Talk about a showdown. Next January 19 in this city of just over a million souls, something in the neighborhood of 50,000 voters will show up at the polls–a pitiful showing predicted because of the timing of the election–and they will make fundamental decisions about the future of the city…
If this job craters, I have a fallback skill. I can work for the CIA! I’m qualified to read the official newspapers of authoritarian regimes and ferret out what’s really happening, because I spend a lot of time reading The Dallas Morning News. Latest good example: On October 3, the…
Picture this. Laura Miller as Mayor Pretend. Mary Poss as Mayor For Real. Believe it. If nothing else changes between now and the special election, that’s what could happen. The scenario goes like this: A fed-up, cynical, deeply frustrated Dallas electorate–probably including me–votes for and elects Miller in a special…
Having a great time, wish you were here. I’m jostling down a dusty lane high on the ridge of the levee in a big white van with canoes on top, driven by a Hemingwayesque guide who has a great mustache, hair below his shoulders and a crumpled Aussie bush hat…
All right, let’s get in the car and go settle this thing. A couple of weeks ago Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk shouted at me on the telephone and said I didn’t care about the “thousands of black families all over South Dallas” who won’t be protected from floods if the…
In the last week, the huge public-works campaign to rebuild the Trinity River through downtown has been rocked by revelations from Washington of deception and inefficiency, but the even greater devastation has been to the moral and political integrity of Mayor Ron Kirk and much of this city’s leadership. On…
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to come to any understanding of what has happened. Way in the back of my mind, I think I may have been looking for a personal escape route. The ground is unfamiliar. I have been very interested in gas masks…
So. We are going to send them to war. And, unlike the leadership that told us the Vietnam War would be easy and quick, President Bush has been straightforward in warning us this one will be long and hard. There may be a natural limit on what you can ask…
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there isn’t one thing wrong with the proposal to bring the Olympic games here in 2012. The Olympics boosters are still stuck with the fact that people don’t trust Dallas City Hall. And why should we? You won’t even believe what the…
I stare. Outside the window above my computer screen, rose hips on thorny stems are barely moving, making tiny anticipatory nods to a soft morning breeze. My wife calls down for me to come right away, something terrible at the edge of her voice. On the way up the stairs,…
The columnists and editorial writers at The Dallas Morning News were falling all over themselves last week, competing to find carefully coded ways of saying that putting the name “Jose Cuervo Tequila” on a plaque inside the new Latino Cultural Center would cause Mexicans to get drunk. Then at the…
Gee, I don’t even know how to tell you how much fun this could be. Just pull out your folding chairs, pop up some corn and get the kids out on the lawn. I think it may be time to watch the fireworks downtown. A group of stalwart grassroots community…
Already this year, even before it hit us with the big budget deficit, Dallas City Hall was telling the taxpayers about all the things the city couldn’t afford to do anymore. And guess what? In the middle of all this, we have to pay $4.6 to $10 million in a…
Hey, when you saw the story in The Dallas Morning News last week about how the city council is going to approve a $5 to $6 million settlement with half a dozen demoted police officials, did you happen to wonder what was going on? I know I did. Typical day…
On the 13th of next month, a movie based on a book I wrote will be released in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and about 16 other cities not including Dallas. The birthing of this movie, a five-year process, was a big deal for me. Called Bully, the…
So I put on my thinking cap. And I ask myself: all of this vote-cheating that cropped up in the recent District 6 city council runoff election between Dwaine Caraway and Ed Oakley. Did that just come out of nowhere? Did people just out of the blue start cheating elderly…
Apparently The Dallas Morning News, the city’s only daily newspaper, has no intention of telling you this story, so I will. You need to know that last Saturday’s District 6 city council run-off election was an earthquake. I’m not talking about who won. What made the election momentous was that…
What if the Dallas City Council suddenly developed a base of reasonable middle-class people who cared about the city? Who had their own money? Who had at least a tad of personal dignity and would not fall down in a slavering, social-climbing, dead damn faint if Ross Perot Jr. invited…
Some experts on church desecration, both in and out of law enforcement, are skeptical about the recent vandalism of St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church, a politically influential black church in East Dallas struck by vandals on May 3. A longtime African-American civil rights activist, brought here from Atlanta, told…
If you’re Terrell Bolton and you make $132,000 a year in base salary plus $20,000 a year in overtime as Dallas’ First Black Police Chief, sure, you’re a walking civil rights case. If somebody criticizes you, a bunch of civil rights-style pickets will surround that fool’s house in a hurry…
Maybe we should approach this biblically. In the book of Luke, we are told that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled in a census. Joseph, you may recall, went up from Galilee to the city of David, which was called Bethlehem, because…
Let me tell you a story. Sophia Dembling, a Dallas writer, sends The Dallas Morning News a letter a few weeks ago to make a point. She says in her letter that the words “bitch” and “whore,” directed recently at Dallas City Councilwoman Laura Miller by speakers and protesters supporting…
