Buying into a Texas wind farm sounds like a good idea. Texas investors have dumped more than $7 billion into the technology and the state’s wind farms generate more than 12,000 megawatts of electricity per year. Texas has the highest wind power capacity in the country, so it makes sense…
President Obama came to a good place last weekend to tell people what this election is about. Dallas may not be the only bull’s eye in America for a discussion of ethnicity politics and voting rights, but it’ll do. In our own backyard and in the nation, some white people…
Ted Cruz is in trouble. He didn’t have the worst night of the four remaining GOP presidential candidates — that honor belongs to Marco Rubio, who got walloped by front-runner Donald Trump in Rubio’s home state, Florida — but he didn’t do anything to derail Trump’s anger-powered locomotive of a…
Sixty-five Texas water systems serving 82,000 people have tested positive for levels of arsenic higher, and sometimes much higher, than what’s considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Environmental Integrity Project says. The authors of the report say the state of Texas hasn’t done a good enough job of…
Avi Adelman was arrested on February 9, ostensibly for trespassing on DART’s Rosa Park’s Plaza, but really, the record suggested, because a DART cop didn’t like that he refused to stop taking photographs of paramedics treating a semi-conscious K2 user. A week later, on February 16, DART notified Adelman that…
In an ideal universe, Dallasites would commemorate Ireland’s patron saint by drinking in moderation, designating drivers and otherwise behaving as sensible grown-ups. This, however, is the real world, which means that thousands of Dallasites will spend St. Patrick’s Day doing the exact opposite — i.e., getting smashed and making all…
Chase Stone and his friends were out Sunday, he says, to enjoy to beautiful weather and the start of riding season with a group motorcycle ride. As the riders traveled through Fort Worth, one of the group’s support vehicles, traveling with the caravan of motorcycles to help out in case…
Just because Dallas doesn’t have a plan for dealing with the inhabitants of the homeless tent cities it plans to bulldoze on May 1, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a plan. That’s the plan. No plan. That’s always Dallas’ plan: no plan, no people. How many times does the…
The earthquake struck in the middle of the morning, shaking houses on their foundations and rattling dishes in cabinets. Surprised residents from Valley View, a town about 60 miles north of Dallas, all the way west to Pilot Point poured into the streets in the fall of 1985. “It felt…
At its most elemental level, government — at least the democratic kind set out in America’s founding documents — exists to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens; the pursuit of happiness is more of a rhetorical flourish. Governments perform this function by passing and enforcing laws, most…
Finally the land-play at the southwest corner of downtown Dallas has been rendered semi-public and a known fact, with last week’s admission by The Dallas Morning News that the property on which the paper sits may be sort of somewhat on the market. And by the way, land can be…
Slowly, but surely under the leadership of new executive director Kelly Gottschalk, the moribund Dallas Police and Fire Pension System seems to be digging itself out of the chasm dug during the leadership of former director Richard Tettamant. According to new data released by the pension fund on Thursday and…
The Cleveland Browns, who selected Johnny Manziel with the 22nd pick of the 2014 NFL Draft, have released the former Texas A&M quarterback. Hopefully, the wheels have not started turning in Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ head. Jones coveted Manziel in 2014. His son Stephen Jones reportedly talked Jones out making…
Thursday morning, Mike Rawlings, for better and worse, presented the case for his term and a half as Dallas. Speaking to a crowd gathered for something called the City Makers Summit put on by The Atlantic and JP Morgan Chase, Rawlings offered a sampling of the things that make his…
One of the most striking things about the run-up to the trial in Three Expo Events v. The City of Dallas — the fight over Dallas City Council’s vote to ban the Exxxotica adult expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center — is the unanimity with which both sides…
Prescription opioids — painkillers like oxycodone, hydrocodone and the old standby morphine — kill more Americans than any other drug. In 2014, the official death toll was 18,893, which is probably an undercount but is nonetheless more than three times the number of Americans (5,415) who fatally overdosed on cocaine and more than twice the…
Two men accused of orchestrating the killing of Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa, the one-time attorney for Mexico’s Gulf Cartel who was gunned down in 2013 in Southlake, have been connected by federal law enforcement to as many as a dozen additional murders. Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Cepeda, 59, and his son Jesus…
Rape: another important topic falls off the map of sanity. Now people are demonizing a North Texas lawmaker because she said rape and booze might have something to do with each other. So does that mean somebody actually thinks there’s a planet out there somewhere in the rant-o-verse where rape…
Wednesday, Tarrant County announced that it’s identified its second and third Zika virus cases of the winter. One patient traveled recently to Puerto Rico, the other to El Salvador, both of which are currently in the midst of a Zika outbreak. No other identifying information about the patients has been…
On February 5, Dallas Police Chief David Brown delivered some bad news to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. Through the first month of 2016, violent crime was up by 26 percent over the previous year. There’d been one fewer murders, but the number of rapes (13 percent) robberies (21…
It was hard to tell from the breathless news coverage of Ted Cruz’s hanging on to win the Texas primary and stay in the race with Republican front-runner Donald Trump last week, but the Lone Star State had yet another election with terrible voter turnout. Despite Texas Republicans casting a…
You know what’s wrong with the new Dallas-based storyline in House of Cards, the Netflix White House soap opera? The same thing that’s wrong with the country. The screenplay assumes that wickedness, cynicism and self-serving hypocrisy flow from the center outward. It’s the whole “fed-up” paradigm now, left and right…
