How cool would it be to have a beautiful urban lake downtown, surrounded by pocket parks and amphitheaters, where a person could carry a bag lunch on a cool day and maybe even rent a canoe? That’s what we voted for in 1998 when we narrowly approved the Trinity River…

The Dallas Independent School District churns out reams of documents telling teachers what to teach, how to teach it and when. The problem is that the documents are self-contradictory, sloppily written and full of enough nitwit gobbledygook to put the average person in the nuthouse after two days on the…

I’m sitting here at City Hall, listening and chewing my ball point pen in half while the city council gets briefed on what the new downtown lake will look like when they actually build it. Steam is coming out of my ears. Look, I don’t have an MBA from the…

Yuck. There’s stuff I just don’t want to know about people. When I served on the editorial board of a no-longer-extant major metropolitan daily newspaper in Dallas, I learned that certain people like to confess very personal things about themselves. On occasion a visitor who had come to talk to…

OK, now I don’t want you to panic or anything. I’ve been sitting around City Hall listening to some of those boring old nuts-and-bolts discussions they sometimes have about money–the sessions that never get on television. And, yes, there does appear to be a bit of an issue. But here’s…

I’m sitting at a makeshift work table in a down-at-the-heels apartment complex in Richardson, staring at a table of numbers on a page. These figures, grainy and warped from too many generations of photocopying, are a parade of hieroglyphic epitaphs scrolling before my eyes like war dead, whispering the answer…

Is Laura Miller a racist? Last month, two days after the city manager fired Dallas’ first black police chief, Terrell Bolton, an overflow crowd of African-Americans thronged the council chamber to say she was. They hooted Miller, jeered her and accused her of racial perfidy and divisiveness. She’s the anti-establishment…

Good Lord, saints preserve us, is there no escape from this infernal misery? I’m sitting up here in the peanut gallery during the Dallas ex-police chief’s special “hearing” at City Hall, and I’m fervently wishing for some kind of natural disaster, a hurricane, flood or lightning bolt–anything–to sunder City Hall…

All right, here it comes. This is former Dallas police Chief Terrell Bolton coming straight at you with a Molotov cocktail in one hand and the other one out for money. So what’s it gonna be? You tell me. You might call it political extortion. I say it just might…

The near-total meltdown at City Hall last week was solely the work of City Manager Ted Benavides. It seems to have been a very clumsy piece of work, indeed, setting the stage for a horrific city council meeting the next day. But it was his work alone. Don’t look for…

Dallas is Number One. We have the worst crime rate of America’s major cities, based on the most recent set of FBI crime statistics. And guess what? It’s getting way worse even as you read this. Murders in Dallas in June were up 300 percent over the same period in…

I’m working on a new joke. I’ve been working on it all week, but I can’t come up with the punch line. Maybe you can help. This is as far as I’ve gotten: Dallas Mayor Laura Miller walks into a bar. There’s this guy sitting at a table with big…

Just try this one little fact on for size: The expressway they want to build on top of the Trinity River will make the traffic worse on Central Expressway. Not better. Worse. And it will make traffic worse on parts of Interstate 30, too. The amount of improvement it will…

If we really want to get those guys we’ve captured in Iraq to crack, the way to do it is with very long PowerPoint presentations. Or, as I have come to think of them, What’s the Point presentations. I sat through more than four hours of PowerPoint on the Trinity…

Some weeks ago I wrote a column about proposed changes to the city-owned classical music station, WRR-FM, in which I made negative remarks about Wise County, a rural area north of Fort Worth. After that column appeared, I received a deluge of angry e-mail from Wise County residents who felt…

Ahhhh, yes. The philosophy department of the University of Morning News. The Dallas Morning News editorial page has been weighing in very weightily on the recent outcome of the District 9 Dallas City Council runoff election–a result we here at the Dallas Observer might otherwise have tossed off as a…

OK. Let’s just cut to the ethical chase on this whole stupid WRR radio station tower-swap deal. This is ridiculous. The city council needs to put some people in chairs, turn on the bright lights and the tape recorders and ask some straight questions. The council will hear this week…

Phew. This talk about changing up the city-owned radio station sure has some odor to it. A group of people in the radio business have offered to “swap towers” with WRR-FM, the city-owned classical music station. WRR gets one of their broadcast towers and some money. They get the WRR…

Hey, wait a minute. What just happened? You tell me. Did a skinny liberal Jewish Democrat woman who is a short-haired ex-muckraker just run for mayor of Dallas and win by 16 great big percentage points over a well-known tenured Republican, mainly with support from the arch-conservative, arch-Republican, arch-Christian, arch-white,…

Go ahead and vote for all the stuff on the city’s half-a-billion-plus bond proposal. They’ll call you a rat if you don’t. Obviously, The Dallas Morning News is going to run an op ed piece every other day between now and the May 3 election telling people that good citizens…

The sleaze artists not only are out there hard at work preparing to steal and bamboozle votes from old people in the May 3 Dallas election: They may even be working overtime. They want to get in their last good harvest before the vote-fraud reform bill shuts them down. State…