This is such a strange town. You could never explain this place to a Martian, or a person from St. Paul, or somewhere like that. The Dallas Morning News is supposed to be the voice of the local conservative business establishment. But for some months, the editorial page staff has…
Brand-new superintendent of schools Mike Moses is getting his first taste of white water in the bulrushes. The problems he is running into are your typical Dallas Independent School District backstabbing and bad publicity–par for the course if you ask anybody who’s been around Dallas more than a couple of…
Consider this: The city’s first black police chief is fighting off an investigation of his own department for racial profiling. The first black chairwoman of the Citizens/Police Review Board is doing everything she can to shut down a racial-profiling investigation by her own board. And the city’s first black mayor…
Did you know we have commie judges in Dallas? At least I think they’re commies. Now look, I could be wrong. They may be Nazis. I’m going to leave that up to you. It looks to me as if either term would be politically accurate. The point is that Dallas,…
Why is Houston plain and simple and aboveboard even when it’s wrong, and Dallas is sneaky and convoluted even when it’s right? Urban karma? Their main tourist attraction is the Galleria Mall. Ours is Dealey Plaza. Case closed. Example: the issue of arresting people for “failure to identify.” Dallas police…
I happen to be a lawyer fan. I like them. I actually enjoy watching them. So I have some theories about them. This particular theory is about why very smart lawyers sometimes do very dumb things. It’s not common. Aside from marrying a serial killer or buying a Ford Explorer…
Before writing this column, I threw salt over my shoulder. I knocked on wood. If I knew an incantation to ward off the evil eye, I would have used it, but they didn’t teach us that in Episcopal Sunday school (a serious deficit in that religion). So anyway, here it…
Forget about the U.S. Supreme Court. Forget about the Florida Supreme Court. If you want to see where the rubber meets the road in the land of jurisprudence, take just a minute and come downtown with me to the Dallas Municipal Court System at old City Hall, 2014 Main St…
Here is one way of looking at the fact that Dr. Mike Moses, when he takes over as Dallas schools superintendent on January 1, will be the highest-paid school superintendent in the country: How much do you figure it would have cost to get someone to take over as captain…
While our governor has been out running for president on the strength of a dramatic rise in test scores for Texas schoolchildren, it would have been helpful to know that students who took the last statewide math test received a passing score of 70 percent for answering 50 percent of…
Sometimes the petty offenses the police use to put pressure on bad actors who haven’t really broken the law are called nuisance charges. But Leonard Mitchell will tell you one man’s nuisance is the next man’s hell. The cops sometimes call them “throw-down” charges, a half-joking reference to the “Saturday…
The same thing happens every time the Dallas school board puts on its leather skirt and starts trolling the singles bars for a new superintendent. The board behaves badly and scares off the good prospects. Then it has to marry the one who says he can forget the past, doesn’t…
The Dallas public schools dilemma would be easy to solve if all we ever looked at was the headquarters building. Call in an air strike, stop and pick up some salsa and a few brewskis, go home and watch the football game. So what’s the hold-up? The problem is that…
I hear that scary drum roll starting. That means the people down at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Dallas Independent School District must be all loaded up and spit-curled, top hats buffed, fresh coat of paste wax on the cannon, just about ready to shoot another superintendent at us…
Think about the anger and pain of the residents in Cadillac Heights. They believe people in their area are dying of cancer from chemicals left behind by defunct lead smelters. It’s an old black and Hispanic neighborhood on the Oak Cliff side of the Trinity River, just below where Martin…
The Trinity River project is dead. Isn’t gonna happen. Some other river project may emerge. Dallas business leader Albert Black and Dallas City Council member Laura Miller are putting together a public forum to talk about alternatives. Environmental foes and plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the project say they still…
Alastair Cooke-Goody doesn’t seem like the type to get maced four times and have his face mashed in the dirt for ticking off a Dallas cop. But on April 30 that’s precisely what happened to the young Anglican minister, who was here from London as a consultant to the Episcopal…
I am sitting here looking at a mathematical formula buried in the middle of a dry bureaucratic memo, and I really don’t know if I should react with tears, horror, or wrath. Every time I re-read this and think about what it really means, the first thing I feel is…
If you own a small business, or if you pay the bills for yourself or your family, or if you are the treasurer of a church, synagogue, or mosque, or if you got decent grades in lower arithmetic, or if you have any kind of a bad temper at all,…
You can’t really blame Dan Peavy if he gloats. For five years, the chuckles and the self-congratulating back pats have all been on the other side. In 1996, when WFAA-Channel 8 investigative reporter Robert Riggs won the Peabody Award for a series of stories painting Peavy as a corrupt Dallas…
So why, you ask, does a major Dallas law firm pay the mayor of Dallas $200,000 a year when the mayor himself concedes he does little or no legal work for them? What does the law firm get out of the deal? OK, this is not exactly the riddle of…
To start off with some perspective, let’s put this shoe on another foot. Try to imagine a white man, a leader in the business community, lashing out against white women who marry black men. Imagine that he accuses them of “sleeping with the enemy.” Imagine that he lumps these women…
