Do you like having a previous speculation confirmed in black and white? I kind of do. A lot. That’s why I got such a kick out of the endorsement editorial in The Dallas Morning News last weekend urging people to vote for three people not named Scott Griggs for mayor…
Last month after federal sleuths in Massachusetts rolled up 16 well-heeled parents in an alleged college admissions and exam scam that included the University of Texas, four members of the UT-Austin student government proposed that some kind of formal apology be tendered to former UT system regent Wallace Hall of…
Sometimes you learn more about people in politics from their shadows than their faces. Serial efforts over a period of years to take down two progressive Dallas City Council members have cast the same kind of shadow consistently. In the effort, mostly failed I think, to dirty up council members…
In 1998 when John Creuzot, now the new Dallas County district attorney, was a Dallas County felony district court judge, he established an experimental program called the Dallas Initiative for Expedited Recovery and Treatment or DIVERT. It sent first-time drug offenders into intensively monitored recovery programs rather than to jail…
You do what you want, but this is popcorn and folding chair time for me. An eye-popping little tent show is about to unfold, and I want a front-row seat. It started last week with this: Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs, running for mayor on an anti-boondoggle platform, scored…
A blueprint of a site plan for proposed construction is projected on a pull-down screen before me; a city official is at the podium droning through a very long litany of legalese while five bored-looking board members try to maintain the yes-I-am-too-paying-attention facial expression; and as I write this with…
You may not believe this. I can’t do anything but tell you. The same people who brought us the absurd and embarrassing $6 million fake kayak rapids fiasco in the Trinity River, the folks who brought us the $115 million bicycle bridge that’s too dangerous to use, the same social…
The Margaret McDermott Bridge over the Trinity River in downtown Dallas is the city’s ne’er-do-well relative who shows up every year or so for yet another handout. Is it a mercy for us to give her more money, or have we just become codependent? Designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava,…
Probably out of sheer meanness, like bug-killing, I enjoy seeing politicians pitch themselves to really loony audiences. I like to watch them wriggle. There can’t have been any other reason I interrupted a perfectly fine Monday evening and drove north to the Churchill Rec Center to witness the Citizens Matter…
Most of us had the right reaction, as far as I can tell, when we watched the March 21 video of Austin Shuffield, a muscled up 30-year-old bouncer in Deep Ellum, pounding a young woman repeatedly as hard as he could in the head with his fists. Most of us…
A lawsuit, really a collection of lawsuits, has been creeping along through the local courts for years like the plot of Charles Dickens’ mid-19th-century novel, Bleak House, pitting Dallas against some members of the Topletz family, who are landlords in southern Dallas. But there is a new wrinkle in the…
Maybe we need to have a little bit of Journalism 101 here. There seem to be some people around town who don’t quite know how it works. Professor Schutze is always glad to assist. A major political dust storm erupted at City Hall after my cover story appeared last week…
After my own lengthy and exacting legal analysis of positions taken by The Dallas Morning News editorial page on official actions and decisions by newly elected Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, I have come to the following learned conclusion, which I think should be published in a legal journal,…
Its real name on tax records is the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, but now it calls itself VisitDallas, because nowadays you have to have an ungrammatical neologism for your name if you want to be hip. I don’t know how hip it is really, but VisitDallas is maybe the…
You don’t know this, because you don’t read D, the city magazine of Dallas, but they’ve been running a mayoral poll on their online Frontburner page. You click to vote for your favorite candidate. This week they admitted the poll probably is being gamed. Shawn Shinneman wrote: “It’s possible —…
We don’t even yet know how much of it is true, but the $25 million college admissions bribery scandal described in a federal indictment in Massachusetts last week has already ignited a firestorm of blame-laying, which should fill my heart with joy. The blame game, after all, is my personal…
The City Council campaign in District 13 north of the Park Cities is shaping up to be strangely like a very important chapter in my own past, although it’s also totally different. Former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller (2002-2007) is running to unseat the incumbent, Jennifer Staubach Gates, who has represented…
The mayor of Dallas and the editorial page of The Dallas Morning News have revived an incident from 2015 in which Dallas City Councilman Scott Griggs, now a candidate for mayor, was accused of violently threatening a city official, then-Assistant City Secretary Bilirae Johnson. A Dallas County grand jury dismissed…
Last Monday, Observer columnist Jim Schutze wrote a story in which he accused The Dallas Morning News editorial page of telling lies about Dallas City Council member and mayoral candidate Scott Griggs. Schutze suggested this was a deliberate smear campaign aimed at attacking a candidate, Griggs, opposed by the mayor…
My well-known modesty, one of my many admirable personal traits, won’t allow me to tell The Dallas Morning News how to do its job. But if I had been the editor on that story last week about a suburban mayor and her husband getting convicted on federal bribery charges, the…
To win a Dallas City Council vote on a construction project, Methodist Dallas Medical Center in North Oak Cliff (“Methodist”) hitched its wagon and its long good name in the community to Dallas landlord and investor Ralph Isenberg. That’s a hitch. The last time we had much to do with…
In August 2018, Texas A&M University-Commerce gave George Hale a choice: 1) Sign a loyalty oath swearing he would never join or support a boycott of Israel, 2) Lose his contract to continue working on an award-winning podcast about unsolved crimes in Texas for the public radio station associated with…
