Does truth get more difficult the smarter you are? On August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton told a Washington grand jury, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is….[I]f ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is…

Last night’s four-hour “hearing” on the Trinity River toll road was one big toothache for most of the 100 or so folks on folding chairs in the very gloomy, Soviet-seeming Dallas Convention Center Arena. I put hearing in quotes because it was clear from the very outset that the event…

The Dallas Independent School District board of trustees seems to be moving toward Draconian cuts in staff and budget for the district’s two most distinctive programs, magnet schools and learning centers. The board appears likely to acquiesce to the urgings of Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, who is telling them that pressure…

I paid a visit today to the Margaret Hunt Hill suspension bridge construction site on the Trinity River because a frequent correspondent had expressed concern about the effects of recent heavy rains. His worry was about the two big pier footings right by the river’s edge: When viewed from the…

With help from Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, The Dallas Morning News has been painting the developer of the city’s inland port shipping and warehousing center as a racist. In a story in the paper on April 12, Morris was quoted as saying…

At 2:30 p.m. today 14th Civil District Judge Eric Moye put the Planet Earth back where it belongs, much to the relief of people clinging to its surface in one East Dallas neighborhood. In the infamous “dirt skirts” case, a zoning dispute over building heights, Moye ruled that city of…

Angela Hunt has delivered a sound thwacking to fellow city council member Ron Natinsky and Assistant City Manager A.C. Gonzalez over some loose-lipped claims Natinsky and Gonzalez have been making about our upcoming referendum on a city-owned hotel downtown.She says Natinsky and Gonzalez, in their eagerness to get people to…

Yesterday Dallas Morning News managing editor George Rodrigue took issue with my April 1 column in which I took issue with his attack on the Dallas Observer last month. At this point, I’m sure it would be better for everybody if George and I were locked in a sound-proofed room…

The crisis over the Dallas levee system represents a total failure of the traditional leadership class in this city. We can and will argue for years about why this happened, but the important thing now is that it did. The mayor lied. City council members, with the exception of Angela…

Well, I think I got some interesting stuff here.The city keeps telling people they’re going to “fix” the Trinity River levees. Don’t much think so. Looks to me like a whole lot of the existing levee system along the Trinity is going to have be torn out and replaced.My column…

I’m already getting calls from my Republican friends (I have some! Swear!) who have seen the Todd Gillman story that just went up on The Dallas Morning News’s site. In it, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk tells Gillman he’s really pissed that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is bringing…

Astute Friend of Unfair Park “Wylie H.” drilled into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ report on the Trinity River levees yesterday evening and found the real horror story that goes almost unmentioned in this morning’s Dallas Morning News account of the report: the story of the day we almost…

Let’s begin with the assumption that you, as reader and citizen, do give a damn what’s going to happen along the Trinity River through downtown, where the biggest public works campaign in the city’s history seems to have become a big mess. Let’s also assume you do not care too…

Month or so ago, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price called me up and reamed me out for suggesting he may be carrying water for Ross Perot Jr. and the Perot-dominated Alliance freight airport in Fort Worth. The commissioner told me he barely knows Mr. Perot and said he couldn’t…

For 11 years the Dallas Observer has been reporting the existence of serious, fundamental life-and-death design errors in the Trinity River project, a huge public-works undertaking to rebuild the river through downtown Dallas alongside a new highway and parks. Above all else, this was to be a flood-safety project, but…

Steve Blow writes today on The Dallas Morning News’s Metro Blog about Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, the Trinity River toll road and Blow’s own support of Leppert in the past:Yet I don’t feel misled by the mayor. In thinking about it, I finally hit upon the pertinent word for me:…

By now I’m way way too deep into the story of the Trinity River Corridor Project. I have actually developed a kind of side interest — a hobby, maybe — involving the history of the Trinity River Project. I’ll know it’s time to see a doctor when I start collecting…

Mayor Tom Leppert and The Dallas Morning News are hell-bent for leather to invest half a billion bucks in public money in a city-owned convention “headquarters” hotel downtown to save the city’s convention business. But should we stop and reflect on the fact that the decline in the city’s convention…