U.S. Representative Steve Stockman is the Texas lawmaker who is probably least likely to whip out a joint at the party and share it with everyone. He likes families, straight people, guns and fertilized eggs that might one day become babies. He hates liberals. Not as much as he hates…
It could only have been fate that steered me to Al Roker this morning. Just one week after I changed the route of my Farmers Market-to-Oak Lawn bike commute, shifting from one plowing straight through Downtown and McKinney Avenue to one skirting the edges past City Hall and Victory Park,…
For all its walkability and easy access to food and drink, the type of dense, urban living embodied by Uptown does have its drawbacks. Price is one. The three-bedroom townhomes that line Worthington Street are valued on the tax rolls at upward of a half million dollars. Another minus: Loud…
Staff in Governor Rick Perry’s office must have had a case of the Mondays. It was noon before we got his emailed statement blasting the Obama administration’s proposal to cut carbon emissions from power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels over the next 15 years. Seriously? That was, like, hours,…
Open Carry Texas and its most active local offshoot, Open Carry Tarrant County, have succeeded marvelously in their quest to mercilessly troll gun-control advocates. Whether they’ve made any progress toward their stated aim of legalizing openly carried handguns in Texas, however, is another matter. The National Rifle Association, for one,…
Councilman Tennell Atkins wanted the town hall meeting to be done “the right way.” That’s why he asked all his angry constituents to stop talking directly to him and instead write their questions down on little cards. The cards would then be passed to the front of a room, for…
Local chef Kent Rathbun has a very practical reason for driving a neon yellow Porsche. “Everyone knows it’s you,” he told The Dallas Morning News a couple of years ago. “That’s a good thing and a bad thing, actually. Part of the reason I like it is because when it’s…
Squad Car Footage from Amy Silverstein on Vimeo. The allegations against the former McKinney Police Department officer are serious: He was driving too fast, with no siren lights on and making a dangerous lane change before crashing into the car of a man who is now suing him. But there’s…
The photo tell the story. Not all of it, maybe but enough. A mangled baby stroller abandoned in the middle of a six-lane intersection. A few feet away, a weathered pickup has stopped sprawled half across the curb. Yellow police tape twists in the foreground. The scene is Cooper Street…
In case the almost six full days that have elapsed since a gunman killed six students at the University of California at Santa Barbara has allowed for the reemergence of some positive feelings about humanity, then allow the Parker County Sheriff’s Department to strangle those warm fuzzy feelings with a…
Dallas, we have learned, does a wonderful job of building incredible parks over freeways. On that front, you might credibly say we’re world-class. As for providing residents with usable public green space in their neighborhoods, that’s a different story. Dallas’ rank on the Trust For Public Land’s annual Park Score…
In a recent chat with our Amy Silverstein, Dallas City Councilman Philip Kingston described the outcry over proposed cuts to Dallas Animal Services — and the public jockeying among departments for additional funding — as “absolute theater.” But c’mon. An online petition and a get-together at Lee Harvey’s? That hardly…
Imagine, in a moment of suspended disbelief, that your job pays 174 grand a year. And comes with a $1.3 million expense account. And a staff of eighteen Ivy League yes-men whose sole duty is to bray loud and wide about the miracle that is you — when they’re not…
Dallas has thousands of orphaned animals stuck in the shelter system, and a big corporation promised to help save some of them. Beginning last September, a PetSmart store in north Dallas opened up its doors to the Dallas Animal Services department, housing some of its “adoptable” dogs and cats. Every…
Overnight Tuesday, a couple of minor mysteries struck an Oak Lawn apartment complex. The first: Who took the Louis Vuitton luggage and iPad from the gold 2010 Lexus parked for the night in the 4300 block of Gilbert Avenue? A neighbor awoke to a car alarm at about 6 a.m…
Before Open Carry Tarrant County members and their rifles set foot in a Fort Worth Jack in the Box earlier this month, setting off a series of increasingly absurd showdowns between open-carry gun activists and national restaurant chains, its members were standing on Arlington sidewalks handing out copies of the…
If you live in Dallas and your house or apartment is more than 22 years old, and if your commode uses 3.5 gallons or more per flush, the city would like to give you a free, low-flow toilet. There’s no catch. No strings. Ninety bucks of porcelain, yours for the…
The two dozen lawsuits that have piled up against Grand Prairie’s Cardinal Coachlines in the wake of last spring’s grisly bus crash on the Bush Turnpike in Irving were predictable enough. Three dead, dozens more seriously injured, almost all senior citizens bound for Choctaw Casino in Durant, Oklahoma — all…
Dallas City Hall has come a long way over the past 10 months. Last year, it was trying to chase Uber out of town with vice stings and surreptitious regulations. Now, it’s put forth some generally sensible recommendations to streamline the governing of the “transportation for hire” industry and put…
Anyone who’s been lulled into thinking that Texas Democrats might finally have their act together need look no further than Kesha Rogers. Rogers, a Lyndon Larouche Democrat who’s staked her U.S. Senate campaign on a promise to impeach Obama (she’s compared him to Hitler), somehow managed to get into a…
Dallas City Councilman Sheffie Kadane still isn’t sure Dallas should be fluoridating its water. “Have you seen toothpaste that has fluoride in the toothpaste?” he asked Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett this morning. “And have you read the disclaimer on it that says ‘Do not swallow, and if you…
No one — not her teacher, not her mom, not the school nurse, not the paramedics — could initially explain why Meaghan Levy, an otherwise healthy kindergartener at Frisco’s Corbell Elementary, suddenly collapsed to the floor as her class walked to the library on the morning of December 12. She…
