Digging back through old files, I can see some patterns emerging that I missed back in the day. For example, the connection between Willis Johnson, the luckiest radio host in the world, and Ross Perot Jr. Johnson is a close personal and political associate of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we meet the people in the local music scene that you don’t see on stages. Lazo’s experience with record labels has had her working with a variety of national touring acts, but the list of artists that are based in our hometown alone is…
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that string. Now everybody’s talking about Willis Johnson. But nobody’s got the connection. Last week Brett Shipp of Channel 8 reported on contracts between the county and Southern Dallas political consultant Willis Johnson, and over the weekend The Dallas Morning News…
Colleen McCain Nelson debuts a new political column today on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News in which she holds up my former hometown, Detroit, as the arch example of what Dallas needs not to be. She’s writing about Mayor Dave Bing’s initiative to withdraw scarce city services…
Should have seen this one coming. Hope it’s not my own fault. On Monday I reported here that the city is going to spend some $76,000 to have its screwed-up and unusable fake rapids in the Trinity River digitally modeled by an engineering company that builds sewage treatment plants. That’s…
Dear Mexican: A few years back when I was in high school, my social studies teacher and the leader of our high school M.E.Ch.A. club had deep resentment toward the Spaniards/conquistadors who killed hundreds — probably thousands — of Aztecs. He went so far as to deny that his own…
The classic ’50s radio show Queen for a Day always opened with the line “Would YOU like to be queen for a day?” Presumably for the last several weeks a good many Dallas politicians and City Hall insiders have been greeting each other in darkened corridors with a whispered variation…
If you missed Brett Shipp’s Willis Johnson story on WFAA-Channel 8 last night, you need to go give it a gander here. I also have a column in this week’s paper version of Unfair Park talking about Johnson, a radio host who is a crucial but mysteriously low-profile figure in…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we meet the people in the local music scene that you don’t see on stages. It’s such a cool thing when our LMA subjects have the humble beginning of simply being a fan. Even more exhilarating is the fan who elevates to a position of…
Jack Floyd (I don’t really know Jacquielynn personally, but I’m told that’s what cool people call her) has a good column today behind The Dallas Morning News pay well today about making downtown Dallas fun. I know. I know. Right off the top it sounds like a dreadfully dreary topic,…
Somewhere in the saga of the Dallas Wave, formerly known as the Standing Wave, there is sanity. Things happen for a reason. I take this as an article of faith, but my faith is sorely tested by the wave. The standing wave is a manmade rapids in the Trinity River…
Look, I hate it when people tell me stuff and then won’t tell me how they know it. I generally apply about a 50 percent discount to information like that. So I’m about to do the same thing to you: tell you a bunch of stuff I have been learning…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *I know one practice doesn’t make a career and, as Bill Parcells says, let’s hold off on shipping that bust to Canton, but Cowboys’ first-round draft pick Tyron Smith looks like a…
Hey, I was out of town last week when the August issue of D hit the streets — well, given the magazine’s target demo, perhaps we should say it hit the winding lanes and parkways — with an essay titled “Let’s Ditch the Trinity River Toll Road.” Wow. Pretty remarkable…
Dear Mexican: A few years ago, my girlfriend and I visited the beautiful city of Merida in the Yucatan. We were surprised to see a sentence in our guidebook warning us to be on the lookout for Mennonites peddling queso in the mercado. Sure enough, we bumped into a bearded,…
Quite a bit of chest-puffing harrumphing holier-than-thou going on over at The Dallas Morning News editorial page today, with a self-congratulatory ditty about that dirty Rupert Murdoch, about those nasty dirty Brit tabloids and about how happy the News is with itself for being … well … you know …..
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we meet the people in the local music scene that you don’t see on stages. Scotty Mankoff can be a bit menacing to witness at a live music show, with his hulking frame draped in black clothing, a flowing, curly mane of long dark…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Dear NFL owners, you’re a slimy lot. Signed, Everyone. Basically on Thursday the owners ratified a proposal, not an agreement. They made a deal with themselves. Then — with darting eyes…
Dear Ask a Wetback: You and your fellow law-breaking wetbacks don’t like Arizona’s SB 1070? Too damn bad. Trot back to Make Sick o and protest there, see where it gets you. If you’d work half as hard cleaning up your dump nation as you do sneaking in here, your…
If the ongoing FBI corruption probe is based on things that have gone wrong with county government, the feds may be in trouble. Really bad things happen at the county on really good days. If you walk into county offices and it looks like the entire psych ward has escaped…
OK, let’s get over the thing about “no one has been indicted” in the ongoing federal corruption investigation of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. It’s true. No one has been indicted. But let’s be real. Somebody will be. I am working on a column for next week’s paper about…
I have been looking back at the federal corruption conviction that forced the late Al Lipscomb off the Dallas City Council in 2000. That conviction was set aside two years later by a conservative panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. We have lessons, people…
