Way back in January, over the objections of just about everyone affected, the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees tacked a mandatory 45 minutes onto every teacher’s workday. How the teachers used the time would be up to principals. Not surprisingly, the decision sparked considerable resentment among teachers who felt the…
For those of you who haven’t been keeping score at home, a quick recap. Tom Corea is a disbarred, Klonopin-addicted trial lawyer accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his client’s money, with which he bought luxury cars, a half-million-dollar RV, a quarter horse operation and other things…
On the night of October 9, Juan Herrera and Willie Jones went to a strip club. They showed up at Dallas Cabaret on Harry Hines Boulevard at about 11:30 p.m., where they paid $20 for their cover. Herrera then went to the bar for drinks when the bouncer, Brian Rodriguez,…
Cowboys fans no doubt had high hopes that something would come of that White House petition to remove Jerry Jones as owner of the Cowboys. Alas, the White House removed the petition from its web site, claiming it was because it had nothing to do with the operation of the…
In recent months, Hostess’ corporate leaders have struggled valiantly to save the Twinkie. That they didn’t succeed goes to show not that the company utterly failed to adapt to a changing market but that they simply couldn’t overcome the mighty power of a union bent on destroying an American icon…
The City Council made it pretty clear last month that it’s not quite ready to take the bold step of barring drivers from throwing things at cyclists. This is in keeping with general reluctance to turn Dallas into a legitimately bike-friendly city, a reluctance that seems to stem both from…
A few weeks ago, the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder went on a journalistic mission to a Cash Store outlet near his home in Austin. His aim, as he describes it, was to see what it was like to take out a payday loan in Texas, particularly in the wake of…
You’ll remember Andrew Rodriguez as the 17-year-old who learned the hard way what Hurst police officer Disraeli Arnold’s knee feels like when it strikes the back of one’s head. The video of that encounter, and Arnold’s expletive-laced threats (“Move and fucking’ die.”), went viral, embarrassing the Hurst Police Department and…
Quick programming note: Things are going to be light around here in the coming weeks. A bunch of us threw in on the Powerball, which is up to $550 million, and as everyone knows, the more people who get together on buying a ticket the better the odds. So I…
We’ve had it good, no doubt about it. Ever since the drought of the ’50s, when Dallas water planners set forth, constructing and acquiring the rights to reservoirs that would feed the city’s growth for the coming decades, we haven’t had to worry. Even as Lake Travis contracted to a…
Drivers traveling past DFW Airport today may have noticed the cloud of black smoke rising into the air. This guy did, at least:…
Over Thanksgiving weekend, the Morning News’ Randy Lee Loftis posed a question we’d been wondering about ourselves: Just what the hell happened to that fracking ordinance the City Council was supposed to pass, the one that would finally and completely resolve all those unanswered questions about gas drilling within the…
There must be easier ways to make a living than faking car accidents and submitting false insurance claims for those fake car accidents. It also sounds like a ton of work to set up fake chiropractic clinics to generate fraudulent medical records and bills to submit with those fake insurance…
We generally don’t actively want to write about Glenn Beck, for more or less the same reasons we don’t go around touching other people’s cold sores. But sometimes, up there in his Southlake media fortress, the man does things that put us in the sad position of feeling obliged to…
The Daily Show with Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10cThe Employees Strike Back – Twinkie’s Endwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire BlogThe Daily Show on Facebook On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart took on Hostess, finally providing the definitive postmortem on what caused the snack maker’s…
There has been a lot of ink devoted over the past few days to Dallas ISD being named a finalist for $40 million in federal Race to the Top funds, which built to a crescendo yesterday when Education Secretary Arne Duncan came to town. That all sounds fantastic, but what…
The Morning News’ Tanya Eiserer and WFAA’s Rebecca Lopez teamed up last night for what has to be one of the more bizarre stories to emerge from the Dallas Police Department in recent years. Their reports revealed that Regina Smith, a DPD lieutenant in charge of burglary and theft detectives…
Luther Campbell’s days as a member of 2 Live Crew, cutting wildly misogynistic tracks that shocked and appalled Tipper Gore and led to a famous Supreme Court victory for free speech, are behind him. He’s a father now, married to a lawyer, and he has a respectable job as a…
On March 30, 2007, 57-year-old Margrit Long went to the Center for Integrative Medicine in Portland, Oregon. She was given an intravenous dose of colchicine, a drug developed to treat gout but commonly prescribed, as in Long’s case, to treat neck and back pain. She’d been receiving the treatment for…
Writing in the Atlantic today, Derek Thompson reports from recently released data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that Midland — not Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, but a 110,000-person speck of dust out in West Texas — is the country’s second richest city, per capita. It might well be…
It’s officially called the IH 345 overhead freeway bridge, but you probably know it better as the clusterfuck between Woodall Rodgers and Interstate 30 which, even when there’s relatively little traffic, is a nightmare to navigate. It’s also structurally deficient, which is a civil engineer’s way of saying it’s not…
Once again, the Railroad Commission of Texas’ raison d’être has been evaluated by a commission comprising state legislators and two regular citizens. Once again, it was given a reprieve from being abolished, given the gang-busting pace of oil and gas development over the last several years. But not without a…
