Club Extasis, the nondescript Grand Avenue night club where Orr-Reed owner John Hargrove was brutally beaten to death in the early hours one January morning, has always had a vacant look to it, at least during the daytime. The bars across the door were a permanent fixture, and the neon…
As the sun sank and the cold set in, Dallas PD mobile command centers idled in an empty lot behind a McDonald’s off Lancaster Road and I-20, a stopover on a trucking line for long haulers. Plainclothes and uniformed officers massed near one of the trailers, walled in by the…
In September, transportation planners revealed that they had finally found a way to finance the $2.7 billion Cotton Belt, the 62-mile commuter rail line they hope someday will connect Richardson and Fort Worth. A private consortium, the members of which are still being kept under wraps, had agreed to take…
Public water systems in the United States have been adding fluoride to their water since the 1940s as a way to prevent tooth decay. The consensus among public health officials and scientists is that the practice has been incredibly effective. The only documented side effect is a rise in fluorosis,…
The idea behind McKinney Senator Ken Paxton’s proposed legislation really is pretty ingenious. The whole school-choice voucher idea — essentially a guise to funnel public money to religious schools — invariably runs afoul of constitutional challenges. So, lately, that movement has shifted its strategy quite successfully by avoiding public coffers…
Attorney General Greg Abbott posted the above political ad to his Facebook page this afternoon. We present it without comment, other than to wonder if Abbott and Glenn Beck have ever been seen in the same place together. Think about it…
For much of the last decade, Roy Williams was the hard-hitting enforcer of the Cowboys secondary, pulverizing any player who dared to bring the ball in his general vicinity. His reputation has since been tarnished by the poor pass coverage and general descent into mediocrity that led the Cowboys to…
We were going to take a pass on this one. We were going to ignore the press release Dallas police sent at 12:39 p.m. informing every media outlet in town that Thomas Lee Watkins III, the 20-year-old nephew of Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, had been arrested for allegedly…
A couple of weeks back, we stumbled upon the city’s campaign to educate drivers about its new cyclist-protection ordinance. It consisted of a single, poorly designed brochure posted to the Dallas Police Department’s website that was more concerned with admonishing cyclists to behave than anything else. It was quickly taken…
Every week, managing editor Patrick Williams disappears into his office and reemerges a cranky, nicotine-addicted, third-person-referring superhero we like to call Buzz. OK, everybody relax and just breathe easy (though not too deeply). That whole global-warming, energy-supply, sooty-air thing is taken care of. We know this because unlike many, many,…
Dallas police patrol the area around Kidd Springs Park at various hours, in part to crack down on the frequent car burglaries, in part to be on the lookout for people using the park to drink and do drugs. That’s what one officer was doing at about 8:30 Tuesday morning…
Yesterday, Collin County state Representative Jodie Laubenberg filed a bill that would ban all abortions after 20 weeks, calling it the “Preborn Pain Act.” The bill is premised on deeply questionable science which claims that fetuses can feel pain at that point in a pregnancy, and ignores a heap of…
The city of Dallas is still figuring out how best to alert the driving public that bicycles are vehicles, too, and that they cannot, per new city ordinance, be run off the road or targeted with flung projectiles. While that’s happening, the state legislature will be considering whether to write…
Right now, there’s a push underway in the Texas legislature to impose term limits on the state’s elected officials. A bill, filed by Representative Lyle Larson, a San Antonio Republican, is currently being mulled by a House committee. A similar proposal by Tyler Republican Kevin Eltife is being considered in…
The White Rock Dog Park is a wonderful place, and not just because it was the the first official off-leash space in the city. It’s a friendly place reliably thronged with good-natured canines and the people who love them. It’s part of what makes White Rock Lake such a gem…
The now-five-year old insider-trading beef against mercurial Dallas Mavs owner Mark Cuban isn’t going away anytime soon. Chief Judge Sidney Fitzwater rejected Tuesday a motion to dismiss the federal case against him, which alleges Cuban dumped his stock in an Internet search engine after getting tipped off by the CEO…
It was only a week ago that Scouting Magazine shared the exciting announcement that Train and Carly Rae Jepsen were “ready to rock” this year’s National Scout Jamboree, an annual gathering of unnervingly upstanding young men. Alas, neither Train nor Jepsen will be making the trip to Summit Bechtel Reserve…
The George W. Bush Presidential Center, construction of which has clogged up the eastern part of the SMU campus for years now, will be christened at a private ceremony on April 25. The former president will be there, as will wife Laura and an unspecified numbers of alumni from the…
Back in December, Governor Rick Perry announced with much pomp and circumstance that he would support the passage of a “fetal pain” bill this session in the Legislature. “Fetal pain” is one of the pet legislative projects of pro-life group Texas Right to Life this year; it’s a total ban…
Curiously absent from the otherwise thorough Wikipedia page on Scott K. Ginsburg, the Dallas-based digital media entrepreneur and founder of Boardwalk Auto Group, is any mention of insider trading judgment the SEC won against him in 2002 for illegally passing non-public information on EZ Communications, Inc., a radio conglomerate, to…
Yesterday, Forbes released the billionaires list, its annual parade of the ridiculously, absurdly super-rich. This year, the list stretches to some 1,426 names worth a combined $5.4 trillion. Texas claims a small if significant portion of that, counting 50 billionaires among its 26 million residents. Many of these — Alice…
The District Attorney’s office very excitedly announced today that a federal judge found no merit in Al Hill III’s allegations of misconduct against Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins. The allegations stem from a dispute Hill had concerning legal fees he owed his former attorney Lisa Blue, a prominent Dallas lawyer…
