Last legislative session, Representative Bill Zedler, a Republican from Arlington, wanted to hear about abortions in Texas. All of them. In great detail. Zedler filed a piece of legislation that would have required a woman having an abortion to fill out and submit to the state a detailed questionnaire about…
Yesterday afternoon, we were summoned down to City Hall via a text message from Paula Blackmon, Mayor Mike Rawlings’ chief of staff. After several long months of silence, it appeared that there was finally going to be some semi-official word on the new regulations for gas drilling within Dallas city…
Here’s what we know: a guy named Adam who works at the Dallas County Clerk’s office was late to the office this morning. Fourteen minutes late, to be precise, according to the “Kronos Workforce Timekeeper System used by Dallas County.” So says the rather officious form Adam was given when…
Back in July, the Irving-based Boy Scouts of America reiterated that it won’t be having any openly gay folks in its organization. Now, they’ve lost another corporate sponsor as a result of that policy, the American Independent reports. The Merck Foundation issued a press release on December 5, saying it…
Perhaps you were hoping that the upcoming legislative session wouldn’t be yet another round of conservative lawmakers vying with one another to show just how deeply and sincerely anti-abortion they are. Or maybe that’s exactly what you look for in a lawmaker: an eagle eye and a vise grip on…
Seven months ago, the influential anti-abortion advocacy group Americans United for Life released its annual report, Defending Life 2012, featuring an enthusiastic blurb from Governor Rick Perry, who called the report “ammunition in a fight that is far from over.” In return, AUL was full of praise for Texas, saying…
Last legislative session, your lawmakers in the Texas Legislature cut $73.6 million from the state’s family planning budget, a move which, impressively, has somehow resulted in far fewer patients being served, for more money per patient. Don’t ask us how they managed that one. As Emily Ramshaw writes this morning…
Back in September, using the format of a totally ridiculous board game, we recapped the fight over gas drilling on land owned by the city of Dallas. At that point, the drilling task force had long since wrapped up its work, and a vote from the City Council on new…
It’s a warm fall morning near the Texas State Capitol’s south steps, and there’s a fight brewing. “Don’t be an idiot!” a man shouts at a small crowd making its way up toward the Capitol. He is David Stokes, a self-described “street preacher” from Houston, arrived specially in Austin for…
It’s getting near Christmas, and as far as we’re aware, Texas has yet to secede from the Union. Even Governor Rick Perry thinks it’s a bad idea, and he looks like the sort of man who’d snort wasabi on a bet. But the Texas Nationalist Movement is still feeling pretty…
In June of this year, Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton sued a number of people who dropped by their rural farmhouse in Liberty County last year, people who mistakenly believed the couple had a mass grave containing dozens of dismembered bodies on the property. Those people included the Liberty County…
In the last legislative session, Texas lawmakers cut the state’s family planning budget by two-thirds, a loss of around $73.6 million over the next two years. The reason behind this, naturally, was that “family planning” is clearly a secret code word for “abortion.” “Of course this is a war on…
This morning, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the conflict in Syria had reached “new and appalling heights of brutality and violence,” as the clashes between government troops and opposition forces drag on. An estimated 40,000 people have died in the conflict, which began in March 2011. The Assad regime continues…
As we’ve mentioned more than once, Dallas Animal Services has been dealing with a few serious unresolved issues, some of them stretching back years: the HVAC system in the shelter doesn’t work and apparently never really has, leading to stifling temperatures in the summer months; the shelter and field divisions…
There must be easier ways to make a living than faking car accidents and submitting false insurance claims for those fake car accidents. It also sounds like a ton of work to set up fake chiropractic clinics to generate fraudulent medical records and bills to submit with those fake insurance…
We generally don’t actively want to write about Glenn Beck, for more or less the same reasons we don’t go around touching other people’s cold sores. But sometimes, up there in his Southlake media fortress, the man does things that put us in the sad position of feeling obliged to…
Officer J.D. Tippit came home for lunch on November 22, 1963. He rarely ever had time to leave his patrol long enough to do that, and his wife, Marie, scrambled to fix him a turkey sandwich and set the table. “I got to see him one last time,” she said…
The weirdness surrounding disgraced attorney Tom Corea has several levels. There’s the obvious one, in which he was sued by several former clients who said he’d stolen their settlement money; indicted for felony theft by the Dallas County District Attorney’s office; had disbarment proceedings initiated against him by the State…
On Tuesday, Governor Rick Perry and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst announced their support for a bill filed by Flower Mound State Senator Jane Nelson, which would require people applying for Temporary Assistant for Need Families (TANF) funds to be drug tested. At the same press conference, they also announced that…
This week, to our great excitement, Texas legislators started pre-filing bills for the upcoming legislative session, which kicks off in January. Those bills will include State Senator Jane Nelson of Flower Mound’s proposal to drug test potential welfare recipients and a measure from Longview’s David Simpson that would make it…
At this point, you’ve probably heard just about enough about petitions, particularly the one lobbying the White House to let Texas “peacefully secede” from the United States . It’s got over 100,000 signatures at this point, our managing editor Patrick Williams thinks the whole thing is deeply, pants-shittingly disturbing, and…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: There’s still some very stale, deeply discounted Halloween candy kicking around the aisles at CVS, Christmas music has suddenly overtaken your dentist’s office, and Texas legislators have begun pre-filing bills for the upcoming legislative session. The session doesn’t kick off until January,…
