Wow. I always thought Dwaine Caraway was a pretty good-looking guy, but there must be something nasty and scary about him. He sure put the fear of God in the school district last week. After Caraway and a bunch of pissed-off parents jaw-boned the city’s public school system for two…

Dallas Area Rapid Transit was conceived in sin. Dallas wanted to father a light rail system, but in order to get the money to pay for it, Dallas married its first cousin, Suburbia. Now DART, the progeny of this cynical union, is sadly, uh…not quite right. DART announced in early…

You know all those people you see riding the DART train? It costs you $3.66 every time one of them gets on a train. Maybe you’re like me and believe it’s worth it, within limits. Theoretically we’ll all be better off if DART can get more people out of cars…

Dirt skirts. Understand dirt skirts, and you understand the Earth. Some weeks ago I received e-mails from an esteemed neighbor warning me of an important City Hall issue having to do with “dirt skirts.” I wrongly assumed we were talking about our perennial East Dallas problem with prostitutes. Dirt skirts,…

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be a better person. Another is to do a better job cleaning up after the dogs in my backyard. Whichever comes first. The dog thing I can do. The better person plan is in conflict, I must admit, with some of what…

DART, the regional mass transit agency, announced a couple weeks ago that it had underestimated the cost of building a new billion-dollar suburban rail line by, oh, say, give or take, you know… about a billion dollars. Was gonna cost $1 billion. Now the DART staff says it’s gonna cost…

It has been decades since Ron Cowart was a grunt in Vietnam or a SWAT cop on the streets of Dallas, but he still has the bearing. Now head of the city’s homeless outreach team, he is more gray about the ears than when we met a good 20 years…

I have always been a member of the Church of We-Have-to-Save-Downtown. Whatever that means. I sing in the choir. It’s a lifelong expression of my profound wannabe urban cosmopolitology. A religion. Why? Obvious. Because downtown is…uh, well it’s down. And it’s…you know…town. Now all of a sudden I have doubts…

So if East Dallas is Cool Dallas, then everybody in East Dallas must be cool with each other, right? But in fact it’s a strange law of human nature that nobody gets more un-cool with each other than cool people. Yeah, and that is exactly what I am telling myself…

Sorry. One more column about The Dallas Morning News and the recent Trinity River toll road referendum, then I promise to do a twelve-steps thing. I think there is a larger theme–the difference between the Dallas that believes in telling the truth and the Dallas that doesn’t get it or…

This is one of the worst deadline pickles I think I have ever encountered in my 200 years as a newspaper writer. I am writing this at the end of the week before the Trinity toll road election. The results from the election will come in about an hour after…

Wait a minute. Think about this. The main argument for keeping the toll road inside the park downtown is that it can’t go anywhere else because of the cost. I just looked at files in the offices of the people who would build the road. It’s flat-out untrue. This is…

Months of debate. Endless hours of colorful accusation, innuendo, inference and implication. More hydrological data than a soul can handle. And what does it all come down to? Yes, we have no bananas. In next month’s Trinity River toll road referendum, do you vote yes for no toll road? Or…

How about that amazing line-up of politicians and business groups put together by Carol Reed, the political guru running the Vote No! campaign for the November toll road referendum? The entire city council except for Angela Hunt. The entire county commissioners court. The entire congressional delegation. The United Brotherhood of…

Black racial treason. That is the underlying theme in this week’s federal indictments at Dallas City Hall. It’s the same theme that ran through the indictment and prosecution of former city council member Al Lipscomb eight years ago. Selling the black community down the river. In that case the white…

Here’s what happens. A blogger kicks up some legitimate interest in the way school district employees use their school district credit cards. The city’s only daily newspaper piles on, trying to rip off the blogger’s story and turn it into its own investigative exposé. The superintendent of schools panics. He…

Mitchell Rasansky, Dallas City Council member, is somebody I like. I just do. When you like somebody, you typically can’t say just why. I can’t. I just do. Which is what makes this so hard. Rasansky, a gentleman, philanthropist and self-made success in the real estate business, made his bones…

The nightmare anniversaries of both 9/11 and Katrina are upon us—again the dream-warped tracking shots of corpses and tangled rot, outstretched arms imploring helicopters from hopeless rooftops. A basic element in both horror stories was the failure of engineering or politics to protect us. Especially in the Katrina story, what…

OK, so you want me to feel guilty about picking on the county judge for being non compos mentis. Jim Foster is an accidental officeholder, swept in last November on a countywide anti-Bush, Democratic tide. Give the man a break, you say. He’s a guy who owns an alarm business…

Maybe you’re not like me. You don’t explain life as science fiction. So you don’t think of Dallas politics as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I do. Body Snatchers is the movie where the space pods grow in your basement, and then they turn into you. I forget what…

President Bush said last week he doesn’t think Congress should raise the gas tax to pay for new bridges until it does something first about all the gas tax money wasted on so-called “earmark” projects—projects that don’t meet federal standards but get done anyway as political favors to Congress members’…