a 34-year-old male teacher, we learn that the Episcopal School of Dallas has already instituted a number of important reforms. According to a pay-walled piece in…
Straws in the wind: 1) Rick Perry, toll czar of Texas, still pushing private highways; 2) DART a dismal failure; 3) North Texas Tollway Authority still run by the good old boys. This could all be good. You know where we need to wind up with all this? A toll…
Think of the Dallas City Council Redistricting Commission as Sunday school, where everything is done by the book. Right next door you have this dumpy divey smoke-filled neon joint called “Domingo’s Dance Hall.” That’s where people just do it. The official redistricting process, carried out over months by a legally…
Texas schools earn a couple of mentions in Taylor Branch’s explosive article “The Shame of College Sports” in the current Atlantic Monthly. Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-wining civil rights movement historian, piles shame upon shame in calling for an end to the ludicrous fraud of amateur athletics in America’s colleges and…
How long has it been since we heard rain on the roof like Sunday night’s downpour — blowing, battering, crashing off the eaves? I stared out the kitchen window and wondered where the water went after it left my driveway. Maybe I always wonder that. Sunday night on the 10…
