Oh, now the city council has decided it needs to revisit its vote weakening the ethics rules on donations to city council members. Maybe they’ve decided to have themselves re-virginized. We pointed out here a thing that seems to have slipped past most media eyes: The council voted two weeks…

OK, pretend you have to bet money on this. Here’s the set-up. On one hand, you’ve got these huge natural gas drilling companies coming down the road with their gigantic rigs, tons of money and very expensive haircuts. Where are they headed? Oh, no! They’re headed to Dallas City Hall,…

Did anybody else have a serious gag reflex reading our former mayor’s what-a-good-boy-am-I essay on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News yesterday? Does Tom Leppert just assume people don’t remember a single thing about him? Or does he not remember a single thing about himself? His op-ed piece…

What is this crap about the importance of attracting more businesses to the city? They throw it out like a line from the Bible or something — especially mayoral candidates Mike Rawlings and Ron Natinsky. Got to “grow that tax base.” Only way we can grow that tax base is…

No, no, no — not that same old crap again about how we need to get more suburbs to join Dallas Area Rapid Transit, our regional rail system. The suburbs are what’s wrong with DART. Screw the suburbs. Dallas needs to quit DART and let the suburbs go build their…

The Dallas Morning News has just endorsed attorney Scott Griggs over incumbent District 3 council member Dave Neumann in the May election. If Neumann were a high school quarterback, this would be like his parents going across the field and cheering for the other team. Switching metaphors, for years Neumann…

Ah, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I call “rubber meets road” on the school district issue in the mayor’s race. Candidate Mike Rawlings has been getting himself some political mileage on the hustings by saying that, as mayor, he will help fix the city’s beleaguered public school system. I…

Isn’t it interesting? The one question that seems to bubble back to the top time and time again in the ongoing mayor’s race is the world-class city thing. Why? Maybe it’s just semantics. Maybe what we really mean, when we use that embarrassingly pretentious, transparently insecure term, is that we…

Forgive me, or just slap me, if this is way too tea-leaves for you, but I can’t help trying to read the dregs, you know, trying to see what’s behind the burqa, since this city is such a Talibaptist mystery some of the time. And lately I think I definitely…

OK, wait, wait, wait. Sorry. I don’t get it. I need a little catch-up here. The second Calatrava fake suspension “signature bridge” across the Trinity is going to be a bicycle bridge? A bicycle bridge? We’re going to spend more than $100 million in tax money to build a make-believe…

David Cay Johnston, author of the best-seller Free Lunch, has a great piece out this week called “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes,” providing powerful evidence that middle and working class Americans are being played for suckers and dupes by the plutocrats in this country…

Did you realize our city council was faced with a crisis of too much ethics? Yup. Apparently the council has been staggering under the weight of way too much ethics. So today they approved a proposal to chop those ethics back, specifically by making it much easier for developers and…

I have a new idea for controlling costs at City Hall. Breathalyzers for the city council, because those people must be drunk. The city is in the toilet, so broke it can’t mow the parks. So broke it can’t fix the streets. So broke it can’t keep the rec centers…

Oh, so now it starts. Here it comes. Camouflaged in a lot of pompous blather about a fair city council redistricting process, The Dallas Morning News is already waving the banner for chopping up the East Dallas city council district. Should have seen that one coming. East Dallas is a…

We added insult to injury a long time ago in this whole business of fracking in Dallas — you know, the kind of natural gas drilling where they blow up underground rocks in a geological formation called the Barnett Shale, releasing trapped gas. Now, if you don’t mind, I need…

I used to be such a mass transit whore. I had this post-’60s idea that cars and highways are bad, which they are, so that must mean trains are good. I examine that reasoning now, and I think, “So if smoking crack is bad, does that mean meth is good?”…

Really interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times about my hometown, Detroit, where the population is now half what it was when I bailed in the late 1970s. It seems Detroit is now on the cutting edge of the “shrinking cities” movement, and I wonder if Detroit may have valuable…

Honest question. Are you even aware there is a race going on now for mayor of Dallas? Honest answers only, please. It’s OK. Especially in the early phase, the mayoral election is a boring thing. I don’t expect you to be on the edges of your seats clicking updates every…

Check me on this. In an atmosphere of federal, state, county and city funding crises, where we may even see the defunding of federal health care reform, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, an absolute decimation of support for public schools and impoverished children, drastic cuts in Medicaid and…

I’m all for pay walls. Pay walls r me. When newspapers like The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times put up pay walls, charging readers for access to news content, I figure they’re trying to get ink-stained schlubs like me paid. I know there are people out there…