OK, this is one of those stop, do not pass go moments. The Dallas Morning News published a story yesterday about the University of Texas admissions scandal that was so far off the mark, so wide of the target, so separated from reality that we need to call a halt…
The so-called bike share program at Fair Park may be a scarcely utilized disaster. That doesn’t mean that a well-considered bike-share system, with stations placed strategically at points throughout the central city so riders can travel from where they are to a place they might want to go (rather than…
Uber and Lyft have been legally operating in Dallas for almost three months now. Uber was already dominating cabs in the competition for business trips, a trend that has only continued since the City Council’s new transportation-for-hire ordinance went into effect on April 30. Data on personal trips are harder to…
Dallas is currently in the midst of an ATM theft epidemic. Twenty-four cash machines have been stolen since January 1. Thirty-one more unsuccessful attempts at stealing ATMs have been made in the same period. Dallas police are pretty upset about the whole thing, and generally push out surveillance videos in…
Hey, Julian Castro. Thanks a ton. That was sarcastic. You’re the Obama administration’s new secretary of Housing and Urban Development. First thing you did when you took office nine months ago was yank the rug from under a major housing segregation investigation of Dallas. Before you took over, HUD had…
Little by little, Ken Paxton is being forced to see the light. The recalcitrant Texas attorney general, ever steadfast in his refusal to accept the wisdom of the U.S. Supreme Court, is beginning to acknowledge its authority. After the court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in June, Paxton issued an opinion…
One of the more amusing vagaries of the theater inspired by campaign finance laws since the Citizens United case opened the sluices for corporate giving is the little dance candidates must do with their Super PACs. Formal campaigns can’t officially coordinate with Super PACs, but, because Super PACs can accept…
When a crime is seen from a distance, everybody’s macho about it and wants to lock up the bad guys for life. Sometimes things look different to the people who are in the moment. My wife and I were shocked to see video on Facebook of Alice Zaccarello getting mugged…
If you didn’t already know the attitude of the overflow throng that came to the Sheraton downtown to hear Bernie Sanders, it was absolutely clear less than five minutes into the Vermont senator’s speech. “Bullshit,” came a shout from the crowd as Sanders described Texas all-Republican state government. This was…
Big picture, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project shouldn’t change much. In endorsing disparate impact theory — the notion in civil rights law that a policy can be found illegally discriminatory through a statistical analysis of its effects…
The Dallas Police and Fire Pension System’s continued poor performance is a threat to city’s credit rating, the bond rating service Moody’s said this week. On July 9, a revised audit of the system revealed it had about $3 billion in assets, 6 percent less than was reported to the…
Philip Kingston says that despite what you may have heard, he really does care about his fellow city employees. So much so, in fact, that he’s been crowd-sourcing — with the help of white board put up at City Hall — a list of things city of Dallas workers want from…
As you’re reading this, Texas, thanks to the leadership of our governor, Greg Abbott, and the intrepid work of Texas Guard soldiers, our fair state has survived the first 48 hours of Jade Helm 15, U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s highly publicized covert takeover of Texas. So far, martial law has…
Well, it turns out that the city councilman who the general public has known as Rick Callahan since he was elected to represent District 5 in 2013 actually prefers to be called Rickey Callahan. This is incredibly awkward. The councilman recently changed his official City Council name—which appears on the…
First, a few stipulations: Planned Parenthood offers abortions at many of its healthcare clinics. The tissue that results from those procedures is medically valuable. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and his predecessor, Rick Perry, have a deep-seated interest in making abortion illegal or as close to illegal as possible, as evidenced…
The title of Dutch documentary filmmaker Kasper Verkaik’s 60-minute film, Plaza Man is a reference to Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist Robert Groden, the guy who sells books and DVDs every fine weekend at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. But the Kennedy assassination, the conspiracy theories, even Groden’s long-running battle with…
Dozens of people have been arrested by the FBI on drug-related charges after a North Texas-based investigation featuring the Dallas Police Department and an alphabet soup of federal agencies. Some of the drug conspiracy, feds say, ran through DFW Airport. Four of the people arrested — Molitoni Katoa, Janelle Isaacs,…
It’s one of the essential tenants of making local news: If you hear about a drug that you hadn’t previously, you need to freak out about it. Monday night, WFAA led its 5 p.m. newscast with a story that purports to be about flakka, a synthetic drug. There is very…
Fifty years of bloody conflict in Colombia — thousands of deaths from firefights, sniper attacks, bombings, assassinations and mass executions — and it all comes down to this: a group of government negotiators and rebel leaders sitting around a big table, talking about land reform and crop subsidies and what…
Attention homosexuals, sodomites and godless cowards who, through misplaced compassion or cowed silence, abet the gay destruction of the American way of life. Christians are sick and tired of being bullied, and they’re not going to take it anymore. No doubt you’ve heard this rhetoric before. Lord knows there’s been…
In Texas, at least, only two real skirmishes left in the battle to actually get the state’s recalcitrant state officials and county bureaucracies to acknowledge the United States’ new reality and issue marriage licenses to any couple who wants to get married. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, after initially feeling…
“Revered” is a bad word, I know, for Dallas playwright, social activist and teacher John Fullinwider, because it means old. But, look, he is old. And he is revered. He had a piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News yesterday suggesting a much better approach to the…
