Its been almost four years since the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, in hopes of making a bit more scratch, rolled out a line of customizable license plates. Drivers can now select from a large buffet of completely legal plate designs celebrating Dr Pepper, Jesus, the late Dale Earnhardt and…
The Texas Legislative Study Group is a caucus of around 50 Democratic representatives from the Texas House, and they’re real buzzkills. The LSG keeps a full-time staff of policy analysts around, who almost every year since 2003 have released a report called “Texas on the Brink,” detailing all the most…
Congressman Steve Stockman was up late last night, wading through the flood of media accounts wondering why the media isn’t paying attention to the case of alleged late-term abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell and putting the finishing touches on his campaign bumper sticker. He tweeted a picture at 1:44 a.m. Our…
Last month, the Morning News reported that Frankie Forshee, a code enforcement worker and 13-year city employee, had been arrested and was facing a trio of bribery charges. Details were scarce at the time. Code Compliance Director Jimmy Martin told the paper only that Forshee had been placed on paid…
Last week, as they City Council was being briefed on the still very incomplete effort to end chronic homelessness in Dallas, a frustrated Dwaine Caraway proposed a surefire solution: Why not round up the homeless people, stick them on a Greyhound bus, and send them back to where they came…
As they try to carve out a permanent niche in the ultra-competitive American car market, Tesla and billionaire founder Elon Musk have had to position themselves as sprightly Davids disrupting the lumbering Goliaths of Detroit and Japan. They have no other choice. They can’t afford the untold billions legacy automakers…
Subrina Brenham, the businesswoman challenging Tennell Atkins in the District 8 City Council race, was driving along Lancaster Road this morning when she noticed something odd: One of her campaign signs, the large rectangular variety you see plastered on the sides of buildings and fences, had been cast aside in…
Before term limits and elections change the complexion of the Dallas City Council in unknowable ways, Scott Griggs and Angela Hunt want an up-or-down vote on proposed natural gas wells along the Trinity River. Last month, the Dallas Plan Commission voted down the permits for drilling outfit Trinity East, which…
Have you ever been drunk? Have you ever wondered about how drunkenness affects your maze-completing ability? Have you ever wanted to test your drunken maze-completing ability using a taxpayer-funded smartphone app that constantly shames you about your drunkenness? If you answered yes to all those questions then you’re in luck…
In recent years, as North Texas’ feral hog population has exploded, Arlington, Irving and other suburbs have taken to rounding up the swine and selling them for bacon. Now, it’s Dallas’ turn. Robert Wilonsky brings news this morning that the city is looking for someone to harvest its feral hogs…
Vickery Meadow sits just across Central Expressway from Preston Hollow, but it’s a world away. One is home to multi-million dollar houses owned by the city’s business and civil elite. The other is a mind-blowingly diverse pocket of 25,000 people living in low-rent, crime-plagued apartments. Both places are wrapped into…
Update at 1:19 p.m.: No, the peacocks are not being removed. That’s the word from city spokesman Frank Librio, whose full explanation follows after the jump. Original post: Last weekend, someone called 911 to report “loose fowl of various kinds running freely in the street in an area very close…
A half hour after sunset on Thursday evening, a young couple was walking along the White Rock Lake Trail. They were passing through the small wooded area by the spillway at the southern tip of the lake, headed toward the water, when a man passed headed in the opposite direction…
The last time I set foot in Valley View Center three or four years ago, it was eerily reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic zombie flick, and not the old-school kind with the undead lurching forward with laughable slowness. The zombies that come to mind are the type that are puma-quick and…
From a purely aesthetic point of view, Ori Raphael is dominating the District 11 City Council yard sign war. His opponent, former park board member Lee Kleinman, went with blocky, mustard-colored letters superimposed on a blue background, his enormous first name partially obscured by a silhouette of the Dallas skyline…
It didn’t take long for the District 2 City Council race to turn into a mud-slinging match, even if the mud has come from only one side. The first volley came last month from Herschel Weisfeld, who seized on Adam Medrano’s refusal to discuss his sexual orientation to question his…
The city of Dallas has been criticized at times for the agonizingly slow implementation of its 2011 Dallas Bike Plan. Two years after its adoption, only about 10 percent of the planned 1,127 miles of bike lanes and trails have been been put in place. That would seem to indicate…
The LGBT Resource Center at Texas A&M University, like its cousins at the University of Texas and the University of Houston, is an innocuous arm of school bureaucracy that offers an array of resources to gay and transgendered students. There is a guest speaker program, a lending library, networking opportunities,…
It’s been a decade since the city of Dallas announced the development of a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, a quest that, as a short stroll downtown will tell you, has fallen short of its goal. There are still plenty of people without homes. That’s not to say the…
As you may recall, Texas’ 2011 plan to redraw political boundaries was so brazenly partisan, so undeniably bent on reducing minority influence, and the evidence was so mountainous and convincing that a federal court didn’t even bother cataloging it all in its ruling against the state. “The parties have provided…
It wasn’t long after Gary Isett parked a Kip’s Big Boy statue on his front lawn at the corner of Abrams and Trammel that people started taking notice. First, passersby, then the Lakewood Advocate, then the Morning News. D’s Tim Rogers reminisced about that time in high school he took…
There remains a pressing need for meaningful, statewide regulation of payday lending in Texas, since the industry has shown a willingness and ability to skirt restrictions passed by Dallas, Austin, and other cities. Those reforms look like they are still at least a couple of years off. Despite high hopes…
