The first time I saw Mayor Mike Rawlings deliver a prepared speech, he talked about changing the culture of southern Dallas by shooting it with bullets of economic development, so I had high hopes for his lunchtime state of the city address today at the Sheraton downtown. Other than some…
It’s been almost two weeks since law enforcement swept into a Dallas apartment and arrested Barrett Brown, frontman for that merry band of hackers at Anonymous, for threatening an FBI agent on YouTube. Brown was taken briefly to Dallas County Jail before being released to the FBI and reportedly sent…
If you’ve been up that ways in the past year, you might have noticed that they’re doing some work on LBJ. But, as the video above tells you, it’s not just any old work. They’re transforming the tired old freeway into the LBJ Express, by which they mean they’re adding…
In 1997, Dave & Buster’s seemed like a good idea. It did to 12-year-olds, anyway, and adults played along for a while, enough for the chain of arcade/crappy restaurants to go public for the first time. Things soon soured, however, and the Dallas-based company was taken off the stock exchange…
The swaths of land that run underneath Oncor’s electric transmission lines are in many ways ideal spots for jogging trails. They stretch for miles, are largely free of obstructions and are controlled by a single entity, eliminating the types of property issues that would make construction anywhere else a logistical…
For the first time in five games, Josh Hamilton will be in the Rangers lineup tonight for the first of four against the A’s, who conveniently lurk four games behind in the West with 10 games to go. Hamilton has been sidelined with blurred vision and balance issues, reportedly caused…
Nearly half a million dollars seized by the FBI during its investigation of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price are headed for civil forfeiture proceedings over the protestations of Price and his top aide, Dapheny Fain. Both say the thick stacks of $100 bills — confiscated from a safe in…
Tomorrow afternoon, Mark Cuban, Mayor Mike Rawlings, and Harvard Business School guru Clayton Christensen will walk into a room with a dozen other civic, academic, and business leaders for the sixth and final closed-door meeting of the 21st Century Commission to finalize their vision for the future of the University…
We all got a good chuckle when Lubbock County Judge Tom Head warned of that impending United Nations invasion of West Texas, but the laughter may have been premature. InfoWars, the website run by Austin Austin radio host/all-around crazy Alex Jones, published a low-budget, Onion-quality newscast that provides incontrovertible proof…
On January 5, a student at Dallas ISD’s Sunset High wrote a letter to his school’s assistant principal. It was about his math teacher, Richard Hood. According to the student, Hood was having students in his Algebra II class memorize answers in advance of the coming Assessments of Course Performance…
It was pretty much guaranteed that Dwaine Caraway’s “Saggin’ Pants Forum,” held Saturday in City Hall chambers, was going to be weird. This was, after all, almost a full afternoon devoted to the City Council member and former mayor’s ongoing crusade against men who don’t belt their pants at the…
There weren’t supposed to be many kids at CityWalk@Akard. The 200 units at the downtown office building-turned subsidized apartment complex were small, closet-less studios and one-bedroom units, and half were set aside for the formerly homeless or those at risk of becoming so. But there they are: 38 kids, from…
A week after being thoroughly handled by the Seattle Seahawks, the Cowboys returned to Dallas to be thoroughly handled by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Fortunately for Dallas, Tampa didn’t have a running back near the caliber of Marshawn Lynch, and their punt coverage team couldn’t resist going for Cowboys’ punter…
The longtime owners of the Dallas Observer have sold the paper and its 12 Village Voice Media sister publications to a group of VVM executives, creating a new holding company and cutting ties with Backpage.com, the controversial classified advertising company. So: We have new owners, but the same old bosses…
After more than a decade as an investment banker for outfits like Merrill Lynch, John Kleinheinz struck out on his own in 1996, establishing what would become Kleinheinz Capital Partners in Fort Worth. Over the next decade-and-a-half, the hedge fund exploded, growing from basically nothing to $1.8 billion and providing…
First, the good news. The Dallas Fed’s most recent economic numbers show that Texas’ economy is growing. That growth is moderate, 2.4 percent for the year, but it’s better than in the country as a whole. Energy is booming; so is construction. Even the government sector is expanding slightly, in…
SMU is not known as a party school, at least according to the party-school power rankers. But this is still college, where people have a tendency to gather in large groups and drink, and the school does have a robust Greek scene, so there are parties at SMU, and they…
Shakbsha Burleson has trouble sleeping at night. So around 3 a.m. this morning, as she told police, she set out for her usual late-night walk in her Lake Highlands neighborhood. Soon after, she noticed a man walking up and down the street nearby, then parking himself on a bridge railing…
Quantifying a the cleanliness of an entire city seems like it would pose a challenge. Do you count the number of discarded Taco Bell cups? Analyze shower head sales? Perform a census of head lice? There are countless factored to be considered if you are to get a solid grasp…
Some six million Texans are one health emergency away from financial ruin, and the state of affairs in Dallas County isn’t any better. Nearly 30 percent of its residents are uninsured. That’s 672,681 of our neighbors whom the health insurance markets have excluded, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau…
For a dozen years, John Montford was a powerful force in the Texas Senate. He subsequently did a stint as chancellor of the Texas Tech University System before moving on to the private sector, where he served as an executive at AT&T and GM. Now, he’s found himself a new…
Even as the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System (DPFP) tries to deflect media attention from its shiny, shiny Museum Tower project, Courthouse News reports that it’s also fighting to avoid releasing information on a different luxury developer, one that it wholly owns. The pension system filed a lawsuit in…
