Hope Hicks can now add “being objectified by the president of the United States” to the narrow list of accomplishments she’s racked up as she’s gone from SMU English major to White House communications director. According to Michael Wolff’s new presidential tell-all Fire and Fury, Hicks, a former model and Gossip…
Over the last couple of weeks, a small furor has developed around the issue of combating panhandling in Dallas. The week before Christmas, several Dallas Police Department commanders ordered their troops to stop issuing citations for “solicitation by coercion” — aggressive panhandling — or panhandling near gas pumps or ATMs…
Looks like former San Antonio mayor and HUD Secretary Julian Castro is really running for president in 2020. Great. Maybe now HUD will show me those documents it’s been promising for a year and a half. It’s simple. If he’s going to run for president under the Democratic flag, then Castro needs…
Without some action from Dallas, children attending school within the city won’t have crossing guards starting at the end of January. On Wednesday, the City Council learned about this unintended consequence of voters’ November decision to eliminate Dallas County Schools. Texas law requires all cities with populations of more than…
Late Friday night — 11:29 p.m., according to the email time stamp — the city of Dallas handed out its last news dump of the year. Along with the usual weekly detritus was a memo from the Dallas city manager’s office about panhandling. The memo appears to be directed at two…
In the course of the Dallas dog bite hysterics of the last month, people have said a lot of totally crazy things about pets and people, but it’s important for you and me to remember one big thing about any dog we own. If that dog has ever bitten before…
If he runs for president, and if he runs as a Democrat and if Donald Trump is his opponent, Mark Cuban might win Texas, a new poll says. The survey, conducted by Public Policy Polling — say that three times fast — for Business Insider shows Mavs owner Cuban, a real…
Dallas has three great shots at getting big things done in 2019, all of which will require us to take a hard turn away from Trumpism. Notice I didn’t say hard turn left or hard turn right. I don’t even know any more. We have to turn away from tribalism…
As the Dallas City Council continues to battle over its newest plan to address panhandling in areas of the city with the most foot traffic, the Dallas Police Department is consulting with the city attorney’s office about which of the city’s panhandling ordinances can still be enforced after constitutional challenges…
The season to be jolly is over now, right? At the end of this year, I had a big awakening, and, no, it was not from a nap. True, I’ve been at this an awfully long time to be having awakenings just now, but this has to do more with…
As Dallas and the rest of Texas crept slowly to the Christmas vacation Thursday afternoon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton addressed a matter of religion for many Texans. State law, he said, allows for people with licenses to bring their handguns into places of worship, unless a church, synagogue or…
Robert Jeffress, pastor at First Baptist Dallas, committed himself to Donald Trump and his presidency in 2016, positioning himself as the evangelical face of Trumpism. This year, for better and worse, Jeffress has reaped the consequences of that commitment, repeatedly finding himself at the center of the Trump universe because…
Chief Deputy Marian Brown, former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez’s third in command, will serve as interim sheriff until voters elect a new one in November. Valdez is stepping down to run for governor. Brown, a 29-year law enforcement veteran in her fourth year with the sheriff’s office, is running…
Earlier this year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it’s targeting the seat of U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, the Dallas Republican in District 32. Sessions has drawn four competitive Democratic challengers — former Obama appointee Lillian Salerno, former WFAA-TV reporter Brett Shipp, former Hillary Clinton adviser Ed Meier and civil…
Six months ago, it wasn’t hard to imagine how Texas’ 2018 midterm election would go. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, backed by his $40 million war chest, was going to sweep to re-election with the rest of the Republican party’s statewide candidates. El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke would fall to incumbent…
Not my place, but would somebody else who knows what’s what please step forward and offer to give the new Dallas city manager and his top people a 45-minute seminar on recent city history? They seem to be good people, but they’re kind of traipsing out with a basket and…
When the president is on Twitter suggesting a U.S. senator is a whore and his fellow Republicans are on TV talking about how much they hate the FBI, guess who gets lost in the shuffle? Why, it’s our own Rick Perry, our former Gov. Oops. Where is that boy, anyway,…
There was a moment this year when The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, which serves between 8,000 and 9,000 homeless people a year, almost had to shut its doors because of a stupid software problem. Not its software. Somebody else’s. Although The Bridge had a sophisticated software system, it was paying…
People who watch this stuff closely for a living were not surprised at the end of last week when The Dallas Morning News got Marlon Rollins kicked off the Dallas park board. For one thing, it was a fair shoot. He was vulnerable. For another, it was inevitable because Rollins…
What good do you think it would do for Dallas to carry out the moral, political and social equivalent of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission process of the late ’90s? What if we took a deep dive into the specific decisions in our past that put us where…
Can a reporter become an elected official? I know it’s legally possible, but isn’t it some kind of crime against nature? When WFAA-TV (Channel 8) investigative reporter Brett Shipp announced his resignation last week to run for Congress, most of the immediate comments painted him as an ingénue, a guy…
To our regret or good fortune time only will tell, but Dallas is a great laboratory for viewing the forces roiling around American cities. We’ve got thunder overhead, rumblings in the basement and maybe a great day ahead. Nationally, the divide between cities and everybody else has been consuming ink…
