Three Texans are going to see the future before everyone else. Late Thursday afternoon, a federal judge in San Antonio issued a preliminary injunction requiring Texas to allow the online voter registration of three plaintiffs in an ongoing suit against the state. The court is expected to make a ruling…
Over the last two weeks, the saving grace of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial has been that the senators hearing the case have, at least in the Senate chamber, had to shut up. Sure, you could get your fill of their self-aggrandizing meanderings from the mics ready to catch their…
The Dallas Police Department’s multi-year investigation into its Vice Unit is over, the department announced Wednesday. Twenty-two officers have been disciplined, according to DPD Chief Renee Hall, and face punishments ranging from a written reprimand to suspension. The department did not fire any officers, and no officers were charged with…
The task ahead of Texas Democrats is like the one Dirk Nowitzki and the rest of the 2010-11 Mavericks faced before that season’s playoffs: monumental, but squarely within the realm of possibility. The rewards are similar too, for both groups, should they find success. The Mavs turned back the tide…
It took Dallas almost two years to get the results of the police staffing study it commissioned from KPMG, one of the world’s biggest auditing firms. Judging from what DPD brass told members of the City Council on Monday, actually making any hay from the study’s conclusions is going to…
Baylor University’s athletic department is having a banner winter. Its football team, two years removed from a 1-11 season, finished 11-3 and made appearances in both the Big 12 Championship Game and the Sugar Bowl. Its men’s basketball team is No. 1 in the country, according to the Associated Press…
Los Angeles Lakers superstar and five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash in California Sunday morning, the Los Angeles Times and multiple media outlets confirmed. Four others, according to the Times, died in the crash and have yet to be identified. Bryant was 41 years old. As news…
It’s like they always say, a ballpark’s not a ballpark until it’s branded with its corporate sponsor’s logo. Globe Life Field, the Rangers’ new home, is starting to look a little like a finished article. Thursday, the team released video of the park’s sign being hoisted into place, along with…
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, protector of the Texas Senate, is prepared to rewrite one of the chamber’s oldest rules for the second time in less than a decade. Speaking Thursday on a panel presented by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, Patrick said he will have the votes necessary…
In 2011, Texas booted Planned Parenthood from the state’s Women’s Health Program, starving the family-planning provider from federal Medicaid funds. Almost half of Planned Parenthood’s Texas clinics closed, depriving many in the state of critical medical care. Two years later, the federal government cut off funding to the program, because…
We probably should have seen it coming. Impeachment is an arcane, anachronistic and deeply partisan process, so of course it’s right up Ivy League nerd Ted Cruz’s alley. Despite lamenting the impeachment process since its specter was raised this fall, Cruz has taken every opportunity afforded him to present himself…
There’s something about public memorials Dallas can’t get quite right. Sure, Robert E. Lee has been kicked out of Turtle Creek Park, but the traitorous general’s fellow travelers are still standing, albeit shielded from public view, on Pioneer Plaza near City Hall. Efforts to take down both memorials to treason…
They should just come out and say it. Everything would be so much easier if Texas Republicans would just admit what they, their constituents and their fellow travelers know to be true: They don’t care whether President Donald Trump did what he’s alleged to have done in the articles of…
The state of marijuana regulation in Texas, as it stands at the beginning of 2020, is a puzzle. For those of the right race and socioeconomic status, weed is effectively legal. In the state’s big cities especially, pot isn’t seen as a scourge — police departments are citing and releasing…
Newly released documents paint a disturbing picture of the incident that lead to the arrest of a Dallas County Sheriff’s Department deputy Thursday evening. Deputy Austin Palmer is charged with assault causing bodily injury and official oppression, both Class A misdemeanors, after he allegedly tased and threatened a handcuffed man…
People across North Texas, and in Dallas specifically, have progressively gotten squeezed by the region’s rental market, according to a report from RENTCafe, a rental market analysis website. Despite robust apartment construction, rental costs have skyrocketed, far outpacing household income gains. At the beginning of the decade, in 2010, the average…
Stripped of specific context, Thursday’s events in Washington were remarkable. Ninety-nine U.S. senators — Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe was absent, dealing with a loved one’s medical emergency — swore an oath promising to impartially weigh whether President Donald Trump’s conduct merits his being removed from office. It’s historic, only the third…
When the Observer first reported on the burgeoning “sanctuary cities” for the unborn movement last summer, the whole thing seemed like a sideshow. Waskom, a town smack-dab in the middle of Gohmertland in East Texas, banned abortion clinics within its city limits. The town based its decision on the fact that,…
It doesn’t take a particularly good memory to remember when Dallas had a problem with loose dogs. A crisis is probably a more accurate way to describe it. A 2016 study found that there were literally thousands of loose dogs roaming the streets of southern Dallas contributing to a spike…
The quickest emotion to crowd its way to most Rangers fans’ minds Monday was schadenfreude. The Astros, the team they’d had to watch bring the state of Texas its first World Series championship in 2017, six years after the Rangers gave theirs away, ended up not being so special after…
One of Dallas’ oddest but still really consequential fights limped through another round at City Hall on Tuesday, as city staff, council members and advocates for the homeless pushed, pulled and tugged at a proposed ordinance that will finally codify just who, and who isn’t, allowed to provide shelter for…
Dallas Police Department Chief Renee Hall had to see it coming. If there was a chance that she’d get out of the Dallas City Council’s Public Safety Committee meeting Monday unscathed, it disappeared Thursday, when Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson made clear his issues with the business Hall had scheduled for…
