Meet Linda Harvey, a talk radio host on a Christian station in Columbus, Ohio. In her free time, she’s the founder and main opinion-spewer behind Mission: America, which promotes itself as “Christian commentary on the culture.” Harvey is deeply concerned with pressing social issues like “paganism” (she means Halloween and…
Ryan Ball didn’t know that porn legend Jenna Jameson was having her birthday party at Le Vu on Friday night, or so he claims in his recap of the night on Reddit. He and a pair of friends just wanted to have a couple of drinks and settled on the…
From time to time, when police have a particularly busy weekend, we like to compile some of the more interesting happenings into a quick crime digest. We think of it as a public service. How else would readers know not to visit the Stults Elementary playground at 1 a.m., or…
Earlier this year we introduced you to Mike Bishop, the irascible ex-Marine with 20 acres in the path of the Keystone pipeline, just east of Nacogdoches. When we met him, the retired chemist and bio-fuel tinkerer was livid, cataloging the insults to his land — the ‘dozed crops, the clear-cut…
When the city, AT&T and golfing legend Lee Trevino gathered at City Hall last November to announce plans for a PGA-caliber golf course in southern Dallas, they were long on such adjectives as “game changer” and “world-class” but short on details, like where the tens of millions of dollars to…
We’ve written about Kaitlyn Samuels twice: Once last February when her parents went before a military judge to argue that Tricare, the Department of Defense’s health insurer, should cover therapy costs for their severely disabled daughter, and again in October after Tricare ignored the judge’s order to do so. Kaitlyn…
“I am pretty sure I am not a sick human being,” California comic artist Jack Ohman wrote on his blog this week. But some folks in Texas, including the governor, are pretty sure he is. Ohman published the above comic this week in the Sacramento Bee, the daily newspaper in…
Dominique Thornton did not testify in his trial for charges that he committed a string of armed robberies along the Katy Trail last May. It probably wouldn’t have done any good. He was IDed by victims as the gunman in the heists, and police found Thornton’s thumbprint on a stolen…
Teena Mathis has always said it was an accident. She had left her 15-month-old niece, Heidi, with her children on a backyard swingset while she stepped inside to answer the phone. While she was in the house, the girl wandered behind the swing, which hit her in the head. Heidi…
Hang on to your hats, everybody, because I’m about to give you a super-duper exciting glimpse into the inner workings of the Dallas Observer. We get a lot of email from our readers. Some of it comes directly to our various email addresses, but a lot of it goes to…
Goat Island Preserve is a comma of 348 acres hugging the Trinity River as it meanders through an unincorporated portion of far southeastern Dallas County. It’s surrounded by gravel pits and crisscrossed with crude four-wheeler trails but is otherwise a rather wild and seldom visited tangle of land. County officials…
Last night, the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees approved a resolution “opposing legislative efforts to diminish graduation standards and academic rigor.” Basically, they don’t like HB 5, the Texas House of Representatives-approved bill that would reduce the number of tests students take to graduate, and basically create separate college- and…
The Morning News’ David Moore put it gently when he wrote that the Cowboys’ selection of Wisconson center Travis Frederick in the first round of the NFL draft is “not likely to satisfy [the] fan base.” The football cognoscenti had predicted he’d be a second or third round pick. Even…
We somehow missed this in the chaotic aftermath of last week’s Boston Marathon bombing, partly because we don’t watch the news with closed captioning on, partly because we don’t follow Zooey Deschanel on Twitter. But local Fox affiliate KDFW seems to have labeled the 33-year-old actress/indie songstress/Apple pitchwoman as an…
First, the good news. According to a report just released by the American Lung Association, the air in Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten considerably cleaner in recent years. The average number of days with unhealthy levels of ozone has been cut in half over the past decade, and the concentration of…
The men and women who gathered alongside Central Expressway this morning to protest the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center were mostly well-behaved. They marched by peacefully by in their Jason-esque hockey masks, Guantanamo prison garb and comically oversize papier mache heads. But then something went wrong. A…
Back in March, after a grand jury declined to indict him on charges of rape, former Highland Park High School student Ryan Romo sued his accuser and her family. The complaint alleged five separate counts of misconduct, leveled at different family members. Among them: malicious prosecution, negligence and vicarious liability,…
When police officers raided former Kaufman County Justice of the Peace Eric Williams’ Seagoville storage shed earlier this month, amongst the guns and other items they found a white, four-door Ford Crown Victoria that they were pretty sure had been the getaway car in the March 30 murder of District…
The most interesting of the three institutions that comprise the sprawling George W. Bush Presidential Center at SMU is the museum, which is filled with artifacts from the former president’s life. There’s the bullhorn he used to address first responders from the rubble of Ground Zero in 2001, the windbreaker…
At 10 a.m. today, the tweets and media reports previewing the George W. Bush Presidential Center in increasingly granular detail will reach a crescendo as the center is dedicated. Every media outlet in the known universe is there, which explains your exploding Twitter feed. Unfair Park is the exception. The…
Last week, Texas Alliance for Life paused briefly in its crusade to enact increasingly onerous abortion restrictions and shifted its focus to the other end of the human lifespan. The group urged its supporters to lobby for passage of SB 303, state Senator Bob Deuell’s bill to reform end-of-life care…
The corpse of the Bowl Championship Series, college football’s much-maligned way of wrapping up each season in often incomprehensible fashion, has gone cold. The organization that will replace it now has a clever name — the College Football Playoff — that leaves plenty of room for a big-dollar corporate sponsor…
