Talk about mixed feelings. I’m trying hard to be honest with myself about the big blow-up over the Dallas school system spending $57,000 yesterday to take 5,000 fifth-grade boys to a war movie while the fifth-grade girls had to stay back at school to watch a movie about a spelling…
State Rep. Eric Johnson, Democrat of southern Dallas and Mesquite, has an essay on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News today describing Fair Park as a “powerful economic engine” and a “jewel of our city” whose economic power should be harnessed to improve life in surrounding poor neighborhoods…
Dear Mexican: My family for six generations have been born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. Right now, almost every Republican in the state is trying to work redistricting to cut out the bumper crop of Mexican-American candidates. They passed voter ID laws recently, and you begin to get the idea…
This is how far behind the curve I am. The Dallas City Council is tied up in knots debating how to develop a successful horse park in a poor part of the city. I’m asking myself, “What the hell is a horse park?” Is it like a dog park? People…
We still have to read between the lines to glimpse the bottom line on the Komen Foundation’s attack on Planned Parenthood, but the slowly emerging truth of the matter doesn’t bode well. Karen Handel, the Komen executive who resigned yesterday, has a weird talent for letting the cat out of…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we get to know the people behind the scenes in Dallas/Fort Worth music. If you play your cards right with a local music venue, all you need is a huge picture window as your marketing tool. Certainly anyone who has strolled by LaGrange and…
Oh, boy. Another chance to say something good about Detroit. Nothing gets a bigger rise out of a certain element among you loyal Lawners than when I utter anything even faintly complimentary about my hometown. For reasons I may never fully understand, I would incite less mouth-foaming if I sang…
Wait, wait. We haven’t finished the conversation yet about whether Rick Perry has embarrassed Texas so badly we can never again show our faces outside the state. Are you telling me now we’ve got to have the same conversation already about Nancy Brinker? What if people start connecting the dots?…
Some good may come out of the Komen Foundation’s hard right turn on abortion this week. It was about time, anyway, for a fundamental re-examination of Komen by people committed to the cause of cancer research. You’ll find a good summary of reasons to be worried about giving to Komen,…
Let’s check back in, shall we, on our county’s “homeland security” program by which it is supposed to protect us from terrorist attack, massive flooding, tornado, pandemic, poison gas, things like that. I just want to see if we all understand what took place last week, and then I will…
May I offer one more word about Joseph Drake, the Dallas teacher put on suspension last week after sending an argumentative email to school board member Edwin (“Snidely Whiplash”) Flores? Fourth-grade teacher Joseph Drake, who told Flores that his depiction of teachers as lazy slug-a-beds was demeaning, has now been…
Dallas City Councilman Dwaine Caraway bushwacked his way through the forest along the Trinity River this morning to see for himself the place where pig blood from a packing plant turned the river red. “I am in no way trying to interfere with the city’s official investigation of this matter,”…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we get to know the people behind the scenes in Dallas/Fort Worth music. It blogs. It books cool local music shows. It’s a must-follow Facebook and Twitter page. It promotes bands, free of charge. So what is Dallas Distortion Music, exactly? Essentially, DDM is…
By now you’re probably aware that an unnamed DISD teacher is trying to organize a “Leap Day” sick-out protest by Dallas public school teachers. I hope it’s just the beginning. I want to suggest a bunch of other ways public school teachers can get around the state’s stupid “right to…
The back and forth between the city and Columbia Packing Pant on the January 19 river-of-pig-blood incident is fascinating on a bunch of levels. If nothing else, it would seem to raise urgent questions about the way industrial facilities all over Dallas pump waste into the city’s sanitary sewer system…
The worst thing that happens in this town, and it happens on a cyclical basis, is the official Scarlet Letter shunning of some person who did the right thing. It’s happening again. Two real estate outfits in Dallas, Odyssey Residential and Frazier Revitalization, are fighting for the same $20 million-plus…
Dear Mexican: It’s so sad to see your wimpy answers. Your replies scream self-hatred and self-shame for your raza. No plan or desire to fix Mexico’s problems. You’re a puto with no huevos. My DREAM Act would be that you Mexicans would stop groveling to gringos, and scream about fixing…
Did anybody else feel less than homeland-secure after yesterday’s fandango with the Dallas County Homeland Security Advisory Committee? First, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price tried to re-appoint to the committee the founder of an international anti-Semitic hate group — a guy best known locally for threatening to bring rifles…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we get to know the people behind the scenes in Dallas/Fort Worth music. Lee Russell has spent the last 27 years doing live sound at just about every major amphitheater in the country, traveled the world with some really big productions, and is the…
It looks like Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, long a puppet of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, finally has hit the Price wall. Jenkins has stopped action on the appointment of Price protégé Aaron McCarthy, aka Aaron Michaels, to the county’s “homeland security advisory committee,” whatever the hell that’s…
Two years ago I toured the area around Columbia Packing Company on East 11th Street in Oak Cliff with city council member Dwaine Caraway and his wife, state Representative Barbara Mallory Caraway. The Caraways told me shocking stories of guts from nearby meat-packing operations piled in steaming heaps in the…
Wait a minute. Forgive me, but I must misuse and abuse a bit of Dylan Thomas here to suggest we should not let Rick Perry go quite so gentle into that good night. I’m reading a lot of crap about how he bombed in his presidential campaign because he was…
