The city of Dallas is ramping up to implement its new paid sick leave ordinance on Aug. 1 and along with it, nonprofits and political groups are working to educate employees on this new law. Starting Aug. 1, any employee of a private business or nonprofit who performs at least…
Even before it began in earnest, a question-and-answer session about the city of Dallas’ new paid sick leave ordinance grew heated Wednesday afternoon. Before she began a presentation explaining the new ordinance, Hannah Alexander, partnership liaison with the city’s Office of Fair Housing and Human Rights, told a packed auditorium…
The core Achilles’ heel problem, the perennial failing and persistent flaw in the way Dallas City Hall thinks and operates, is its bizarre insularity, almost as if the world outside Dallas city limits does not exist. Maybe the strangest and most wonderful illustration of that problem is the now almost…
Nationwide, Ross Perot was known as an eccentric Texas billionaire who launched two unsuccessful presidential bids. In Dallas, he’s known, among other things, as the man whose name is on one of the city’s better-known museums. Perot died Tuesday after a five-month battle with leukemia, a family spokesman confirmed to…
A real debate, sure, I can see that, where we can watch opponents drill down on an issue, but an adolescent, reality-show put-down fight? Really? We’re going to choose our presidents that way? No, c’mon. I can’t believe I’m supposed to take former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro as a…
Texas, for all its grand political history, has had more than its share of bad candidates, ranging from the benign but deluded, like 2002 gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez, to the not-so-benign but totally hopeless, like Craig James. Scattered among the political graves are several Texas politicians who got too big for…
Please, deliver us. Before this presidential election is over, is every old white guy in America going to say the not-a-racist-bone thing? If nobody’s got a racist bone in his body, how in the hell did we get here? This whole election is about race. The whole country is about…
Sen. Ted Cruz exposed his Achilles’ heel again last week. During a Commerce Committee hearing, Cruz went after Google executive Maggie Stanphill, preening for the cameras about Google and its donations, or lack thereof, to President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Cruz was trying, we think, to harden the growing…
Oak Lawn is getting a bit more colorful. On Wednesday, the Dallas City Council signed off on a series of street improvements in the neighborhood that includes 10 rainbow crosswalks meant to celebrate Oak Lawn’s history as a safe space for Dallas’ LGBTQ community. The crosswalks will be installed and…
Believe it or not, there is an honest-to-goodness presidential debate tonight in Miami. It’s the first of the 2020 election cycle, getting underway 222 days before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3. Thanks to the Democrats’ clown-car-filling 24 candidates for president, the debate will actually be held over two nights,…
This spring, Bedford state Rep. Jonathan Stickland finally passed a bill. It took four terms in office and dozens of dramas big and small, but Stickland pushed through his long-desired ban on red-light cameras. Turns out, finally getting on the legislative board took all that Stickland had to give. The…
It sounded almost too good to be true. Two weeks ago, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill killing the state’s hated Driver Responsibility Program, which has led to 1.3 million Texans having their driver’s licenses suspended. On Sept. 1, the day the program officially ends, more than 630,000 people…
Texas kids are still suffering. They still lag behind children in other states when it comes to economic well-being, education, health and measures of family and community support, according to the 2019 Kids Count data book from Annie E. Casey Foundation. Despite limited help from the Texas Legislature in the…
Texas’ white plurality is this close to being over, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Any day now, it seems, the state is set to become majority Hispanic. According to the bureau’s 2018 population estimates, Texas has about 11.9 million white, non-Hispanic residents, compared with 11.4…
Sometimes it’s helpful to remember that East Texas U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert is just one of 435 members of the U.S. House. If he had more power, his ascientific, ahistoric and afactual view of the world would be menacing. As a back-bencher, Gohmert remains an object of curiosity and a…
Civility is big this year. A new Pew poll shows a majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, think the way President Donald Trump talks is “concerning” and “embarrassing” — not the notes you want jotted at the bottom of your annual review. And then here in Dallas we…
The Texas Legislature passed 1,429 bills in 2019. Lawmakers took swipes at problems that have plagued the state for decades, like Texas’ public school finance system, and problems that don’t exist, like doctors who regularly get away with committing infanticide. They passed many bills, the effects of which won’t be…
First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress took to the airwaves Friday to make one thing clear: He and the rest of President Donald Trump’s evangelical backers aren’t being used by the president. “I agree 100 percent that no pastor should be a stooge for a political party or for a…
This may come as a shock to those unfamiliar with East Texas, but the people there, especially those in many of its small towns, really, really don’t like abortion — so much so that they’re willing to make national spectacles of themselves just to show everyone how much they hate…
Dallas ended up paying dearly for banning porn conventions from the city in 2016. On Wednesday, the City Council signed off on paying J. Handy $650,000 to settle the suit he brought against the city in February 2016. Handy, founder of the Exxxotica pornography and adult industry expo, sued the…
Thanks to an addendum to the Dallas City Council’s agenda Wednesday, we now know who felt flush enough to pay a million-and-a-half for Dallas’ recently toppled tribute to the treasonous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. According to council documents, the high bidder in the city’s online auction for the statue,…
If he’s anything, Dallas mayor-elect Eric Johnson is an ambitious guy. He’s got degrees from Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, and took his seat in the Texas House of Representatives before turning 40. In the legislature, he’s sought out high-profile fights, sparring over things like criminal justice reform,…
