I’m confused. We’re all confused. Most people honor the cops. Dallas police officers put themselves between us and bullets. Common decency requires that we honor and respect somebody who does that for us. But what about this police pay business? C’mere: Get in the car. I’ve been thinking about the…
In June the Dallas plan commission totally slam-bammed Wal-Mart’s zoning request for an in-town superstore. Next month Wal-Mart is going before the Dallas City Council to get the plan commission’s unanimous no-vote overturned, but things look no better for them. So how smart is Wal-Mart? I have a clue. When…
I predicted projectile vomiting at the last Dallas City Council meeting. So I was off by maybe 20 percent. Instead of projectile vomiting, the Dallas City Council whipped out a big old rusty-bladed knife and stuck it in the ribs of the Palladium deal. I told you there was strangeness…
Something very weird is going on at City Hall. People are speaking in tongues. Maybe the budget crunch has crunched them. We may need to send in a rescue team with Prozac. It’s all about a major proposed reorganization of the staff that nobody wants to talk about publicly yet…
From 1998 until this year when both of my parents died of old age and natural causes, I knew Lois Lillico only from an arm’s length as the stern night nurse at the health-care unit of Presbyterian Village North, the retirement community on Forest Lane near Greenville Avenue where they…
I have been writing about racial issues in Dallas for almost a quarter-century, during which time my thesis has always been that Dallas is a weird place. A while back I had an experience that caused me to wonder if there might be another possibility–that perhaps I am a weird…
Right after the appeals court ordered a new trial in former Dallas City Council member Al Lipscomb’s bribery case, the U.S. attorney in Dallas should have done a plea bargain requiring Lipscomb to run for mayor. Lipscomb for mayor. At least then he could just bring it on. We could…
The whole panhandling issue was deliberately designed to put liberals like me in a bad mood. I’m walking across a parking lot toward the Stewpot Ministry on Young Street across from First Presbyterian Church downtown. It’s about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and now here comes a guy who is obviously going…
Don’t tell me we can’t fight City Hall. So what if they’re all a bunch of suits down there, they’re goofballs, they’re numbskulls, they’re going to do what they want to do anyway, so it’s useless, and it’s boring. Great. Please do not allow me to waken you from your…
Think about every single thing you’ve seen the Dallas City Council do in the last year: • Defy the mayor and give away tens of millions in tax money to two billionaires who didn’t need it for a sports-cum-lingerie mall on a toxic waste dump outside of downtown. • Run…
Wait a minute. The conference is over? The Roman Catholic bishops have left town already? And we’re not going to talk about the gay priest thing? Only in Dallas. This always was a town where people knew how to avoid talking about the obvious. And Dallas is, after all, where…
Very best theater of the absurd this city has seen, ever. Absolutely. Our eyes witness these events, but our brains can’t believe it. First, city council members Mary Poss, Alan Walne and Ed Oakley are leaders of the pack in giving away $43 million in tax money to two billionaires,…
The real joke about the vote-fraud law in Texas is the vote-fraud law in Texas. Let me tell you a little story I happen to know about: A candidate in a recent Dallas election lost the race by a very tight margin after deliberately steering clear of any possible hanky-panky…
The white-folks version of local history is that back in the Time of Genius, the great fathers wanted to protect the citizens from tension, so they agreed to do all the governing themselves. The African-American version is that back in the time of Colonel Sanders, rich white bigots invented the…
Did members of the Dallas City Council vote to make a huge “gift of public funds”–tens of millions of tax dollars to the Palladium deal in exchange for private business favors–when it had evidence the city was getting totally chumped on the deal? That’s the issue. That will be the…
For years, Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson told witty jokes about how nobody really knew what a county judge was. Now Margaret Keliher, the Republican candidate to replace Jackson in November, is trying to turn the joke into a campaign strategy. Keliher is a sitting civil district judge in Dallas…
You’d think Terri Hodge would be in a conservative mode. Her administrative assistant, Felicia Pitre, goes on trial in June on a 10-year felony charge of messing with a blind lady’s absentee ballot. Other players have retired entirely from the absentee vote game, given the heat surrounding it in recent…
The city council debate on the Palladium and City Center-Madison development deals downtown will rise or fall on an issue that has little to do with downtown but everything to do with the votes on the council. Money. It is the very strong impression of certain key council members that…
Back during the mayoral election, did the district attorney’s office not say and did I not eagerly report here and on the radio that a bunch of vote fraud indictments were about to pop? Tell me I dreamed that. All during the election, I got calls from political insiders whispering…
Laura Miller is trying to do this mayor thing the hard way. The Trinity River plan–our version of Boston’s “Big Dig,” a megapolitan pork-barrel chain reaction that has escaped all human control–is a good example. Miller’s predecessor as mayor, Ron Kirk, did the job the slick way. He didn’t spend…
This is how I think: I think that if a judge ordered me to pay a fine of $15 and I failed to do it, I would wind up on Death Row. That’s how fatalistic I am and how afraid of judges I am. So, in a way I almost…
Wow. This Laura Miller thing is going to be different. I don’t know exactly how or what different. But way different. Hold-on-to-your-top-hat different. Miller invited me and Victoria Loe Hicks of The Dallas Morning News, along with David Gray, an environmentalist, to take part in a personal briefing that the…
