Opinion & Commentary

From this rag and that bit of bone, a picture emerges of what Dallas has really been doing with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal housing money all these years. It’s not a portrait of theft or castles in Spain, but it’s not a pretty picture. Instead what we…

The Dallas Morning News has an editorial this morning suggesting that the Dallas school district put a top internal investigator on leave last month to cover something up. The editorial is a development of some good writing Mike Hashimoto has been doing on the paper’s opinion blog, and, for once,…

An unquestioned tenet of local political culture is that white-owned companies that want to do business on the turf officially designated by Dallas as “southern (black, maybe brown) Dallas” must pay a toll. Five days ago I reproduced here a 2009 Dallas Morning News editorial that gave an explicit rendition…

Screengrab via YouTube Back before he was the host of The Daily Show — back even before Josh Hartnett chopped off his fingers and stabbed him in the eye in The Faculty — Jon Stewart was the host of his own eponymous show. It aired for almost two years, first…

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…

No list concerning music books could ever be definitive. There’s simply far too many writers, artists and genres one could choose to explore: everything from the better autobiographies (say, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles or Miles Davis’ Miles) and top tier hip-hop books (like Book of Rap Lists) to jazz guides (The…

In yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, columnist Steve Blow apologized for calling me a “tinfoil hat” (nutcase) in 2008 when I reported that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was sabotaging a major shipping development in his own backyard while having compromising links to the powerful Perot family, owners of a…

On my way from work to City Hall I drive by the Palestinian demonstrations in Dealey Plaza. At home in the evening I see Texas Governor Rick Perry (not my favorite guy) on the TV news leading a rally for Israel. The anchorman on the TV news shows me a…

Oh, I swore I wasn’t going to respond to the stuff yesterday by Tod Robberson on The Dallas Morning News opinion blog yesterday, but now “Wylie H Dallas,” the scarily well-informed omnipresent pseudonymous blog commenter, has got me all stirred up. This morning he posted an old Steve Blow column…

If you listen to country music, it’s almost assured that you feel like everyone is dumping on your favorite genre as of late. As “bro-country” increasingly becomes the butt of the joke for serious music critics and old-school fans alike, this unfortunate plague on country music’s artistic house continues to…

Free Money Is Bad Dollars from HUD are the root of much evil at City Hall. Most of the comments that people offer on blog items on our web page are interesting. Some can be crazy or spam or truly offensive. But whenever I skim over the comments and fail…

This is an addendum to a thing I wrote yesterday about the recent indictment of Dallas’ most powerful county officials on bribery and tax charges. One thing we all have to do in order to figure this out is the math. We can talk all day about collective guilt –…

In a new series, Choice Cuts, Jonathan Patrick talks with artists – both local and international – about their favorite records. Most jazz musicians fall into one of two avenues. They either approach their performances with the instincts of a sculptor or with those of a bulldozer. Dallas’ Dennis Gonzalez,…

You could almost forget about the indictment last week of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, put it out of your mind’s eye, not even think where it will end and better spend your time thinking about trucking. It’s the more compelling story. Logistics is the business of taking cargo…

Photo courtesy of FLICKR/Takahiro Kyono While rock ‘n’ roll is necessarily classified as a form of pop music, it is actually an idiom whose radical, destructive primitivism established a new type of socio-cultural disorder. It’s about rejection of the status quo and celebration of the dis-imprisonment it instills. Always exploited…

Reporters do not gasp, generally speaking, but there were muttered exclamations that might as well have been gasps when Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, age 64, was led into a large and formal federal courtroom this afternoon. His hands were manacled behind his back, his awkward gait in leg-irons…

Arrests by federal agents this morning of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price on bribery conspiracy charges, along with charges against three associates, have set off a new round in everybody’s favorite courthouse whisper game, “Who’s flipped?” Multiple sources this morning say federal agents have arrested Price, who was indicted…

Seeing Tim McGraw in concert today isn’t the spectacle it was in 1996, when he was riding high on being one of country music’s biggest superstars. McGraw may have settled down slightly in his later years, but fans at the Atlanta stop of McGraw’s Sundown Heaven Town tour earlier this…

Late yesterday, just before finally answering my days-old question about it, the city manager sent a memo to the City Council characterizing $800,000 repaid to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a kind of technical accounting error and no big deal. Most of it involves money stolen by…

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 8 2014: The Search for Mary Suhm Heats Up with Rumors of a Trinity Road Goon Squad ORIGINAL POST Is the former city manager still at City Hall? Maybe, maybe not, but her spirit still reigns. Last week I made a new hat-cam movie for our news blog…