A few quick updates for you on some of those Blacklands toll road issues I told you about earlier in the week. Apparently I was wrong about a lot of stuff. See also: State Road Officials Balk. I told you state Representative Cindy Burkett of Sunnyvale, our always sunny suburb…
I tend to keep a sharp nose out for possible nearby flatulence, and I am beginning to pick up strong whiffs from the old downtown political establishment — the ones former Mayor Laura Miller always called “The Boys” — in terms of how they will deal with next May’s watershed…
Sooner or later we’re going to find out who’s really pushing behind the scenes for that private “Blacklands” private toll road they want to build northeast of Dallas from Rowlett to Greenville. And I don’t mean the private dudes who want to build it for profit. I mean who in…
It’s the holiday season. A time of joy. A time of laughter. A time when everyone likes to buy their favorite friends and family members presents whilst being total dicks to all the strangers in their path. Let’s all go to NorthPark and play Holiday Shopping Bingo! The Twitchy-Eyed Mom…
By the way and for what it’s worth, I am aware that I have been talking about nothing but the Trinity toll road for about a month, and I promise that I am on the verge of checking myself in for a toll road detox. Temporary detox. But here’s the…
By Rip Rowan Rip Rowan is a Dallas producer and engineer whose credits include artists like the Old 97s, the Deathray Davies, Whiskey Folk Ramblers, Fate Lions and Dovetail. He also performs on keyboards and drums (sometimes at the same time) with his indie singer-songwriter wife, Vanessa Peters and other…
The thing about Dallas lawyer Marcos Ronquillo, who formally announced yesterday he’s running for mayor of Dallas, is not that he’s Hispanic. We’ve seen that movie before. If Ronquillo’s last name can bring more Latino voters to the polls next May, then that may change the equation somewhat, but Domingo…
All I could do,the composure I could muster, at yesterday’s City Hall press conference announcing formation of an anti-Trinity toll road political action committee, was force myself to sit in my chair, take notes, act like a reporter and not jump up slapping my forehead and doing a wild Jake-legged…
Since debuting five years ago, 91.7 FM KKXT has been one of the city’s most contentious radio stations. For in-the-know music snobs, the station wasn’t “indie” enough. For middle-of-the-road music listeners, KXT was playing too much weird shit. But then we all remembered what our garbage commercial radio alternatives were,…
Lots of talk yesterday about today’s upcoming announcement of a political action committee to kill the Trinity toll road, and, by the way, if you just moved here, it’s perfectly OK to say, “Toll road? OK, I don’t think I care about that.” But think of it this way: It’s…
I’m a suburbanite. Of course, I do spend a great deal of time in Dallas proper, drinking, eating and going to shows. But I live in Carrollton. I actually love it here, in fact. I’m not saying all suburbs are great – most certainly are not, but dangit-all-to-heck, C-town has…
The unveiling later this week of a political action committee to kill the Trinity toll road will be in and of itself an enormous watershed moment in local politics. Unheard of. The kind of people who oppose toll roads don’t have PACs in Dallas. C’mon. They don’t raise money for…
Talk about déjà vu. Here I am back in the ample auditorium of Rosemont Elementary, a modern school in North Oak Cliff with padded theater seating, thank God, attending yet another debate on the damned Trinity River toll road. I attended a debate on the Trinity River toll road in…
Music is all about the immortals. We talk about them all the time: the Ozzy Osbournes, the James Hetfields, and so on. We let these people into our lives. They become a part of us, helping us along as we grow up. The best of them are there for the…
Two stories in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News were bookends for the debate on school rigor. In one, three Dallas school board members launched a campaign against too much testing, saying it’s mean to the kids. In the other, the head of the biggest company by far in Dallas and one…
Last night’s Trinity River toll road debate in Oak Cliff was a barnburner. A crowd of 450-plus broke into repeated emotional applause for City Council member Scott Griggs, who delivered a series of speeches attacking the road that were a cross between Winston Churchill and Tom Cruise — powerful to…
When a panel discussion of the proposed Trinity toll road begins this evening at 6:30 pm at Rosemont Elementary, something will be quite different about it compared with the same kind of events during the run-up to an anti-Trinity road referendum seven years ago. Everything. Seven years ago the supporters…
Sometimes we reporters who write about the schools get so busy reporting on whether school board members have been engaging in fisticuffs with the staff and why the cops had to hustle a board member out of a school, we lose sight of the boring peripheral questions like whether the…
The Dallas Morning News editorial page subscribes to the belief that our mayor accomplishes a great good when he calls attention to disparities between the city’s white and not-white hemispheres. I assume the paper also would give itself credit for doing the same with its years-old editorial page campaign, which…
At the very warmest and most satisfying moment in Thanksgiving Day dinner yesterday, when all was right with the world and I felt truly thankful for my good fortune, a thought struck my skull like a hammer against a church bell. “What about the commenters?” On Thanksgiving Day, Hanukkah, Christmas,…
Dallas Schools yesterday released copies of the complaints against school system trustee Bernadette Nutall that have spurred an ongoing external investigation of her conduct. The complaints include a reference to something I reported here a week ago having to do with Nutall socking somebody. See also: Nutall Probe Will Include…
Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The Dallas City Council, local grocery chains and the Texas Retailers Association go at it for two years about a plastic bag ban. Last March at the end of a long, agonizing process, the council passes a deeply compromised ordinance that doesn’t…
