Politics & Government

For the better part of two decades now, Texas has been Lucy with the football and Democrats have been Charlie Brown, thinking, “If we just target these voters, moderate on these issues or raise this much money, maybe we’ll have a chance.” It hasn’t happened. However much hype a candidate…

First question. Who gives a damn? This very weird story keeps bouncing around the mediaverse about Dennis Bonnen, who is speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and an audio recording that a guy says he made of Bonnen making dirty remarks about other politicians. And we care about this…

At this point, it seems like everyone’s going to be disappointed either way. If Empower Texans activist Michael Q. Sullivan’s tape of his June meeting with Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen never gets released, we’ll always wonder what might have been, given the gnashing of teeth over the recording’s alleged…

Allen, Texas, where the El Paso shooter lived, is one of several affluent suburban communities in the Dallas area served by a commercial online calendar called “Bubblelife.” The name is a play on what used to be a disparaging term for the Park Cities area, a rich, almost all-white enclave…

Finally Tuesday afternoon, Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen made a real apology for whatever he said during a meeting with conservative activist Michael Q. Sullivan and Dustin Burrows, the head of the Texas House Republican caucus, on June 16. We still don’t know what’s on the surreptitious recording of the meeting…

If the people who walk their dogs off the leash in my neighborhood have children at home, I feel sorry for the children. How you train your dog is how you train your kid. So the way they must train their kids is, “Go ahead and play in traffic, little…

Native son Beto O’Rourke has plenty of catching up to do if he hopes to win his home state’s Democratic presidential primary, according to a new poll from Emerson College and The Dallas Morning News. Texas’ Democrats would prefer O’Rourke ran for U.S Senate against John Cornyn rather than president,…

Texas 2020 just got even weirder. Late Monday afternoon, former Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, an Observer and tea party favorite, announced she is running for Congress. Van Duyne, most recently an appointee of President Donald Trump to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, will seek the Republican nomination…

Last week, NBC5 television handed our new mayor, Eric Johnson, his first easy home run pitch to show he can be a leader. A news host asked the mayor to talk about the roiling controversy in heavily poor and minority South Dallas over intensive patrolling of city streets by state…

The Dallas Police Department needs help. Whether it’s 600 more police officers, better staffing policies, higher salaries or some mix of all three, no one at the department, on the City Council or in the community would dispute that something’s got to give, given the public perception that the city…

Texas Speaker of the House Dennis Bonnen danced with the devil. Now it seems like he might get burned. For the better part of a week, Bonnen has been dealing with the fallout of a totally unforced error that could lead to his losing his role as the third most…

Earlier this week, The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial under the headline, “Dallas businesses that become criminal hubs must be held responsible.” The newspaper gave City Hall a pat on the back for filing suit against a Texaco station in far East Dallas: “Ratcheting up pressure against property owners…

The thinking behind former Mayor Mike Rawlings’ “Grow South” campaign was that City Hall needed to encourage investment in the city’s historically segregated and economically shortchanged areas. But what was standing in the way in the first place? Multiple causes are commonly invoked, from active racism to passive unawareness of…

Former Mayor Laura Miller and former City Council members Scott Griggs, Angela Hunt and Philip Kingston may no longer be at City Hall, but their ideas are still there, because they were right. Like the river that runs through the heart of the city, those ideas will persist no matter…

Here at your friendly Observer news vertical, our email inboxes are inundated daily with pitches about this report or that study, which purports to show, usually to some advertising end, something about North Texas. Most of them get ignored, but, occasionally, we’ll get some data that’s interesting enough to pass along…

Mostly, Wednesday’s testimony from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller to the U.S. House Intelligence and Judiciary committees came off exactly as one would’ve suspected. Democratic members of the committees pushed Mueller to make definitive statements about potential crimes committed by President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and his first…

There are a lot of ways Sen. John Cornyn could have gone after Dallas state Sen. Royce West, the newest entrant into Texas’ Democratic Senate primary. They could have suggested that West was out of touch after nearly 30 years in office, or maybe too close to U.S. Rep. Eddie…

Pretend it’s midnight, and I’m rolling by some cops who are standing on the street in Dallas. I stop. I put my window down. I say, “It’s 12 o’clock at night. Do you know where your chief is?” Only I don’t really make jokes with cops on the street. Too…

Long-serving Dallas state Sen. Royce West is making a big announcement Monday morning. It’s not much of a surprise, given that he’s already filed campaign-finance documents, but West is running for U.S. Senate, hoping to take on incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in November 2020. West will join a field that…

For 15 years, the city’s entire ostensible argument for shutting down Jim’s Car Wash on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas has been that the car wash is a hotbed of crime. But the city made a big mistake two weeks ago. They published a map of the…