Well, if you visit here, you can see what Smokey Joe Barton’s congressional committee did to the Internet today. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce, of which Barton is chair, voted out a bill sponsored by him that would give phone companies all kinds of new rights to peddle…
How many people in those beautiful houses on deep lots along Forest Hills Boulevard near White Rock Lake want to see a Blockbuster Video store on their street? Who knows, maybe a tanning salon. Or a couple nice big apartment blocks. Because it could happen. Believe it. There’s a political…
Jim, Sharon Boyd’s posted a comment for you regarding your who’ll-replace-Laura item. But I thought I’d put it here too, to make it easier for you to respond…and so everyone else could play along at home. (And that means you too, Veletta Lill.) “You can’t possibly be serious that a…
So let’s keep trying to narrow our focus on the who-can-beat-Laura runway show. I have blogged in recent weeks that certain people in the business community are devoutly interested in finding a candidate who could knock Laura Miller out of the mayor’s job in the May 2007 election. I’m working…
Pretty interesting how the Dallas Half a Million Mexicans March is shaking out politically, now that it’s all in the past. All of the big-name Latino politicians are trying to step in front and take credit for having set it up. But I have been talking to people who were…
Well, I guess I need your help. I have two very different versions here of a story about the DART police. The first version is that they beat up, Maced and jailed Todd Lyon again for no good reason. He’s the guy I wrote about last year who said DART…
Out there in the heat of the night, the mayoral drums continue to throb. Who can beat Laura? Who-who-who? All kinds of men want to be mayor next time, but all kinds of men always want to be mayor. Just like they wanted to be Boy Scouts. The drums say…
There has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among folks who want to see Mayor Laura defeated next time around. Too many old white guys running, they say, none with enough name ID to cash a check, and all they’re going to do is split the opposition…
Not to be self-referential or anything in attempting to deal with the single most significant political event I have witnessed in the city of Dallas in almost three decades of reporting, but the next morning after last weekend’s monumental immigration march downtown I went to the mirror to see what…
Last December I wrote about Todd Lyon, a 48-year-old guy with long hair who got beat up by Dallas Area Rapid Transit cops for jaywalking in the West End. Apparently on St. Patrick’s Day the DART cops spotted him back in the West End and beat him up again. He…
While the politicians were milling around waiting for the big immigration march to start last Sunday, one of the things they were all gossiping about, of course, was politicians: who was going to show up and who wasn’t. In particular, I thought I picked up some anxiety on the part…
Years ago–I don’t remember how many; I was young myself, that’s how long–an old guy pointed a line across my neighborhood with a chopping motion of his arm and told me it was where the creek bed must have been. I have romanticized the memory–a bad habit, I know–but I…
No telling how many Mexican-American kids have seen Walkout, the movie directed by Edward James Olmos depicting a mass walkout by high school students in East Los Angeles in 1968. It just premiered on HBO Saturday March 18. (You can see the trailer here.) But I do find lots of…
To the extent black Dallas is southern Dallas–and I’m not sure how much water that cliché still holds–then black Dallas wants to be known as a solid bloc these days. I see a crack. Southern Dallas did defeat two recent ballot propositions for so-called “strong mayor” reforms at City Hall…
This was the view from Jim Schutze’s front yard Sunday. Expect more of this when the Trinity River Project becomes a reality. We watched Sunday while the streets in front of our house in East Dallas turned suddenly into white-water rapids. We watched cars float away with people in them…
Last week, when the weather was fair, it was interesting to see all these rich-looking white guys with their polo-shirt collars flipped up piled into a Lexus getting off I-35E at Ledbetter Road in the heart of Southern Dallas. I thought, “These guys have got to be French.” But, no…
Let’s assume we have two camps. People in Dallas who love President Bush and would love to see the Bush Presidential Library here. People in Dallas like me who do not love President Bush and would not love to see his library here. Fair enough. But I don’t see why…
Got any extra food at your house? I’m not begging. I have my own extra food. I’m just doing a wacko check on myself. I have extra food. I have extra water. I have extra shotgun shells. No, you can’t have any. They’re for me. And my family. And as…
We received an automated phone message at the home last night from Ron Kirk, urging us to vote for Chris Bell for governor in the primary today. Kirk identified himself at the top of the call as “Mayor Ron Kirk.” I didn’t think anything of it. But my wife, who…
Strange: I drive by graffiti all the time in East Dallas. I don’t even notice. Sergeant Mark Langford of the Dallas Police Department’s gang unit told me the other day: “People just drive by it like it’s a street sign. It’s almost become a part of the fabric of the…
Last week’s column was about the deal to redo the Mercantile Building downtown, and the day it came out (last Wednesday), I went to the City Council meeting and heard the mayor misstate a key element of the deal for some reason. I don’t think she was doing it on…
The first thing that happens to me when I hear about something like the most recent meeting of the city council finance committee: I assume I must not be getting it. I know that grown-up people on the city council of a major American city would not sit there and…
