Very hard to know from our vantage point here in the boondocks how President Trump’s swamp-draining operation may be going in Washington, but we know how it’s going here. The swamp is full. We’ve got what may well be hundreds of millions of dollars in missing and misspent money given…
Last week, I wrote about Kevin F. Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, the state’s largest law enforcement association. I took him to task for blaming the NFL knee-taking protest on dishonest reporting about police brutality by the national media. Maybe we need to get back into…
If you have been watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Vietnam War, then one of the themes you have seen powerfully depicted is the campaign of public lying carried out by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his team in defense of the war. Long after LBJ’s own Secretary…
Hunter Allis has always loved playing video games. But unlike some fellow 14-year-olds, Hunter’s interest goes beyond simply playing the games. He dreamed of someday creating them. Hunter was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, in which one side of the organ is weaker than the other. He’s had four open-heart…
One night last spring, infamous right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Dallas’ homegrown white nationalist, Richard Spencer walked into a karaoke bar on Abrams Road in Lake Highlands. They left less than a half-hour later after being kicked by One Nostagia Tavern’s bartenders, but not before someone filmed a video of…
Vanessa Swarovski, heiress to the Austrian crystal empire, is ditching her house in Westlake. The six-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion in the tony North Texas exurb is estimated to be worth about $4 million, but Swarovski and her ex-husband, former MLB scrub Jorge Piedra, are selling it in an absolute auction June…
Have you ever seen the Mailander House in Waco? Or the Gorman House? Surely, you’ve seen the Magnolia House. Each was renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines on the HGTV show Fixer Upper. The Mailander house in Waco, renovated in Season 1, is beautiful and highly regarded, I am told…
Last week, with his shock announcement that he’d be joining CBS No. 1 broadcast team rather than signing on with another NFL team, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo joined a long line of Cowboys who’ve taken the soft landing of broadcasting. The reactions to Romo’s hiring have been mixed. While…
For passengers, the photo in the March edition of American Way, American Airline’s in-flight magazine, probably didn’t raise eyebrows. In it, two Australian bros behind a Sydney-based mobile bar service caper around in pilot’s uniforms, getting drunk. The business replicates the experience of getting a drink from an airline bar…
The quadrotor rises with a thin, reedy buzz as it takes off on its maiden flight. It’s Christmas 2016, and hundreds of thousands of drone pilots across the United States are experiencing similar moments. My wife bought it for me, one of what consumer associations say is more than 1.5…
The Dallas Morning News has been doing some good stories lately about the need to clean up a low-income housing program that operates on surplus city-owned lots. I wrote some pieces myself not long ago about ideas for cleaning up poor neighborhoods in West Dallas. But, wait. We’re not going…
This may be something you don’t even want to know about, but it’s about you, so I thought I should mention it to you. James M. Moroney III, publisher and CEO of A.H. Belo Corp., the company that publishes The Dallas Morning News, has been talking about you. In an…
In a bombshell development on the eve of a January 10 U.S. Senate hearing, the Dallas-based online classified site Backpage.com has shuttered its controversial adult listings section. “The government has unconstitutionally censored this content,” every “Adult” page on the site now reads, followed by a hyperlink to Backpage’s “Media Resources”…
Creating a dramatic fireworks display is hard enough when the pyrotechnics are launched from the ground. But during 2017’s New Year’s show, AT&T Streaming Lights at Reunion Tower, the fireworks erupted from the base of the tower to the top, 560 feet high. The Reunion Tower was more than just a…
So-called fake news, which President Obama wants Mark Zuckerberg to suppress, has been around at least as long as the Bible.
Judging from Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO John Crowford’s state of downtown speech Friday afternoon, one would think downtown Dallas is an urban residential utopia. Ninety-four new restaurants will open in downtown over the course of 2016 and 7,000 new residential units are under construction. That thing that downtown residents always…
In an apparent rebuke of California Attorney General and U.S. Senator-elect Kamala Harris, a Sacramento judge has decided in favor of the current CEO and two former owners of online classified site Backpage.com, granting a tentative ruling dismissing criminal charges against the three men on Wednesday, hours before oral arguments…
Vine’s incessantly looping time on our gadgets is coming to and end. Twitter’s announced on Thursday that it would shut down its ancillary video attachment in the coming months. Among the public relations speak his that the platform can’t generate enough revenue to stay afloat in the long-term, competing with…
Crying Jordan is one of the weirdest, best, memes on the internet. Born out of Michael Jordan’s tearful Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, it plasters the greatest basketball player of all time’s crying mug on anyone or anything that’s had a particularly tough moment. It’s a little cruel, but…
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, for better or worse, is inextricably linked to North Texas. Last Tuesday, following one of the toughest weeks of his campaign, Trump hit Dallas for a private fundraiser, his second cash grab in the city in 2016. Trump’s held three of his mega-rallies in DFW, including…
Construction on Texas Live!, the multi-faceted development slated to go up around the Rangers’ ballparks, both old and new, will begin this fall, the team announced Tuesday afternoon. New details of just what will occupy the baseball-themed village were also made public for the first time. Texas Live! is slated…
As far as protest bits go, the one thought up by the University of Texas at Austin’s anti-campus carry contingent was a pretty good one. Wednesday, in order to combat what many students and staff viewed as the unnecessary hyper-masculinity of carrying a gun around a college campus like Yosemite…
