The Dallas Morning News on its editorial page last week repeated again a flagrant and malicious lie about Dallas City Council member and mayoral candidate Scott Griggs. The lie is a window on how the old-guard leadership in the city really operates and the depths to which it is willing…
The other night I attended a public forum where nine candidates for mayor of Dallas fielded questions from a moderator. I think I’m beginning to get the picture. But first, let’s clear the decks. From here on out, I can’t really promise you that I’m going to be objective. I…
This will be my second what-I-did-on-my-vacation column, and all I did was go down to the Rio Grande Valley for a week, so maybe that means I ought to go on more, better vacations? When I was down there, I swore I would tell somebody about one part of it…
After New York, that brazen tart, deserted poor Amazon at the altar, the brokenhearted Amazon said nobly it was done with love and would never seek a new headquarters again. But we all know how long that sort of thing lasts. The tingle returns. What we must fear in Dallas,…
We were on vacation. We went to the National Butterfly Center on the Mexican border near Mission last week to see butterflies. It was coincidence my wife and I were there with friends the same day President Donald Trump declared his border wall emergency. But what a coincidence. I don’t…
Let’s be certain about one thing. Money is always an issue in questions of sincerity and truth-telling. The fact that you’re making money on it doesn’t automatically make what you tell me untrue, but I have a big right to wonder. If money is on the table, it’s on the…
By the time I got there Monday afternoon, a city crew with a big power-wash truck had washed away most of the paint vandals had sprayed on the Confederate memorial outside City Hall on Sunday night or early Sunday morning. Cops on the scene told me they had no suspects…
Who has a crime problem? Not me anymore. I don’t see crime outside my front door, and I sure used to see a lot of it. The new young people on my block in old East Dallas don’t believe me when I tell them, but in the old days when…
Stephen Young has a great piece up on our website now analyzing police staffing in Dallas and whether we need more, fewer or the same number of officers than we already have. As he explains in his story, the overall problem of police staffing is surprisingly complex, with many moving…
Today the Dallas City Council, after a year of crass weaseling, will try once more to decide what to do with the huge, lugubrious Confederate War Memorial that stands 400 feet from Dallas City Hall like a very bad billboard for the city. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to decide how…
Here we go already, off to the slime pits. Bring a towel. Last week mayoral candidate Scott Griggs was one of a handful of City Council members caught with dodgy campaign donations in the past, and you’d have thought he’d shot and killed a child. The donations were dodgy, not…
William Barr, nominee to become U.S. attorney general, was right. Unindicted co-conspirators don’t get enough respect. Barr said at his Senate confirmation hearing: “If you’re not going to indict someone, you don’t stand up there and unload negative information about the person. That’s not the way the [Justice] Department does…
In the Tuesday morning television coverage of the four Houston police officers who were shot the night before, the most heartbreaking and infuriating words came from Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers Union. “We are sick and tired of having targets on our back,” Gamaldi said. “We are…
Cold, quiet weekday afternoon. One of my favorite East Dallas sausage and egg places, Barbec’s on Garland Road, is still as the tomb, empty but for this table, where a waitress hovers over five of us with a pot of hot coffee. Here I am, chatting up a table full…
Wednesday I decided to go out and check on my two favorite issues in the upcoming mayor’s race. Yup, still there: 1) The trashy mess where the city finally tore out the $6 million never-used fake whitewater feature it built in the Trinity River, and 2) the $115 million never-used…
Citizens Matter. Yeah, right. We all know what that means. Citizens Matter is what the group opposed to reforming the Dallas Citizens Police Review Board is calling itself. So the name is contrapuntal to Black Lives Matter. Citizens Matter means White Lives Matter. And, look, far be it from me…
I liked the previous session of the Texas Legislature a lot better. The Republicans concentrated on what I consider to be their innate concerns – dehumanizing women, disenfranchising minorities and putting Big Brother in the bathroom. I didn’t like what they did, but I did like that they wanted to…
I don’t know how many people know this, but my wife, Mariana Greene, was a pioneer of urban chicken-keeping during her days as a garden columnist for The Dallas Morning News, years before backyard chickens became chic. She helped make them chic. To this day she takes her chickens extremely…
City Hall is having a big debate with itself about getting rid of the city’s long-standing youth curfew. We should do an experiment. Try this: Rigorously enforce the curfew outside late-night teenage house parties in the affluent white Lakewood and Preston Hollow neighborhoods. Then re-poll everybody on how many people…
It’s easy to get politically depressed. Sometimes it’s not easy to get out of bed. But we need to draw a deep breath and look at the long arc. Sunlight glows out there on the far horizon. Last week at the very moment President Donald Trump was doing his Dumbo…
The Dallas city auditor released a report last Friday painting the outfit that promotes the Dallas Convention Center as a runaway, money-burning, out-of-control party barn. Soon after, Mayor Mike Rawlings had words to say. Rawlings told The Dallas Morning News: “The narrative in the audit is about vaguery. That ultimately…
Do you care who the next mayor is? Who any mayor is? I mean really. Lots of people want you to care. The field of candidates for mayor of Dallas in the election next May, already swollen to just over a half dozen with the announcement Monday of school board…
