Politics & Government

A visit to the Texas Department of Public Safety, whatever it’s for, is going to suck, at least a little. Thanks to cutbacks and consolidation, there’s less likely to be a DPS location nearby when you have to make your once-every-dozen-years trek to renew your driver’s license or state ID…

The vibe coming from Dallas City Council on Monday morning as they were briefed on the long-awaited Dallas Police Department staffing study was recognizable to anyone who’s ever disappointed someone with a Christmas gift. Council members appreciated what KPMG, one of the United States’ biggest auditing firms, had done for…

Texas’ Planned Parenthood clinics are, as of last week, on the same footing as the organization’s clinics in the rest of the country. That’s not a good thing. A week ago today, the family planning, women’s health and abortion provider announced that it would leave the federal government’s Title X…

Look at it this way. An Italian court has ordered Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to pay the city of Venice &85,000 just because a bridge he designed there is too slippery. The two gigantic pedestrian bridges Calatrava built for us in Dallas, completed in 2017, have never even been…

If he cares about his public reception at all, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott can’t be happy with his Thursday, the day he convened the first of a series of roundtable discussions he’s called in the wake of the Aug. 3 massacre in El Paso. Gun rights advocates held a rally…

Maybe this would be funny. If it were funny. I mean, the first time the city set up a “Public Improvement District” or PID to fight crime along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas, the PID collected property taxes in the six figures, turned all the money over…

Dallas didn’t get left at the altar this time. After nine months of licking its Amazon-inflicted wounds, the city landed its own big-tech big fish, thanks to nearly $36 million in economic incentives from the city, county and state. Tuesday, Dallas County Commissioners approved the final piece of the incentive…

In the new mayor’s laughably pusillanimous response to the city’s murder problem, we are seeing the first symptoms of the last election. Pulling a page, poorly, from the previous mayor, Eric Johnson this week tried to take on murder with some grandstand speechifying. It was not grand. At a scripted…

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is taking the first step toward memory-holing his ill-fated nomination of former Texas Secretary of State David Whitley. Abbott announced Monday that he’s appointed the chairwoman of the Texas Workforce Commission to the post. Ruth Ruggero Hughs, also a former associate in the Texas Attorney General’s…

The first shoe in the case of Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, the Tea Party activists and the secret meeting has officially dropped. State Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, is no longer the chairman of the Texas House’s GOP caucus. Burrows, the third man in the meeting between…

Forty-six years ago, Dallas Police Department Officer Darrell Cain murdered Santos Rodriguez. Dallas is finally getting closer to building a permanent memorial to the slain 12-year-old. Cain killed Rodriguez in the back of a police car on July 24, 1973. He’d picked up the preteen, along with his brother David…

This is a bit of a personal crisis for me, but I guess it’s gravy for you. Based on their budget hearing Tuesday, the new Dallas City Council seems to be a pretty sharp group. I’m thinking of going into the landscaping business. Even the new mayor looked good. Knock…

Dallas got a peek at how its new City Council is going to work Tuesday afternoon. The results, giving bonus points for about half the members being new on the job and all the members being freshly returned from vacation, were a mixed bag. The council didn’t hamstring its budgeting…

Well, I think I just submitted the dumbest open records request of my 100-year career as a journalist. I sent it to the city. This was a tough decision. I swore I would not do this. Then I did it. My open records request was, “Where is the police chief?”…

An activist who became one of the biggest stars of Texas’ 2018 election is seeking office herself. Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the co-founder and former executive director of Jolt and the Workers Defense Project, is running for U.S. Senate, joining a Democratic primary field that includes Dallas state Sen. Royce West, Houston…

A proposed apartment complex in Denton threatens the character of the neighborhood, residents say.

For the better part of two decades now, Texas has been Lucy with the football and Democrats have been Charlie Brown, thinking, “If we just target these voters, moderate on these issues or raise this much money, maybe we’ll have a chance.” It hasn’t happened. However much hype a candidate…

First question. Who gives a damn? This very weird story keeps bouncing around the mediaverse about Dennis Bonnen, who is speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and an audio recording that a guy says he made of Bonnen making dirty remarks about other politicians. And we care about this…

At this point, it seems like everyone’s going to be disappointed either way. If Empower Texans activist Michael Q. Sullivan’s tape of his June meeting with Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen never gets released, we’ll always wonder what might have been, given the gnashing of teeth over the recording’s alleged…

Allen, Texas, where the El Paso shooter lived, is one of several affluent suburban communities in the Dallas area served by a commercial online calendar called “Bubblelife.” The name is a play on what used to be a disparaging term for the Park Cities area, a rich, almost all-white enclave…

Finally Tuesday afternoon, Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen made a real apology for whatever he said during a meeting with conservative activist Michael Q. Sullivan and Dustin Burrows, the head of the Texas House Republican caucus, on June 16. We still don’t know what’s on the surreptitious recording of the meeting…