First question. Who gives a damn? This very weird story keeps bouncing around the mediaverse about Dennis Bonnen, who is speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and an audio recording that a guy says he made of Bonnen making dirty remarks about other politicians. And we care about this…

Allen, Texas, where the El Paso shooter lived, is one of several affluent suburban communities in the Dallas area served by a commercial online calendar called “Bubblelife.” The name is a play on what used to be a disparaging term for the Park Cities area, a rich, almost all-white enclave…

If the people who walk their dogs off the leash in my neighborhood have children at home, I feel sorry for the children. How you train your dog is how you train your kid. So the way they must train their kids is, “Go ahead and play in traffic, little…

Last week, NBC5 television handed our new mayor, Eric Johnson, his first easy home run pitch to show he can be a leader. A news host asked the mayor to talk about the roiling controversy in heavily poor and minority South Dallas over intensive patrolling of city streets by state…

Earlier this week, The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial under the headline, “Dallas businesses that become criminal hubs must be held responsible.” The newspaper gave City Hall a pat on the back for filing suit against a Texaco station in far East Dallas: “Ratcheting up pressure against property owners…

The thinking behind former Mayor Mike Rawlings’ “Grow South” campaign was that City Hall needed to encourage investment in the city’s historically segregated and economically shortchanged areas. But what was standing in the way in the first place? Multiple causes are commonly invoked, from active racism to passive unawareness of…

Former Mayor Laura Miller and former City Council members Scott Griggs, Angela Hunt and Philip Kingston may no longer be at City Hall, but their ideas are still there, because they were right. Like the river that runs through the heart of the city, those ideas will persist no matter…

Pretend it’s midnight, and I’m rolling by some cops who are standing on the street in Dallas. I stop. I put my window down. I say, “It’s 12 o’clock at night. Do you know where your chief is?” Only I don’t really make jokes with cops on the street. Too…

For 15 years, the city’s entire ostensible argument for shutting down Jim’s Car Wash on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas has been that the car wash is a hotbed of crime. But the city made a big mistake two weeks ago. They published a map of the…

Really? Leave the country if he gets reelected? No, I get why people say it, and, man, do I ever know a ton of people who say it. I think half the people I know are shopping already for other countries. But really do it? The first thing is this:…

The core Achilles’ heel problem, the perennial failing and persistent flaw in the way Dallas City Hall thinks and operates, is its bizarre insularity, almost as if the world outside Dallas city limits does not exist. Maybe the strangest and most wonderful illustration of that problem is the now almost…

A real debate, sure, I can see that, where we can watch opponents drill down on an issue, but an adolescent, reality-show put-down fight? Really? We’re going to choose our presidents that way? No, c’mon. I can’t believe I’m supposed to take former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro as a…

Please, deliver us. Before this presidential election is over, is every old white guy in America going to say the not-a-racist-bone thing? If nobody’s got a racist bone in his body, how in the hell did we get here? This whole election is about race. The whole country is about…

Civility is big this year. A new Pew poll shows a majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, think the way President Donald Trump talks is “concerning” and “embarrassing” — not the notes you want jotted at the bottom of your annual review. And then here in Dallas we…