All this online nattering about how much money the Dallas mayor and City Council are wasting on taking down the Robert E. Lee memorial is just insipid. True, the takedown, estimated to cost about $500,000, is taking too long. But the delays have been unavoidable, and the penny-pinching argument is…
The city’s star-crossed efforts to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee took a tragic turn Sunday night when a crane on its way from Houston was struck by an 18-wheeler, killing the driver of the truck and badly damaging the crane. Before the accident a small crowd…
Hiram Patterson, whose name is on the federal complaint that stopped the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas Wednesday, is a Confederate history buff who has very little idea what his own complaint is about. In fact, at the end of the day Wednesday, even after a…
They began gathering well before noon Wednesday, greeted by police and gathered around barricades surrounding Lee Park. They wanted action, either to see the statue of Robert E. Lee taken down after a Dallas City Council vote that seemed preordained, or to see it saved at the last minute. Around…
After an hour spent listening to the public and another hour stating their own positions, the Dallas City Council voted 13-1 today to pull down an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in an upscale neighborhood near downtown. Within hours of the vote a crane appeared at the…
On Tuesday, U. Renee Hall officially took over as Dallas’ chief of police in an atypical way. Traditionally, Dallas’ chiefs have been sworn in on their first day in a public ceremony. Thanks to Hall’s background, she was unable to do so. Officers coming to Texas from outside the state…
Today Dallas comes to a wonderful and terrible crossroad. All indications are that the City Council will vote, probably 14-1, to pull down the city’s many Confederate monuments to white racial privilege. If we have only one council member still in favor of white racial privilege, that will be just…
Major portions of Senate Bill 4, Texas’ just-passed “sanctuary cities” bill, will not immediately become law after U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia blocked significant portions of it from taking effect. Garcia’s ruling, handed down late Wednesday, stops a portion of the law the would require all local law enforcement agencies to comply…
This week, largely ignored in the face of Hurricane Harvey, one of Dallas municipal politics’ biggest worms turned again when Mayor Mike Rawlings announcing a new date for the vote on the immediate removal of Lee Park’s Robert E. Lee statue. The City Council will decide the issue Sept. 6,…
Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center is ready for guests, Mayor Mike Rawlings said Tuesday morning, whenever they arrive. Over the last two days, city of Dallas employees and volunteers have converted the first floor of the convention center’s air-conditioned parking garage into a 5,000 capacity shelter capable of housing…
Early Monday afternoon, as volunteers inside the first floor of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center’s parking garage scurried to put together and line up 5,000 cots, two volunteers from East Texas Community Emergency Response Team sat outside on the parking garage steps, finishing off their Jason’s Deli boxed lunches…
Let’s not get fooled on the Confederate memorials question in Dallas. It’s easy to do. It’s worse than a who’s-on-first routine. This one is more like where-is-first? What may camouflage the real controversy more than anything else, especially for people who are outside the city looking in, is the recruitment…
The city of Dallas announced late Sunday afternoon that it is opening its biggest emergency shelter, adding space for about 5,000 more evacuees from Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath. At the request of the state of Texas, the city is preparing the bottom floor of the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention…
Last week, two court decisions came down that could change the course of electoral politics in Texas — and Dallas County — for the 2018 midterms and beyond. A U.S. District Judge in Corpus Christi tossed the state’s new voter ID law Wednesday, ruling that it unconstitutionally discriminated against the…
Want a pretty good indication where things stand at Dallas City Hall? A majority of the members of the Dallas City Council have decided the city needs to stop keeping a record of where the council gets its campaign money. Gee. What could they have in mind? I stumbled into…
A federal district judge in Corpus Christi ruled late Wednesday afternoon that the Texas’ voter ID law, in all its forms, is unconstitutional. Her decision, which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced he will appeal, says that the original 2011 law and a revamped version passed this year both…
Throughout July and August, a thought has bubbled in the back of Cowboys fans’ minds. Every time Kellen Moore, the team’s de facto backup quarterback, was on the field during the Cowboys first three preseason games, committing turnovers, stalling drives and generally getting outplayed by Cooper Rush, an undrafted free…
The Dallas Morning News ran a piece earlier in the week about a bad-blood feud between Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston and Bobby Abtahi, president of the Park and Recreation Board. The story made it sound like a nice guy versus mean guy thing. Make no mistake. At least…
Three things to say about the death of the Trinity toll road project, authorized by city voters in 1998, killed by the Dallas City Council three weeks ago — Thing 1, Thing 2 and the Big Thing. The first thing, you will find obvious, the second less so. The Big…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings changed direction Friday afternoon on his plan for the city’s four Confederate statues and monuments. While Rawlings initially called for three months of public meetings and deliberation by a task force, the mayor says now that he wants the City Council’s Quality of Life Committee briefed on the…
Earlier this year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it’s targeting the seat of U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Dallas, in Texas Congressional District 32. Sessions has drawn two competitive Democratic challengers, former Hillary Clinton adviser Ed Meier and civil rights attorney and former NFL linebacker Colin Allred. A little more…
The Texas House of Representatives called a close to Gov. Greg Abbott’s special session Tuesday, a day early. While the House used the session to act on about half of the governor’s cherry-picked priorities — including increasing penalties for mail-in ballot fraud and passing a bill that allows key state…
