Maybe the biggest problem with the fracking issue is that it involves the deadly, mind-numbing and sleep-inducing phrase “parts per billion.” Otherwise I might have cracked the case long ago. Fracking is deep-well drilling for natural gas in which drillers inject water and chemicals into a layer of underground shale…

Who loans two hundred grand to a college kid from a poor family? There’s just a whole lot about the Dez Bryant stories that does not smell right. Dallas Cowboys receiver Bryant is being sued for the better part of a million bucks he borrowed to buy jewelry and sports…

You needed to be there. Last week, moments after Dallas Mayor Dwaine Caraway lost his attempt to suppress an embarrassing police voice recording, he strode out into the courthouse corridor loaded for bear. A large crowd of press had been waiting, meek as scolded third-graders in the principal’s outer office…

All of the candidates for mayor say the city’s falling apart but we can’t raise taxes. If both of these things are true, something’s got to give, and I think I know what it will be. Me. First, I’m downtown in the Allen courts building covering a case about a…

Who says the four Dallas mayoral candidates haven’t distinguished themselves from one another? Last night at that forum at Thomas Jefferson High School, the first question they had to answer (and the best question of the night) was why they wanted to be mayor. Dallas city council member and entrepreneur…

Two experiences over the weekend have given me hope. One was watching a documentary on the catastrophic 1911 Triangle Waist Factory Fire in New York, and the other was a seminar I attended on the state budget crisis. Debacles can be good for us. The documentary made an argument that…

So-called regionalism is a rip-off, a scam and a hoax designed to neuter cities and sell them down the river to the damned suburbs. A few weeks from now the Dallas City Council will take up the issue of fracking, the kind of natural gas drilling in which drillers pump…

The Reverend Gerald Britt Jr. of Central Dallas Ministries (now called “CitySquare” for some unfathomable reason) had an op-ed in The Dallas Morning News yesterday that made my heart ache. Britt, a good guy deeply dedicated to southern Dallas, recited all the recent population numbers that show an immense outflow…

I’m just curious. You tell me. Is public service automatically a bad thing? I’m serious. Is any and every kind of experience in government automatically a black mark on your résumé? At Tuesday night’s Dallas mayoral forum, candidate Mike Rawlings, a former corporate chief executive officer, described his rival, former…

The city of Dallas website has a “frequently asked questions” thing about gas well drilling. It reminds me a lot of TEPCO, the company whose nuclear reactors are melting in Japan. Like TEPCO, the city believes that good news is better than the truth. Here is a sampling. A frequently…

We had a nice little chat here yesterday, didn’t we, about South by Southwest in Austin and all the attention Austin got and all the attention Dallas didn’t? I thought it sparked some really interesting comments about what is and isn’t and ought to be in our fair city. The…

A couple weeks ago in my guise as Jim Schutze, really cool hipster (instead of crazy old man with gun), I wrote a post for DC9 At Night about Michael Seman, a research associate and doctoral candidate at University of North Texas’ Center for Economic Development and Research, who is…

I’m really worried about what the Reverend Robert Jeffress is going to say at Dallas First Baptist Church Sunday about the quake in Japan. I live within a three-mile radius of First Baptist, and I’m afraid I won’t be far enough away. The ad for his sermon that appeared here…

Those images of the out-of-control nuclear plants in Japan are hard-wired to our own situation in Dallas. Their tragedy is our challenge. The question is whether we see the wire in time. City council member Angela Hunt has succeeded in forcing Mayor Dwaine Caraway to put the issue of natural…

In the media business, we get paid to keep up with all of this government political stuff. Other people have lives. But I am starting to see signs that the Big Thing is finally hitting home with other folks, or, as we sometimes call them in the news business, real…

OK, let me ask you about something else, while we’re on the subject. And first of all, I am not going to say anything negative or critical about rich people, because I don’t want to offend anybody’s religion. Today. But what about people who are super-duper chickenshit about the homeless?…

Here’s another thing. Have you read all this crap about how the city is going to plug up the tunnel system downtown because some waffle-brow bow-tie city planner told them that’s why nobody’s on the sidewalks? Downtown has pedestrian tunnels between many of the buildings. Originally they were truck tunnels…

I covered part of last week’s school board meeting on the budget crisis. I was way back in back of the room gossiping with other reporters, which is really the only thing I like about news events any more, and nobody wanted to talk about the school board crisis. We…

Talk about a disconnect. On Wednesday night I see Governor Rick Perry on television, with that little cowboy sneer he gets, saying, “The lieutenant governor, the speaker and their colleagues are not going to hire or fire one teacher, as best as I can tell.” Kind of like he’s saying…