This is an open letter to U.S. Senators James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, John McCain of Arizona, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, and to U.S. Representative Don Young of Alaska and anyone else in Congress with an interest in the stalled surface transportation bill:…
If you read the fake-drug report, you’ll get the picture. The fact that nobody’s in charge and nobody’s accountable at City Hall doesn’t stop at City Hall. It trickles down. It’s a culture. Terence Hart and Lena Levario, the lawyers who conducted the investigation for the city and wrote the…
Come with me on a journey deep into the Dumpster of nitty-gritty gut-level local politics, down where the money meets the road and virtue is the lesser of two evils. Don’t forget your boots and a clothespin for your nose. A month ago, Mayor Laura Miller accused District 8 Councilman…
You can’t tell people from other places about Dallas–even when they move here. It’s too wacked. Start trying to explain to them how we didn’t have the ’60s: All of a sudden they have to make a cell call. The best we can do is live with it. But every…
Try this one on for size. What if Dallas is so screwed up that the only way to get it going right is radical surgery? What if we went back to something like the old business-guy committees that used to run everything before the yankee federal courts stuck their noses…
Maybe this is the way to put it, in order to get anybody’s attention in this town. Maybe I should forget about the fact that we have a deeply corrupted, dangerously out-of-control police department and just talk about the money. I pay about $1,000 a year in city of Dallas…
Jim Bryant is 75 years old, walks with a cane, sometimes suffers a dry throat from medication. He gets tired. But Jim Bryant is stubborn about principle. Today he has taken his cane in hand and come downtown to City Hall yet again to continue his quarter-century-long battle with the…
Wouldn’t you know. All the time I criticize the Dallas City Council and say they’ve screwed up, and they get mad at me because they think they’re doing such a damn stellar job. So last week I walk out of a city council session thinking for once they really did…
Wow. Does anybody at Dallas City Hall ever look out back? There are so many homeless people picnicking, camping and taking leaks back there, it looks like the building was designed by I.M. Pee, not I.M. Pei. All of the homeless people who used to employ the public library and…
At the end of July, flooding in this part of Texas killed four people and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses. Joe Tillotson is mayor of Lancaster, once a countrified farming community in Southern Dallas County, now a suburban boomtown. He was quick to place blame where he believed it…
A couple of years ago the New York Daily News published a powerful editorial about the New York City public school system. The paper said the biggest thing the city’s huge staff of school administrators needed was more middle-class parents to tell them what to do. “They need squeaky-wheel parents…
You. You better step over here and get a program. Once the city council gets back from summer vacation and the game starts up again, you’re never going to keep track without one. Major play ahead. Mayor Laura Miller and the old downtown business boys have come to a deal…
Everybody wants the new Dallas police chief to fix everything. Obviously. Sure. When he’s done with that, I wish he’d come over to my house and fix my computer. The problem is fix what? Fix it how? That’s where we get into trouble. Some of these problems are older than…
All the time, I rag on people, I criticize, I say negative stuff. For a change, I want to do something positive. Problem with that: my skill set. After so long as a reporter, what else am I qualified to do? Great idea: debt collector. A lot of it’s the…
So here’s what I’m wondering. Guy calls up the Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency and tells them one of their tow-truck drivers just went bananas and pulled a gun on him in traffic. What does DART do? They call in their guy, right? Grill him. Then they call the citizen…
I’m all for Wizard of Oz voyages of self-discovery. I’m just not sure it’s fair to do them when you’re the mayor. But say this for Dallas Mayor Laura Miller. In recent weeks she has been candid about her change of heart since getting elected to her first full term…
Dallas school Superintendent Mike Moses, such a success for four years, has misstepped seriously in handling the inflammatory issue of school attendance zone re-mapping. It’s bad enough that some people–by no means all, but some–are whispering that Dr. Moses may have reached the city limits of his gifts. This is…
So by now you already know City Hall is a magic show, where all the tricks are based on misdirection. Misdirection is when they get you to focus on the pretty girl in a harem suit so you won’t see the trap door. We’re about to get a good example…
We have a new police chief in Dallas. That’s scary for us. If you haven’t been in town long, you wonder why. Here’s what you have to understand: We’ve been through a series of high-level local officials who have behaved in very disturbing fashions on television. We were watching. We…
The Dallas Morning News special section a week ago, “Dallas at the Tipping Point,” was really strong stuff. I know, I know. You’re just waiting for me to find fault with it. After all, the News, such a booster these years, finally presented statistical evidence to show that Dallas is…
The news coverage of Dallas’ public hospital is always operatic. In a gleaming castle high above Stemmons Freeway, hundreds of Dr. Schweitzer clones in white coats practice noble healing arts on the poor. But the castle is under ceaseless attack from an army of right-wing Nazi meatballs screaming, “Die, poor…
Imagine it this way. You own a vacant building. A guy wants to rent it for a business. You rent it to him for a percentage of his business revenue. But you never ask to see his business’ books, cash register tapes, anything. You never even stroll by to see…
