Wednesday night I scared my wife by shouting during a basketball game, which I rarely do, because I don’t watch basketball. I said: “Hey! I know that guy!” She watches basketball. She fulfills the role in our marriage of the normal person. I was walking through the room. I saw…
Today the Dallas school board meets to hear the possible “good news” from the superintendent — that the district may only have to fire a quarter of its teachers instead of a third, depending on how badly the Rick Perry Banana Republicans and the TeeTee Party in Austin underfund public…
It makes sense that a 212-year-old agency with a $50 billion annual budget would know how to talk. One of many sharp insights in the new Katrina documentary, The Big Uneasy, is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has got its line down cold. Again and again in the…
Yesterday a commenter wrote in to Unfair Park in reference to an item about Dallas Mayor Dwaine Caraway and the legal action he has brought against his own city to prevent the release of an embarrassing police tape. The commenter said, “It’s hard to imagine the tape shows anything other…
Two things. The first is serious business. The second, not so much. As you know by now, a Dallas judge today granted lawyers for Mayor Dwaine Caraway their request for a temporary restraining order forbidding the Dallas City Attorney from releasing an embarrassing police investigative tape of the mayor. The…
Guess what. Maybe it has started. The great gray horse may be rising to her feet at last. Maybe the sane middle class of America isn’t dead in its tracks after all. I have a column in this week’s paper talking about a real Tea Party movement in the UK…
The New York Times ran a story yesterday about all the hate the right-wingers are expressing for school teachers. In the opening they quoted placards from Madison, Wisconsin, saying, “You are glorified babysitters who leave school at 3:30 pm. You deserve minimum wage.” They interviewed a 30-year-old second-year teacher who…
Try this out. Let’s say we project the future of indie rock out into the future as a straight line disappearing way off over the horizon of time. Everything that’s ever going to happen in indie rock, it’s out there somewhere.Then we go over to the other side of the…
Here’s what I don’t get. The right-wingers are always sneering about the “nanny state” — government trampling their sacred rights as individuals by telling them what kind of light bulb they can screw in their lamps. But the same right-wingers want government to guilt-trip women getting abortions by forcing them…
Finding fiscal Jesus: Saturday’s Dallas Morning News story reporting that Tom Leppert now opposes federal earmark money for the Trinity River project reminded Buzz of an old newspaper friend. He had struggled mightily with temptation during his younger married years—and lost. Buzz hadn’t seen him in a long time. Now,…
So we can hear the wolves howling in the forest now. They begin to circle. The deliberate devastation by Rick Perry Republicans of public school funding in Texas is probably going to spell the end of the magnet school system and bring horrendous classroom overcrowding to Dallas public schools, along…
Rick Perry keeps telling me that I shouldn’t worry about dumping all the kids out of school or putting Grandma out of the nursing home. Texas has the nation’s fastest-growing economy, he says, so don’t sweat it. What does that mean — fastest-growing economy? I took a look around yesterday…
The Gromer Jeffers story in The Dallas Morning News Saturday reporting that Tom Leppert now opposes federal earmark money for the Trinity River project put me in mind of an old newspaper friend. He had struggled mightily with temptation during his younger married years. I should say, he struggled mightily…
The shoe hanging over the Dallas mayoral election right now is Angela Hunt’s endorsement. Depending on which way she goes, Hunt will either give David Kunkle a serious shot at winning or hand Michael Rawlings a cakewalk. Several weeks ago, before Hunt announced she was not going to run for…
Dear Opposition Researchers working for U.S. Senate campaigns other than that of former-after-midnight Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert: Please contact me about the following things Leppert is going to say about himself in a campaign. First, he is going to say he led two successful referendum campaigns, one for the Trinity…
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who usually writes from a perspective anyone outside of Texas would consider conservative, has a fascinating column today about Indiana Gov. Mitchell Daniels and why Brooks thinks he should run for president. It’s a catalog of small miracles — some not too teensy –…
Oh, my gosh, Tom Leppert has made Dwaine Caraway the new mayor — thank you so much for that, Tom — and I just realized I never finished the fictional saga I was writing for you, my cherished readers, about The Adventures of Arthur and Archie. So sorry about that…
Dear Dallas County Democratic Party: This is a letter from me to you. Don’t read it in front of the kids. You are newly in the majority in Dallas County. While Texas turns more and more Republican, you guys have caught the demographic wave in the other direction. That’s so…
Just got off the phone with Jim Witt, executive editor of the Star-Telegram, who pointedly did not deny this morning’s hot rumor — that the Fort Worth newspaper’s building, which has been on the market since September 2008, has been sold and the staff told to work from home. Sheesh…
Oh, man. You guys call that a protest? You went down there yesterday to tell the Dallas County Commissioners Court what you think of them, and they slapped the spit out of your mouths. Told you to sit down and be quiet. And you did. People, that’s just embarrassing. It’s…
Yet another slavishly uncritical fan of Get Off My lawn (I get so bored with their love) — this one with the on-line moniker of Enrique de la Fuente (I assume he is not really the Spanish volleyball Olympian) — wrote yesterday to ask, “What’s your take on Dallas’ poor…
Tuesday the city council’s housing committee will hear about 13 low-income housing projects being considered by city and state officials. As usual, the dot pattern of the proposed developments looks like a case of municipal diaper rash, heavily concentrated in the city’s southern regions. Six city council districts, mainly in…
