Blogger Pat Johnson has been a consistent thorn in the side of the state’s towing companies and a champion on behalf of angry drivers whose cars have been hauled away. When a Texan believes her car was wrongfully towed — say, pulled out of her own apartment parking lot for…
Acting like there are two sides to the current fight in the Collin County hinterlands over a potential Islamic Association of Collin County-owned cemetery is view from nowhere bullshit. The arguments being made by the residents of Farmersville, the town closest to the future cemetery, are not reasonable. The association needed a…
The quotation mark around the item title “Living Wage” Discussion on the Dallas City Council’s agenda are there for a reason. The rate being discussed Wednesday for city contracted workers, $10.25 an hour, is not a living wage unless you’re childless, and even then it’s close. But it is a…
Pop quiz: Aside from the obvious (i.e. poor judgment and inept management), what do the following events have in common? An employee of the city’s Trinity Watershed Management is helping organize her boss’s retirement money. To cover expenses, she solicits money from several companies that hold lucrative contracts with the…
Clint McDonough is chairman of the Dallas office and a managing partner in an accounting firm that was known since 1903 as Ernst and Ernst, since 1989 as Ernst and Young, now calling itself “EY,” which I thought was the name of a character in an A.A. Milne children’s book…
On a weekday afternoon in mid-June, Minh Tran guides a late-model Infiniti through Northeast Dallas, checking in on his old haunts. The strip club on an otherwise semi-industrial stretch of Plano Road, unmarked save for its gaudy rows of palm trees, was a magnet for robberies and violence. The apartments…
A week from Wednesday the city council will vote on a zoning deal adjacent to Klyde Warren Park, where the developer wants permission to build a residential tower more than 60 percent higher than the law allows. It’s permission to make 60 percent more money. Oh, but you know our…
Craig James is not content with his life. Despite being part of one of the biggest scandals in college sports history at SMU, being a borderline coherent college football analyst for more than a decade and receiving 3.6 percent of the vote in the 2012 Texas Republican Senate primary, James…
News bubbled out of Austin last week that the ride-sharing app Uber would add the capital city to a short list of areas in which Uber offers UberAccess. UberAccess allows app users to summon a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. In areas without UberAccess, Uber only guarantees that customers with wheelchairs that can fit…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, indicted late last week for multiple felonies stemming from his alleged encouragement of investors to put more than $600,000 into a McKinney technology company, was booked into Collin County Jail Monday morning. In a civil proceeding, he has already admitted to one of the acts…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, you may have heard, is “deeply concerned” about eXXXotica, the three-day porn expo that arrives in Dallas on Friday. Alas, he wrote in a letter to the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which had objected to the event taking place in the city-owned Convention Center, there was nothing…
It’s easy to get lost in all the affordable-housing stuff that’s been swirling around City Hall for the past couple of years. First HUD was really mad at Dallas over its housing policies, then it wasn’t, then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs…
The redevelopment of West Dallas as a hip dining and apartment area proves one thing: Give the big boys in Dallas a quarter billion dollars in public subsidy, and they’ll make some money for themselves. The renaissance of nearby North Oak Cliff proves another thing: Stay the hell out of…
Last we checked in on Rick Perry’s quixotic second bid for president, our erstwhile governor had picked a fight with the 2016 Republican field’s irresistible force, Donald Trump. Perry, desperate to get into August 6’s Fox News-sponsored first GOP debate, was doing everything he could to raise his national profile,…
Dallas oil heiress/philanthropist/bridge-to-somewhere’s namesake Margaret Hunt Hill died in 2007 at the age of 91. Shortly after, her grandson Al Hill III became sort-of famous for filing a lawsuit against his own father, his aunts and his siblings, as families tend to do when there is a multi-billion-dollar trust at stake. A…
Downtown Dallas Inc. says residents, workers and business owners downtown are dealing with too much crime and too few cops. To fix things, the nonprofit advocacy group is petitioning the Dallas Police Department to add a first watch to its patrols downtown. As things are now, calls received between 2:30…
Every once in a while, often in the hottest weeks of the year for some reason, I get an enormous hankering, a craving from deep in my soul, a raw hunger that can only be quelled with a great steaming plate heaped high with the well-sauced meat of that great…
In 2001, under pressure from police and politicians, then-Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill launched a highly publicized crackdown on illegal eight-liner parlors that had sprung up like ragweed in dingy storefronts in Dallas and suburbs. Toby Shook, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, remembers Hill assembling reporters at a…
The point, if there was one, was to say the words “baby parts” as many times as possible, as if they were a mantra. For four and a half hours Wednesday, the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services solicited testimony about fetal tissue donation from anti-abortion activists, Texas Attorney…
Essure is a birth control device designed to stay inside a woman’s body forever. “There is no good way, from the company, from the manufacturer, to take it out,” an Austin-based doctor told us in last week’s cover story about the device. Thousands of women have come forward online and…
I have so many conflicts of interest here, I shouldn’t even open my mouth. But, you know. In a letter to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, the Dallas Women’s Foundation has expressed its “deep concern and disgust” that the Dallas Convention Center will host a porn convention, Exxxotica Expo, on August 7…
If nothing is done address climate change, says a new study commissioned by some really rich people and some ex-politicians, Texas is going be practically unlivable by the time we get to the back half of the 21st century. Average temperatures will increase, the study says, leading to more than…
