Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick showed up at the Fort Worth ISD school board meeting Tuesday night to stand in the proverbial bathroom door. Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton discovered this week that the district, in a purely administrative move made in April, clarified that students at the…
Shoot the dogs. And I owe an apology to Dallas City Council member Ricky Callahan for making fun of him a couple weeks ago when he said the same thing. It should not have taken the horrific story of Antoinette Brown to get me up to speed. Brown is the 52-year-old…
According to Dallas Police, the reason the department took so long to publicly announce the fatal mauling of a southern Dallas woman last week was that investigators didn’t want the owner of the dogs that attacked Antoinette Brown to ditch the canines. Five days after the attack, when the department…
It looks like the Continental Avenue Pedestrian Bridge, one of the city of Dallas’ more pleasant recent additions, will be getting a new name. The city council’s transportation committee voted unanimously Monday to recommend naming the bridge after former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to the full city council. The recommendation…
When I saw last week that Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings had sent a letter to Austin regulators in support of a bid by the Hunt family of Dallas to take over our local electric transmission utility, all of the “how high” jokes I have ever heard in my life started…
Texas’ Child Protective Services is in crisis. In the wake of the brutal, March 13 death of 4-year-old Leilana Wright in Grand Prairie, a parade of news report have documented that the agency, through some mixture of incompetence and an acute staffing shortage, is fundamentally incapable, as currently organized, of…
This week Robert Wilonsky at The Dallas Morning News and Peter Simek at D Magazine both have been telling some of those important but very painful stories we all need to hear about the city’s racial history. I just want to make sure we don’t throw the old guy out with…
Just a month ago, the marshaled conservative forces against Donald Trump seemed to have a foothold. Their man, whether they liked it or not, was Ted Cruz, and Cruz had just put up his strongest showing of the 2016 primary in Wisconsin, beating Trump by a shade over 13 points…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is not going to take Target’s announcement that they want people to use the restroom of their choice sitting down — or standing up, as it were. In a letter provided by Paxton to Fox News that we managed to track down on a Breitbart…
What mystery? Republican leadership offered Republican primary voters a choice between 16 conservatives and a white guy. The voters have spoken. Yesterday morning after Trump nailed the Republican nomination, I’m reading Nate Silver, I’m reading The New York Times lead editorial, reading Ross Douthat, The Washington Post editorial, The Wall…
Halt! Or should I use the German, “Halt!” An idea is afloat out there, almost certainly well meaning, for dealing with the city’s homeless population by creating a concentration camp at a disused military base where you and I won’t be able to see the problem any longer. Who else…
After being throttled in a make or break Indiana primary, Texas’ Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential nominating contest, ceding the GOP nod to New York real estate mogul Donald Trump. “We are suspending our campaign, we left it all on the field in Indiana,” Cruz said, managing…
Last winter’s Dallas City Council battle over the city’s soda contract was way more fun than it had any right to be. Cases of soda landed in council offices in a way that smelled a lot like patronage. There were long exchanges about something called pour rights, and City Council…
All of the pundits and all of the cues and signals are telling me I’m supposed to be angry and suicidal right now. Even though that seems like a conflict in and of itself, I still want to do what’s expected of me, but it’s really hard because I live…
Tuesday, Ted Cruz will face the biggest, and perhaps last, hurdle in his campaign for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination. If manages to knock off Donald Trump in Indiana, he’ll have something approaching a 30 percent shot at keeping Trump for gathering the 1,237 delegates the New York real…
Tracy Murphree, Republican candidate for Denton County sheriff, announced he had said all he needed to say in regard to his Facebook post claiming he’d beat a transgender woman if he caught her in the bathroom with his daughter. “This whole bathroom thing is craziness I have never seen.” he…
Balance. That is the best I can offer. I can’t tell you if the people whom The Dallas Morning News describes as vile malevolent slumlords are what they say they are or if they are legitimate honorable business persons targeted by forces that just want their land. But I can…
Thursday, Dr. Raymond Greenberg, the executive vice chancellor for health affairs for the University of Texas System, made it clear why fetal tissue research is so important. Despite all the knashing of teeth from the state of Texas’ Republican leadership, the research is absolutely vital to studying early human development and fighting…
Andy Seremetis likes to meditate. You might even say he needs to meditate. Too many days without meditating and his mood sours and days he would typically sail through become a slog. “It creates a feeling of being present,” he says. “I notice things around me more. I’m not thinking about…
Seeking to build a bulkhead against Donald Trump’s orange-hued rising tied, Ted Cruz took the unusual step of naming a running mate without being within even sniffing distance of the Republican presidential nomination. Trump won five primaries Tuesday night, edging closer to claiming the title of presumptive GOP nominee. Cruz…
The Dallas Morning News ran a big editorial yesterday vowing to hold the city’s feet to the fire on a new campaign to curb stray dogs. Yeah, I get all that, but the problem isn’t the stray dogs. It’s the damn stray people. Not homeless people. Not talking about that…
Anyone who’s passed the intersection of Skillman Street and Walnut Hill Lane (and who hasn’t been reading the Lake Highlands Advocate for the past dozen years) has probably wondered about the shockingly large prairie at the intersection’s southeast corner and the pseudo-urban apartment complex/parking garage that’s been weirdly deposited in the…
