March. That’s when the Dallas City Council will finally decide whether to ban single-use plastic (and paper) bags. That was the takeaway from today’s council briefing on the subject, the umpteenth since Councilman Dwaine Caraway launched his crusade last March. For the first hour of the meeting, it looked as…
When campaign fundraising totals for the Texas governor’s race were announced on Tuesday, Wendy Davis’ team celebrated that their $12.2 million haul bested Greg Abbott’s $11.5 million. Abbott’s team accused her of “fuzzy math” for counting $3.5 million donated to the Texas Victory Committee, which splits its funds between the…
State Senator Wendy Davis’ campaign has experienced a couple of hiccups in recent weeks. Her attack on rival Greg Abbott for being in the pocket of payday lenders backfired after her campaign grossly miscalculated the industry’s contributions and neglected to mention that she had previously voted for the payday lending…
Today, in the first of three public forums on taxi and limo regulations, City Council members learned what has been clear since Dallas began its crackdown on Uber: The system, particularly for taxis, is completely rigged. That’s partly by design. Historically, because cabs fill an important gap in the local…
When Texas passed its version of the castle doctrine in 2007, allowing homeowners to shoot burglars without fear of repercussions, support in the Texas Legislature was nearly unanimous; of 180 lawmakers, only 13 voted nay. Almost as many legislators (136) co-authored or sponsored the bill, as Democrats and Republicans alike…
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Texas Horse Park, one of the many baubles approved by voters 15 years ago as part of the Trinity River Corridor Project, wasn’t very well conceived. If the unwillingness of donors to chip in private funds wasn’t proof that a fancy equestrian…
It’s not just cars Dallas dumps in the Trinity River. It’s tires, too — tons of them embedded in the muck and stranded along the banks. Particularly cluttered is the stretch of river between the Trinity River Audubon Center and Interstate 20. “They just dumped load after load of tires,…
If it were possible for a human being to physically climb into bed with an industry, Texas attorney general hopeful Barry Smitherman would be under the covers with oil and gas interests in a nanosecond. He has more than proved his ardor during nearly a decade as an energy regulator,…
Yesterday, the Dallas City Council green-lighted a long-delayed, million-dollar renovation of the dog park at White Rock Lake. Built for a song a dozen years ago, it is crowded, muddy and in bad need of an overhaul. City Councilman Dwaine Caraway agrees. He, like the rest of his colleagues, voted…
When Denton City Councilman Kevin Roden first made his pitch to bring Sriracha to North Texas last October, it seemed like an impossible long shot. What chance did a lone municipal official, bearing no tax breaks or economic development incentives, have of convincing the manufacturer of the most delicious condiment…
HUD spent four years building its recently unveiled case against the city of Dallas, compiling statistics and gathering evidence to show that for years the city been illegally promoting residential housing segregation. Evidence that the city was steering affordable housing outside of downtown, the claim that formed the seed of…
A polar vortex has a good chunk of the United States in its grasp, which, in layman’s terms, means that it’s cold — absurdly, bone-chillingly cold. It’s the kind of weather that socks you in the gut and takes your breath away, that overwhelms Texas’ feeble electric grid. Already, the…
In 2013, Dallas residents were treated to an unprecedented whiff of Dallas city government, and the experience was something akin to opening that long-forgotten Tupperware container wedged beneath your car seat. The fumes aren’t going to kill anyone, but the noxious mix of incompetence and deceit is unmistakable. An unpleasant…
There’s no guarantee that U.S. Congressman Ralph Hall, who has represented Rockwall and Northeast Texas in Washington for so long that they named a lake after him, will survive next year’s Republican primary. For the first time in years, he’s facing a formidable challenger in former U.S. Attorney John Ratcliffe…
There’s a lot of stupid stuff floating around the Internet A&E’s decision to suspend Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson from the reality show for going public with his personal views on sin. “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there,” he told GQ. “Bestiality, sleeping around with this…
Senator Ted Cruz, the uncompromising Tea Party standard bearer, the bane of the establishment GOP, is the most influential man in the world (according to 11 percent of Americans, anyway). He almost singlehandedly led his entire party over the cliff during the government shutdown to defund Obamacare. His personal style…
The debate about voting in Texas over the past several years has focused on the controversial voter ID law that passed in 2011 and finally took effect over the summer. It was a necessary step to prevent voter fraud, supporters said, while opponents countered that it erected illegal hurdles to…
You remember Anna Merlan, right? The Dallas Observer staff writer who specialized in writing about norm-bucking local subcultures (strippers, the leather scene, atheists, etc.) Well, she’s doing the same thing in New York and just published a feature on the ladies fighting to defend their legal right to go topless…
Representative Steve Stockman, the Houston-area congressman famous for bringing Ted Nugent to the State of the Union and wanting to arm fetuses, was not the Tea Party’s first choice to run in the GOP primary against Senator John Cornyn. That honor belongs to Representative Louie Gohmert. Next on their list…
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst unveiled his interim charges to the Senate Committee on State Affairs Friday, and they are, to say the least, pretty ambitious. They read like red meat for the paranoid-hacker constituency at times, but they also include the bones of some common-sense privacy protections. And they may…
Now that Dallas has officially made it through Icemageddon 2013, there are plenty of totally legitimate questions to ask about the storm and its response. Here are a few: -Did TxDOT do an adequate job of staving off carmageddon? -Can DART not shut down the entire light rail system next…
If you’re not familiar with Tenaha, Texas, go back and read this The New Yorker piece from August detailing how police and prosecutors in the tiny East Texas town used civil forfeiture laws and a phantom suspicion of drugs to seize cars, cash, jewelry and anything else they could find…
