When Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall rolled out her first draft of potential changes to Dallas’ Citizens Police Review Board last month, she took heat from all sides. Supporters of reforming the board felt that Hall’s changes didn’t go far enough, while opponents of the reforms worried that strengthening…
The Texas Senate approved a bill Tuesday that would offer legal protections to those who refuse to provide services on religious grounds. Senate Bill 17 bars state license-granting agencies from denying or stripping professional licenses “based on a sincerely held religious belief” of the applicant or license-holder. Critics say the…
Probably out of sheer meanness, like bug-killing, I enjoy seeing politicians pitch themselves to really loony audiences. I like to watch them wriggle. There can’t have been any other reason I interrupted a perfectly fine Monday evening and drove north to the Churchill Rec Center to witness the Citizens Matter…
North Texas’ municipal elections are just more than a month away. Anyone who’s lived here long enough knows that means a couple of things: 1. Thanks to Texas’ voter-access unfriendly laws, it’s time to register if you aren’t already. Anyone not on the books by a month before the election…
Opening Day, along with the hope and inevitable despair that await the Rangers this season, is here. It’s the real first day of spring and maybe the single best excuse to skip out on work for the afternoon that you’ll get in 2019. The Rangers and the Cubs playing their…
On most issues, there is no bridge that’s too far between Texas’ Republican majority and law enforcement officers in the state. Whether it’s the state’s slow-to-change drug laws or special protections for peace officers, the Texas GOP loves to defer to its cops, positioning itself as the state’s law-and-order party…
Maybe we need to have a little bit of Journalism 101 here. There seem to be some people around town who don’t quite know how it works. Professor Schutze is always glad to assist. A major political dust storm erupted at City Hall after my cover story appeared last week…
The early reviews for Dallas’ “End Panhandling Now” program are in and they aren’t good. Not Battlefield Earth bad, but not good. It’s going to take more than $400,000 and a Frogger-themed public service announcement, it seems, to stop people from hustling downtown residents for change and connect them with…
Texas House Democrats did everything they could to slow down their Republican colleagues’ “born-alive” bill Monday morning. But the legislation, like so many anti-abortion bills in the Texas Legislature over the last decade, chugged along as expected and looks set for a big debate on the House floor later this…
A bill that would allow licensed professionals to deny services on religious grounds advanced out of a Texas Senate committee Monday afternoon. Senate Bill 17 would bar state license-granting agencies from taking action against an occupational license holder “based on a sincerely held religious belief.” The bill passed the Senate…
After my own lengthy and exacting legal analysis of positions taken by The Dallas Morning News editorial page on official actions and decisions by newly elected Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, I have come to the following learned conclusion, which I think should be published in a legal journal,…
Over the last half-decade or so, Dallas has mostly slowly but surely done what it can to make itself a more egalitarian city. The City Council passed a comprehensive LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance, gone as far as Texas law allows with regard to marijuana decriminalization by implementing cite-and-release and required city…
Its real name on tax records is the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, but now it calls itself VisitDallas, because nowadays you have to have an ungrammatical neologism for your name if you want to be hip. I don’t know how hip it is really, but VisitDallas is maybe the…
It’s not really a surprise, but it’s still news: Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has endorsed Regina Montoya in Dallas’ mayoral race. Clinton’s endorsement is the cherry on top of an impressive couple of weeks for Montoya, who’s also picked up nods from Emily’s List and the Dallas County…
The noise, literal and figurative, is unavoidable. Downtown residents, having just been awakened by a truck driving over one of the steel plates that patch one of the neighborhood’s streets under construction, take to Facebook to commiserate about another lost hour of sleep. “Because of AT&T construction, traffic is being…
Given the narratives and media coverage that surrounded the Senate race between Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that something snapped in Texas last fall. Surely, all the enthusiasm and hype — not to mention the raw numbers of voters who…
You don’t know this, because you don’t read D, the city magazine of Dallas, but they’ve been running a mayoral poll on their online Frontburner page. You click to vote for your favorite candidate. This week they admitted the poll probably is being gamed. Shawn Shinneman wrote: “It’s possible —…
’Four years ago, the last time Dallas elected a mayor, the anonymous online high jinks were limited and mostly amusing. The dumb/brilliant Mayor Mike Rawlings Twitter parody @fauxmayormike and some enterprising cyber-squatting by opponents of then-candidate Casey Thomas livened things up. Wylie H, the website commenter turned social media soothsayer,…
Get ready for another round of text messages from Team Beto O’Rourke. According to social media reports from volunteers for the former El Paso U.S. representative’s senatorial campaign, O’Rourke and his team sent out an email Wednesday afternoon, informing the volunteers that O’Rourke needed help pushing out some text messages…
The City Council campaign in District 13 north of the Park Cities is shaping up to be strangely like a very important chapter in my own past, although it’s also totally different. Former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller (2002-2007) is running to unseat the incumbent, Jennifer Staubach Gates, who has represented…
The mayor of Dallas and the editorial page of The Dallas Morning News have revived an incident from 2015 in which Dallas City Councilman Scott Griggs, now a candidate for mayor, was accused of violently threatening a city official, then-Assistant City Secretary Bilirae Johnson. A Dallas County grand jury dismissed…
There’s parody, self-parody and then whatever the hell the Dallas County Republican Party is doing with the lineup it’s put together for its annual Reagan Day Dinner next week. The slate of speakers the local GOP has assembled is so absurd that, when first spotted in the wild by the…
