Talk about mixed feelings this morning. On the one hand thanks to a youthful experience I would rather not recount here in colorful detail, I know exactly how Dallas school board member Bernadette Nutall feels about getting rousted by the cops earlier this week in a Dallas school building. My…
News media continue to present a picture of Ebola transmission that is significantly inaccurate by omission. They assert much more certainty than the science justifies. The version repeated like a mantra in most accounts — only direct physical contact with an infectious person — is wrong on its face and…
News that Ebola virus had escaped Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and invaded the city in the body of an infected nurse was the last straw. It’s not the virus that’s going to drive us crazy. It’s the officials who keep making stupid promises that they have no ability to fulfill…
Big teachable moment right now in the Dallas school system — huge! — and the school board and superintendent should rush to take advantage of it. I’m talking about the deal I reported here yesterday in which the superintendent called school district cops to physically evict a school board member…
Yesterday morning Dallas school district cops forcibly removed school board member Bernadette Nuttall from Billy Earl Dade middle school on Grand Avenue in South Dallas after Nuttall told them, “Go ahead and arrest me.” They didn’t. They just put her out of the building. But both Nuttall and a school…
Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, speaking on 7/31/2014: “It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards.” “We have quarantine stations at…
Before I get on my high horse, I usually check back upstream to see what sort of feet of clay I may have myself on an issue. Great thing and terrible thing about the Internet. It’s all still there. So this morning before leaping to the saddle to whack people…
One great service Dallas could render to the rest of the country, should the dust ever settle on the local Ebola story, would be a thorough, no-holds-barred post mortem on information sharing. I am already hearing from people behind the scenes, speaking off the record, that there has been significant…
Annie Clark is having all the fun these days. She does her best to hide it, be it as a would-be cult leader or a guitar-shredding robot. But, as happened on several occasions at Austin City Limits last weekend, it still comes through with the occasional smirk or beaming smile:…
The Lockey/MacKenzie federal whistle-blower lawsuit accusing Dallas of deliberate racial segregation, dismissed last year because the judge said I had already blown the whistle, is back in court in all new clothes, filed Friday, this time with less of me and more of former City Council member Angela Hunt and…
The weird shadow government nobody knows about but that runs everything, called “THE COG!,” headquartered near Six Flags amusement park in Arlington, is cooking up a plan to ram a new highway down the city’s throat even if the city votes against it. Well, that would be my interpretation of…
The commenters are already whetting their knives on Stephen Young’s piece here a bit earlier reporting that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price has raised the issue of racism in the treatment of Ebola Patient Zero, Thomas Eric Duncan, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. But maybe we could all acknowledge…
The Lockey/MacKenzie federal whistle-blower lawsuit accusing Dallas of deliberate racial segregation, dismissed last year because the judge said I had already blown the whistle, is back in court in all new clothes, filed Friday, this time with less of me and more of former City Council member Angela Hunt and…
The past few weeks have been pretty good to Texas music festival goers. The last two weekends of September saw North Texas welcome in two of its most promising events, with Oaktopia landing in Denton the first week and Index Fest taking over Deep Ellum on the next. While still…
There has been much more talk in Dallas the last few days about the dangers of panic than about the dangers of Ebola. In the meantime if we are paying attention we must notice by now that our vaunted Western industrialized defenses against contagion are riddled with holes. We know…
A major theme — a very dangerous one — in the reaction here to the arrival of Ebola is the notion that we are protected by our cultural and economic superiority from the kind of contagion now in Africa and that all we need to do is remain calm. I…
There’s a power-story making the rounds — I just heard it for the first time a couple weeks ago — about why people in the business community are changing their minds on the Trinity River toll road. It goes like this: “Oh, no, Angela Hunt was not right. Absolutely not…
Today in multiple stories, our only and always comforting local daily, The Dallas Morning News, reiterates the official public line of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control: that physical contact with a person suffering symptoms of Ebola disease is the only mechanism of transmission by which the Ebola virus can…
I have a column that hasn’t quite been published yet that I would like to withdraw in advance. Well, not withdraw. More like re-draw. I don’t think it’s possible to correct something you haven’t said yet, is it? So let’s think of this more in the vein of an expansion…
Old hippie, nanny-state, fault-finding, problem-centric, negative-minded, knee-jerk liberals — and I speak only of myself — were quick enough to jump all over Highland Park school district last week for banning seven books from the high school curriculum. Now I guess we’re under some kind of obligation to come back…
Just heard a good one this morning about another visit by the toll road goon squad. The back story is about a prominent person who let slip recently that she had changed her mind on the proposed 10-lane Trinity toll road through a park cutting off downtown from the river…
Photo courtesy of EB MediaBy Chris Gray and Matthew Keever HONORABLE MENTION: SUNNY SWEENEY Thus far mainstream success has eluded Sunny Sweeney, but not for lack of either talent or trying. According to her Facebook page, Sweeney (a former standup comic) has now played the Grand Ole Opry 41 times…
