From the looks of it, what happened last Friday was a good sign for Dallas Police Chief David Brown. After about two weeks of being circled by his opponents, Brown got what appeared to be a robust show of support from nearly all of the Dallas City Council and Dallas…
Under its old policy, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office honored all requests for what’s known as an immigration hold from the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Anytime someone was booked into Dallas County Jail, ICE could request a hold and the person would be kept in Dallas County…
The state of Texas has won a small victory in its fight to continue dump stuff in water in defiance of new Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to protect the integrity of the nation’s water supply. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined with other states’ attorneys general to stop the…
Dallas County appears to be about to get itself into another mess centered on the county’s entering into contracts with some of the entities that underpin the nation’s prodigious prison-industrial complex. Last year, the county almost banned in-person visits as part of a plan to implement widespread video visitation at…
If you had just read this week’s Dallas City Council agenda, you might have thought the meeting was a good opportunity to get informed about Neighborhood Plus, the program developed by the city in response to accusations that it illegally concentrated low-income housing in the southern part of town. You…
This week, Ken Paxton took time out from fighting his multiple felony indictments to send a set of directives to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick outlining the attorney general’s priorities for the period leading up to the Texas Legislature’s next session in 2017. If you’re a woman, someone who thinks…
During the first week of August, when we first starting thinking that the Rangers might conceivably make the playoffs, we were talking about the possibility of a possibility. That they might be able to sneak in if everything broke right, grab the second American League wild card and get lucky…
Like much of Dallas, I was late to work Tuesday because of a failure to anticipate just how bad downtown Dallas traffic was going to be Monday morning. Late buses and added time navigating downtown were the rule of the day. The traffic mess stemmed from a bunch of streets…
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, or at least the person running his Twitter account, is generally pretty feisty on the social media platform. His tweets are usually signed with the infamous TCOT hashtag — the portal to wingnut Internet hell, search it at your peril — and the governor’s not afraid…
House Bill 2, the deeply controversial anti-abortion law passed by the Texas Legislature in 2013, still isn’t fully effective. The U.S. Supreme Court has stayed perhaps the most onerous provision of the law, the one that essentially requires any facility performing abortions to be a mini-hospital, until it decides whether…
I would love it if the Rangers moved into a new stadium in downtown Dallas. Absolutely love it. I might go to 60 games a year if it happened, and I would definitely buy season tickets. I am about as biased as you can be toward all things baseball, and…
World-renowned performance artist Donald Trump’s ongoing piece, titled “What if Pat Buchanan Was a Billionaire and had a Queens Accent,” continued Friday with his announcement that he’s hired state campaign directors in three states that are not among those with the earliest GOP nominating contests. Included in those hires is…
It’s not a shock, but disappointing nonetheless: State Representative Jonathan Stickland, the Observer’s BFF and favorite member of the Texas Legislature, is getting a primary challenger. The Reverend Scott W. Fisher, pastor of the Metroplex Chapel in Euless, announced this week that he’s taking Stickland on. “With my background in overseeing…
Full credit to The Dallas Morning News’ Robert Wilonsky for finding this video first, but boy, it sure is something. First Baptist Church of Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress, it turns out, was not content to give his blessing to the Donald Trump for president circus just once. Monday afternoon, according…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s critics, it seems, are beginning to smell blood in the water. After a week that’s seen Dallas City Council members singled out by the mayor for having a meeting to discuss Brown’s performance with the city manager and Brown firing back at his critics during…
Correlation does not equal causation. We know that. But it’s certainly beginning to appear that whenever an SMU athletics program is on the verge of a national breakthrough, it’s also likely on the verge of NCAA sanctions. In the 1980s, the football team that achieved prominence built on the backs…
There are two stories currently consuming Dallas City Hall. They’re related, but they aren’t the same. One is the growing frustration among multiple members of the Dallas City Council, Dallas’ police associations and some members of the police rank and file with police Chief David Brown. The other is the…
As of August 31, Dallas drivers have killed 31 pedestrians in 2015. That’s already more than 2014 (22) and almost double the number killed in 2013 (16). In 2015, at least one pedestrian has died in 13 of the city’s 14 City Council districts — only Sandy Greyson’s District 12…
Ignore it. Ignore (almost) everything that happened in the Cowboys 39-28 loss to the Falcons. Joseph Randle, the team’s newly minted starting running back, is not as good as he looked Sunday. He’s not going to score three touchdowns a game — he may not score six more this season…
The tenure of ex-University of Texas Athletic Director Steve Patterson was a barely mitigated disaster. On the job less than two years, Patterson resigned under duress September 15. When he quit, Patterson still had about four years left on his contract, worth $1.4 million annually. He’s not going to get…
For Democratic state Senator John Whitmire, it’s simple. “You pay now or you pay later,” he says. “If you don’t pay now, you may pay with your life later or you’ll have to beg someone not to shoot you in your garage when they’re a crack addict or a mental patient…
For all his claims about being fiscally conservative, Ted Cruz sure isn’t acting like it in his wild-eyed quest to keep every single government penny away from Planned Parenthood. Cruz, along with a number of his farthest right compatriots in Congress, have made it very clear over the past month…
