Everything goes back to Detroit, I guess. Well, not me. I was thinking more about the Dallas chief of police. Again. Yesterday, the Dallas chapter of the National Latino Law Enforcement Organization joined a growing chorus of critics calling for Chief U. Renee Hall to be canned. The NLLEO is…
You know who you are. If I’m talking to you, you know how I feel. I know how you feel. This is like a mini version of the week after Donald Trump got elected. Oh, Canada! And then, “Oh, no! I don’t have a job in Canada.” So let’s take…
The brand-new mayor elected Saturday is in for a tough initiation. During the campaign, Eric Johnson, a lawyer, gave the legally correct answer to questions about loose dogs and other knotty day-to-day problems: not the mayor’s job. And he’s right, legally and on paper. The day-to-day operation of city government…
Dallas had 41 homicides in May, compared with 15 homicides in the same month the previous year. People are talking about why. Is it poverty? Is it meanness? Last Sunday evening, a woman was shot to death and four others injured in what police called a gun battle at Jim’s…
Last week a few readers posed a fair challenge to a Dallas Observer story by Stephen Young. The story confirmed that mayoral candidate Eric Johnson was anointed by a wealthy Dallas oilman looking for somebody to stop four-term City Council member Scott Griggs from getting elected mayor. The challenge posed…
Don’t forget. Early voting has begun in the Dallas June 8 mayoral and City Council runoff election. Now is your chance to go to the polls and vote against The Dallas Morning News. I’m serious. A little over a year ago, the Morning News hired a political propaganda writer from…
Victor Vital, the lawyer who represented Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston before the city’s ethics advisory commission this week, won a victory even harder to achieve than a favorable verdict in court. In court you have the rule of law. The ethics commission, on the other hand, is sort…
The $11.5 billion public education bill passed by the Texas House and Senate last week is proof that Texans are getting smarter, especially those who thought they were already smart, like education reformers. Intently focused for the last two decades on clearing the sludge out of the state’s public school…
The runoff campaign in the District 14 East Dallas City Council race is a mirror of the citywide runoff for mayor. In both contests, a challenger backed by the business community accuses a long-term City Hall incumbent of being a jackass. It’s the jackass question that I have a particular…
First I was confused. Too many great Democrats running for president. But then I saw the Fox poll: Biden beats Trump by 11 points. I said that’s it. Biden’s my man. Then I watched Beto O’Rourke’s town hall the other night on CNN. Now I’m confused again. I do have…
George Hale is a journalist, an occupation that confers on him no special legal status beyond what any American citizen enjoys and may even, on any given day, rate him a little lower. Being a reporter has taught him that somebody at some point will always want to shut him…
The whole business about the Catholic Diocese of Dallas in January publishing a list of 31 so-called “credibly accused” priests seemed weird at the time. Credibly, who says so? Now as the story grows only darker, we have to wonder how the diocese, which is the regional headquarters of the…
Wow, Eric Johnson, candidate for mayor in the June 8 runoff election, really has a lot of endorsements. I mean, a ton of endorsements. The list is so long, I can’t even reproduce a screen grab of all the names here. I would need three screen grabs. So why is…
In two mayoral runoff election debates so far between Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs and state Rep. Eric Johnson, half of Johnson’s entire pitch has been that he will bring an end to snarkiness, personal attacks and divisiveness at City Hall. The other half of Johnson’s pitch has been…
Sam Coats, named last week to take over as the interim leader of the scandal-plagued Dallas convention and visitors bureau, called VisitDallas, is the perfect guy. He has a deep international résumé as a fixer of broken companies and a turnaround artist. He has experience as an elected official and mayoral…
Do we focus on local things because we can’t stand to think about the big picture? What’s really going on in our heads? This week we learned that an upcoming U.N. report based on 15,000 scientific studies will say one million living species are faced with extinction, some within decades,…
Crazy, goofy and idiotic are not good explanations for people who are hard to understand. I’m going to buy a Cub Scout wood-burning kit that makes engravings on plywood and put that on a plaque. Maybe I’ll hang it from the rearview mirror of my pickup. But for years I…
In 1995, somebody in the business leadership of Dallas figured out that Dallas had a serious amount of catch-up to do to be a contender on the larger stage of history. The answer, brought forward by the city’s business elite, was the city’s first black mayor, a brilliant young lawyer…
All nine candidates on the ballot for mayor of Dallas in the election Saturday have come out officially in opposition to corruption. Several have offered specific plans for combating corruption. Most of those proposals are aimed at catching people in the act of being corrupt. We could do that all…
At least in terms of the public process, if not the legal one, the release of the audio recording of the 911 call in the Botham Jean killing finally takes us down to the fine point of what has been the public question from the beginning: If a white cop…
The political flap over Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot’s recently announced policy of reduced prosecution for certain offenses opens a window on a really interesting question in these tumultuous times: What does somebody mean when he says he’s a conservative on crime? Or a liberal? I admit, one reason…
Today I proudly and courageously don my tinfoil hat. I do so for you, Dear Reader, so that you will not have to wear one. First, in the Department of Problems It Seems Like Maybe We Should have Been Able to Foresee, we learned recently that the mayor’s plan for…
