City of Ate’s inbox is typically crammed with messages from eager publicists, hopeful restaurant owners and aggrieved diners, who’ve often found the Better Business Bureau unresponsive to their complaints about grimy bathrooms and surly bartenders. Since we can’t do much for our woeful correspondents either, we’re turning their troubles over…
On Thursday we will get an interesting first official bite of the apple in complaints that the city of Dallas flouts federal law and practices racial discrimination in its downtown housing policies. The board of directors of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs will ask downtown developers Ted…
[jump] *Keep an eye on SMU football. Something’s not right. I know head coach June Jones supposedly signed a lucrative contract extension last November, but he can’t be happy at all by these players being dismissed from his team and recruits not being accepted into school because of SMU’s ridiculously…
Dear Readers: The Arizona pendejas have emboldened hundreds of Know Nothings in the past week to boast to the Mexican that they’re not racist if they support SB 1070 because, according to them, they believe in the law, and they have no problems with immigrants as long as they’re legal…
We earn disasters like the Gulf oil spill. We bring them on ourselves by breaking the rules every time the rules get in our way. Houston attorney Jim Blackburn, one of the nation’s top environmental lawyers, talked to me last week about efforts by Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert to get…
I know nobody asked me. But the latest development in the story of the police chief’s son is just too much to ignore. Under relentless hectoring by Dallas police unions, City Manager Mary Suhm has hired attorney Terry Hart, a respected former federal prosecutor who worked on Don Hill’s gag-order…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Don’t understand why some folks around here can’t stand Mark Cuban. And that includes you, Ross Perot Jr. In Thursday night’s NBA Draft the Dallas Mavericks owner wrote a check for…
Dear Mexican: Why do the Mexicans HATE American soccer and HATE (bolded, underlined and italicized) Landon Donovan? —Uncle Sam’s Army Brat Dear Gabacho: Because Mexicans hate Americans—DUH! Geez, this is the literary equivalent of taking a penalty kick at this year’s FIFA World Cup with no goaltender—but I also want…
An extremely important thing happened at the city council meeting this morning. Nothing happened. I can’t tell you how big that is. Angela Hunt won. Mayor Tom Leppert told a packed house that the city council had agreed informally not to vote on the contentious Love Field concessions issue, directing…
I saw the Harlem Globetrotters not long ago but I’ll admit, I had no idea they had a “draft.” You? The world’s most famous basketball team yesterday drafted the “Club Trillion” founder, a college slam dunk champion, a husband-wife couple and – lookie here – a dude from SMU. That’s…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Watching Thursday night’s NBA Finals Game 7, it struck me just how far your Dallas Mavericks are from a championship. Lakers 83, Celtics 79 was a rugged, violent scrum on every possession…
Dear Mexican: I’m a civil rights lawyer. I sue the San Diego Minutemen. Whenever the Minutemen are accused of being racist, they always say something like, “I’m part Hispanic,” or they’ll note that some of their members are Mexican. This last claim is actually true. Some of the most zealous Minutemen are…
The Dallas Morning News has been doing stories and editorials about the shrinking population of black students in the Dallas public school system—a phenomenon the newspaper calls “black flight.” In its first story the paper reported: “Interviews with dozens of parents reveal that the exodus is not fueled by a…
The irony here is that true historic preservation activists in Dallas are going to welcome this latest bit of Trinity River toll road news. I began hearing from them long before the Corps went public with its efforts to get some kind of protective historic designation for the Trinity project…
Yesterday’s mail included a couple of letters from the Texas Attorney General, which I will share, regarding two unrelated matters. The first was an opinion dealing with my letter to Dallas Area Rapid Transit on March 23 in which I requested: “All reports generated by DART’s departments of board support,…
Delicious development over the weekend as TCU’s baseball team took two of three from Texas in Austin to earn its first ever trip to the College World Series. The Horned Frogs begin play in Omaha, Nebraska Saturday at 1 p.m. against Fresno State. TCU has a legit shot because of, if…
I hate it when things work out. From my point of view, it’s not good for business. But it looks like city staff and the Dallas City Council may actually come up with a reasonable way to oversee operations of multiple neighborhood farmers markets. Ah, well. Can’t lose ’em all…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *The Southwest Conference lived to be 80. The Big 12 won’t see its 17th birthday. Favorite part of the squabble is Texas A&M threatening to go to the Southeastern Conference without…
D has posted an item on its blog, FrontBurner, reporting that I traveled by kayak out to the Calatrava bridge site and defecated on the bridge to show my disapproval. The item, written by D Major Domo Tim Rogers, was satirical and not meant to be taken seriously. But a…
Dear Mexican: I worked a summer job during college in southern Arizona during the late 1960s, where most of my coworkers were Mexicans from the state of Sonora. Their favorite expression when something was broken was no vale verga, literally “not worth dick” but actually meaning “totally fucked up.” What…
Just sitting here drumming my fingers on the desk. It’s been six weeks. I asked City Hall a simple question. I’m still waiting for their call. This is starting to remind me of my teenage dating career. My question to the city six long weeks ago was this: How many…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Thing that jumped out at me about Thursday night’s Game 1 of the NBA Finals was how physical it was. The scrapping for loose balls. The intensity of picks. Just running through…
