They’re the superheroes of the Democratic Party, swooping in to save the day with their super vote before a misguided populace burns the Democratic establishment to the ground by selecting a candidate who spews radical ideas as if it were 1972. Birthed in the flames of George McGovern’s ’72 presidential…
OK, Dallas City Council, this is between us and please don’t tell our readers about it here at the Dallas Observer, in fact please don’t tell the Observer about it, either. I wish you would go into a smoke-filled room, shut me out totally, draw the blinds, refuse to comment,…
Mr. Trump, this is from me, an old middle class white guy watching from the sidelines here in Dallas. You said if they took the nomination away from you at the convention, “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing many, many millions of people.” I’m looking at your people, Mr…
Presented (mostly) without comment, here’s Dallas City Council member Rickey Callahan bringing in St. Patrick’s Day, and his birthday, with a lovely, lilting brogue and a song. Thanks, Rickey, and District 8 council member Erik Wilson, who brought our attention to this video…
President Obama came to a good place last weekend to tell people what this election is about. Dallas may not be the only bull’s eye in America for a discussion of ethnicity politics and voting rights, but it’ll do. In our own backyard and in the nation, some white people…
Ted Cruz is in trouble. He didn’t have the worst night of the four remaining GOP presidential candidates — that honor belongs to Marco Rubio, who got walloped by front-runner Donald Trump in Rubio’s home state, Florida — but he didn’t do anything to derail Trump’s anger-powered locomotive of a…
Just because Dallas doesn’t have a plan for dealing with the inhabitants of the homeless tent cities it plans to bulldoze on May 1, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a plan. That’s the plan. No plan. That’s always Dallas’ plan: no plan, no people. How many times does the…
Finally the land-play at the southwest corner of downtown Dallas has been rendered semi-public and a known fact, with last week’s admission by The Dallas Morning News that the property on which the paper sits may be sort of somewhat on the market. And by the way, land can be…
Slowly, but surely under the leadership of new executive director Kelly Gottschalk, the moribund Dallas Police and Fire Pension System seems to be digging itself out of the chasm dug during the leadership of former director Richard Tettamant. According to new data released by the pension fund on Thursday and…
Thursday morning, Mike Rawlings, for better and worse, presented the case for his term and a half as Dallas. Speaking to a crowd gathered for something called the City Makers Summit put on by The Atlantic and JP Morgan Chase, Rawlings offered a sampling of the things that make his…
One of the most striking things about the run-up to the trial in Three Expo Events v. The City of Dallas — the fight over Dallas City Council’s vote to ban the Exxxotica adult expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center — is the unanimity with which both sides…
It was hard to tell from the breathless news coverage of Ted Cruz’s hanging on to win the Texas primary and stay in the race with Republican front-runner Donald Trump last week, but the Lone Star State had yet another election with terrible voter turnout. Despite Texas Republicans casting a…
Last weekend was a good one for Texas’ Canadian-born junior senator, Ted Cruz. He won caucuses in Kansas and Maine — Cruz’s chief rival, Donald Trump, did note that Cruz likely did well in Maine because it was “close to Canada” — and finished closer than expected to Trump in…
Anyone from Dallas sitting down to watch the first couple of episodes of season four of Netflix’s House of Cards over the weekend was bound to have felt like they took half a step or so into the uncanny valley. Keeping spoilers to a minimum, the season begins with First Lady…
Texas’ Super Tuesday primary featured one of the most important elections in the state’s history. We’re not talking, of course, about the presidential nominating contests, which were dominated in expected fashion by Texas’ own Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, who won her second Lone Star State primary. Nor are we…
As with so many things — sprucing up the Trinity River, fixing Fair Park, combating domestic violence and poverty, regulating gas drilling — Dallas’ next step in dealing with the city’s lack of affordable housing should be to form a …. wait for it … task force. On Friday, the…
The Dallas public school system has announced it will launch a new high school in 2017 using the city of Dallas as a “laboratory” to teach kids about architecture, public policy and community development. Is this going to be one of those “scared straight” things? You know, like when they…
Different things can set off my paranoid tendencies, especially a room full of people who look like Masonic Illuminati who parked their black helicopters out back. That’s pretty much how I was feeling last week when I sat down to a white-linen table setting in the Fairmount Hotel ballroom —…
Tracy Murphree stood in front of his campaign signs, speaking to a room full of supporters, some wearing red T-shirts with the words “Team Murphree” on the front and “Justice is coming 2016” on the back. The road to earning the Republican nomination for Denton County sheriff has been long…
For whatever reason, Dallas is almost always under everybody’s radar and off the charts where national issues are concerned. Well, The Atlantic, the 159-year-old monthly news and analysis magazine that has won more magazine awards than any other monthly, just noticed us. It’s not a great debut, but it should…
Dallas, thank goodness, is not Cleveland or Detroit. Its economy and identity have never had the Rust Belt dependence on manufacturing, and so it hasn’t been hollowed out by American manufacturing’s collapse. But make no mistake. Even though the Dallas area’s population and economy are both famously booming, the city…
Leona Allen, deputy managing editor of The Dallas Morning News, who is black, has an interesting piece up on the paper’s opinion blog and also in the print edition yesterday, worrying about a fight between two top black Dallas officials last week. She wonders if black people in Dallas are especially…
