A month ago, there was a legitimate question about what the Rangers should do at Major League Baseball’s July 31 trade deadline. They were solidly in contention for a playoff spot — albeit a wild card — and making fans and media alike wonder whether they’d undervalued what looked, at…
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…
Forget Cowboys training camp in Oxnard. Forget Ezekiel Elliott’s impending holdout, Dak Prescott’s contract worries and Jason Witten’s exhumation from cold storage. Definitely don’t think about Joey Gallo’s injured hamate bone, the trade deadline or how many games in a row the Rangers need to win to get themselves back…
More than 300,000 Texans could lose food assistance benefits under proposed changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, according to statistics from Governing Magazine. The estimated 302,800 Texans affected is the highest number of vulnerable SNAP recipients in any state in the nation, according to the magazine…
Here at your friendly Observer news vertical, our email inboxes are inundated daily with pitches about this report or that study, which purports to show, usually to some advertising end, something about North Texas. Most of them get ignored, but, occasionally, we’ll get some data that’s interesting enough to pass along…
Last week, D Magazine posted an interesting piece by Peter Simek about gentrification. The setup gave me pause. Something about the Jim Lake Co. telling me gentrification is good for me summoned unpleasant memories of my Grandma Alice and Pepto Bismol. My brothers and I suspected her of owning stock…
Mostly, Wednesday’s testimony from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller to the U.S. House Intelligence and Judiciary committees came off exactly as one would’ve suspected. Democratic members of the committees pushed Mueller to make definitive statements about potential crimes committed by President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and his first…
Wednesday’s decision from a three-judge panel in federal court in San Antonio reads like a really good joke. There’s the buildup, in which they repeatedly blast Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature for its racially discriminatory 2011 redistricting, that gets you leaning in one direction. Then there’s the punchline that nearly gives you…
Walking to his ride-share pickup point and smoking a cigarette after a late show at the Twilite Lounge, a man, who has asked to remain anonymous, was approached by two men who asked him for a light. One of the men lit what looked like a blunt, appeared to take…
There was never any way Dallas was going to make it all the way to Aug. 1 without a legal challenge to its paid sick leave ordinance, but now it’s official: the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the conservative think tank helping represent business groups suing to stop similar ordinances in…
Our basic rights: that’s one thing. Very important. I’m a huge fan of basic rights. But I also don’t want people to get shot. So I’ve been wondering lately if here in Dallas we need to have a second conversation. If, like me, you really don’t want to get shot,…
A third, previously unidentified domino has fallen in the federal corruption case involving late former City Council member Carolyn Davis and low-income housing developer Ruel Hamilton. According to documents filed in federal court, the go-between for alleged bribery payments between Hamilton and Davis pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony…
There are a lot of ways Sen. John Cornyn could have gone after Dallas state Sen. Royce West, the newest entrant into Texas’ Democratic Senate primary. They could have suggested that West was out of touch after nearly 30 years in office, or maybe too close to U.S. Rep. Eddie…
Count this among the many, many times when discretion would’ve been the better part of valor. At about five minutes to 9 a.m. Monday, according to the time stamp on a dash cam video uploaded to YouTube, commuters heading north out of downtown Dallas on I-35 saw something they had…
A Dallas County jury has found a former Mesquite Police Department officer not guilty in his second trial for aggravated assault after shooting an unarmed man twice in the back in 2017. Derick Wiley’s first trial in 2018 ended with a hung jury. Wiley shot Lyndo Jones after responding to…
After about two years on the lam, Nathan Hawkins is back in Dallas County’s jail, but he likely won’t be there for long. Hawkins, 36, had been on probation for 12 years, stemming from a 2007 charge for burglary of a building, a state jail felony. His case was the…
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…
Long-serving Dallas state Sen. Royce West is making a big announcement Monday morning. It’s not much of a surprise, given that he’s already filed campaign-finance documents, but West is running for U.S. Senate, hoping to take on incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in November 2020. West will join a field that…
Latasha Morrison is one of the most prominent Christian advocates of racial reconciliation. The organization she founded, Be the Bridge, provides training materials for Christians to launch small, diverse discussion groups focused on racial unity. Many of these “Bridge Builder” groups exist in the Dallas area. In October, Morrison will…
This spring, the Texas Legislature passed a bill legalizing hemp and hemp-based products as long as those products contained less than .3% THC. THC is the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. At the time, the decision seemed simple enough. It put Texas farmers on a level playing field with farmers in…
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…
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has resurrected the only plan for paying for President Donald Trump’s favorite pet project that’s less likely to succeed than the president’s own plan for paying for the scheme. Cruz, echoing the totally conceived-in-good-faith idea that first sprang from his mouth in 2017, thinks that Joaquín Guzmán…
