Should Garbage Collectors Be Allowed to Live?

Is this thing on?: Last week, Buzz revealed our brilliant plan for a compromise on the fight over Love Field concessions contracts. Our scheme involved the city council bargaining with the companies selling food, drink and retail goods at the airport to get the companies to pay their workers better…

Our Brilliant Idea for a Love Field Compromise.

Show some Love: Buzz is so proud. All on our own, we’ve come up with a compromise in a battle that has split our beloved city council and reopened racial divides, tearing a hole in our civic-minded heart. In case you’ve forgotten: The council is divided over whether to give…

Taste of Dallas Kicks Off Tonight in Fair Park

Over here on that other Dallas Observer blog, Unfair Park, sometime City of Ater Andrea Grimes has the latest word on Taste of Dallas, which begins tonight on continues through Sunday at Fair Park. Don’t feel like clicking over to read the news about Andrea’s appearance as a judge for…

5 Awesomely Easy Ways to Imbibe
For the 4th of July

Ah, Independence Day. Nothing quite says “celebrate America” like the combination of barbecue, explosives, martial music and getting wasted. So here’s a list…(riiiiiip sound of needle being dragged across vinyl record). OK, wait right there. Earlier this week City of Ater Alice Laussade was invited to move her pinko butt…

Eating Fast Food Might Make You Fat, but not Necessarily a Slob

In a bit of tangentially related-to-food news, the Texas Department of Transportation is reporting that the state’s motorists are doing much better at keeping food-related trash off Texas roadways. Smokers, however, are pigs. TxDOT reported this week that food-related trash items, “which for years have been nearly tied with tobacco…

Did Joe Barton Have a Point?

Insane in the membrane: It’s gotta be a brain tumor. What else can explain the words our tree-hugging fingers are about to type? To wit: U.S. Representative Joe Barton might have had a (garbled) point when he apologized last week to BP chief Tony Hayward. His first apology, we mean,…

City Gets a Little Too Piggy for Farmers Market Vendors

Over on our news blog, Unfair Park, Robert “Fingers of Fury” Wilonsky has the latest word on the debate over how exactly City Hall will regulate the growing number of small farmers markets sprouting up around town. Fresh food fans should check out Wilonsky’s post. If you’re too busy, however,…

Craig Watkins Just Can’t Seem to Please Anybody.

Damned if you do: Short of handing his testicles to Republican County Commissioner Ken Mayfield to wear as cufflinks, what exactly could District Attorney Craig Watkins do to please those—like the local GOP and Morning News—who criticize his handling of the investigation into allegations of corruption by Constable Jaime Cortes?…

The GOP dredges up some local Dems awful pasts

Forgive and forget: Man, them Dallas County Republicans are coldhearted. Four local Democratic officeholders have atoned for their transgressions, got right with their higher powers, made searching and fearless moral inventories, humbly asked God to remove their shortcomings and followed the hallowed 12 steps into recovery. Any decent person would…

Totshop

America needs consumers to get this country’s economy humming–not just today but in the future, when hordes of us will be old and counting on those government checks. So, if you’re a parent, do your part for Uncle Sam and haul your tykes to the Dallas Kids Expo, Saturday and…

Welcome to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Dallas

Back in the DSSR: We hate to say it, but what if the Tea Party people are right? Sure, they may look like wacky gun-loving, government-hating, thin-lipped, bigoted, paranoid loons. Completely deranged, ignorant…wait, we’ve lost our point here. Oh, yeah. What if they’re correct? What if there is a subtle…

Just Do It, Just Cut Down All the Trees

Picky: This is the trouble with Dallas: nitpickers. Whenever the city begins to make some progress, out they come with the complaints. Take the city’s decision to go ahead with plans to build a whitewater kayaking facility on the Trinity River. “Hey, that sounds fun,” right-thinking people say, but then…

Speak Out, Loud And Proud

A district attorney in Wisconsin has threatened to prosecute teachers who follow a new state law that bans abstinence-only sex education and requires sex-education classes to provide age-appropriate information. That’s not exactly surprising coming from a people who call themselves cheeseheads, but then, Texans have nothing to brag about when…

Whistle While You Hurt

Whatever happened to good ol’ cheerful propaganda? You know, like in the ’30s when the world was in the shit, and theater gave us dancing gold diggers happily singing, “We’re in the money.” Sure, it was whistling past a graveyard, but that’s better than staring into the graveyard. We say…

Raise a Toast to the Political Pros Helping to Turn Dallas Wet

Salud!: Because Buzz figures anyone who reads us is drunk, this week we take another look at Progress Dallas’ effort to secure a vote to change the dry laws in the city. The group—led by retailers and restaurateurs—wants to allow beer and wine sales in grocery stores and eliminate rules…

Dallas ISD Investigators Find Hostile Work Environment (And, Maybe, the Worst … Boss … Ever)

Allen Gwinn over at www.dallas.org has posted a report from DISD’s Office of Professional Responsibility about its investigation of Maria C. Silva, former manager of the district’s Adult Basic Education Department. The typical journalese way to describe the report would be “scathing.” A more accurate description would probably be “holy-crap-I’m-glad-she’s-not-my-boss.”If…