Before he left for the Land of a Thousand Blogs, Robert Wilonsky had a few stories about city officials’ desire — they would call it a need — to spend another $25 million or so sprucing up the Cotton Bowl, just four years after taxpayers coughed up $57 million for…
We keep hammering away at this same general point, but really: It’s been a terrible year for family planning providers in Texas. First the Legislature moved $73.6 million out of the state family-planning budget for the next two years . At the same time, they changed to a tiered funding…
“That’s right,” Cat Lafitte wrote in an email to the Observer about a month ago. “I’m the idiot Facebook cop.” If you don’t remember Cat Lafitte’s name, you may remember her actions: She was one of three police officers fired in June 2011 for violating department policy. Lafitte’s offenses, according…
Wait. This is awesome. We just stumbled across Craig James’ new U.S. Senate campaign ad. His campaign manager, who also moonlights as his daughter, is interviewing him, asking if people in West Texas will hate him for his role in the Texas Tech football fiasco that led to head coach…
Like him or not, I’m sure we can all agree: Damarcus Offord, the 20-year-old Lincoln High grad who’s challenging Bernadette Nutall for her southern Dallas seat on the Dallas ISD school board, is making the typical snoozefest that are school board politics a lot more fun. Last week, Greg showed…
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Rick Perry dropped by Fox News early this morning to let Steve Doocy know just how happy he is to be your governor. In less than five minutes, he also managed to find the time to diss the feds and defend the voter ID…
A while back, for reasons I happily can’t recall, I took the step of following the staunchly anti-gay pastor Lou Engle on Twitter. Engle is the founder of TheCall, a traveling circus of politically focused intolerance, and he makes his living (as much as $90,000 in a year, tax records…
Over at the Morning News’ Trail Blazers Blog, Christy Hoppe pointed out late yesterday that Rick Perry’s Facebook page has been “inundated by angry women” unhappy about the end of the Medicaid Women’s Health Program. Perry’s Facebook bomb is actually part of a larger effort to “sarcasm-flood” the pages of…
America is in a pissy, irascible, throw-the-bums-out, anti-incumbent kinda mood. Even, apparently, if it means unseating a longtime congressman with some serious seniority and a choice committee chair. According to Charlie Cook over at the National Journal, there are some 22 House Republican primaries to watch this year. Rep. Ralph…
It costs north of a million bucks to win a U.S. House seat these days. Winning District 33, the new DFW block carved out of the totally riveting and not at all arcane redistricting process, should cost considerably less, thanks to a shortened primary and probably noncompetitive general. Still: It…
All this arguing we’re doing about contraception is getting a little tiresome, isn’t it? Sure, we get to use the word “sluts” repeatedly in a national conversation, and we’ve watched several elderly male politicians state their understanding of how birth control works, explanations which often deserve bonus points for creativity…
Still deciding who to favor among the Republican candidates vying for nomination to the U.S. Senate? Might as well play eenie, meenie, miney, mo, or choose based on favorite color or music preference, because politically, they’re practically the same. Tom Leppert, Senate candidate and former Dallas mayor, even noted at…
What prompted Governor Rick Perry’s frenzied bout of outraged tweeting about the Women’s Health Program yesterday? As much as we’d like to speculate that it was a bad batch of PCP (and will continue to do so privately, purely for our own amusement, not because it’s at all true), it…
Left-wing activists have taken aim at a man whose name you’ve probably never heard: Edward DeMarco. He’s the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and he oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The presidential appointee has become a villainous figure to those who believe lenders should write…
It started an hour ago, and it’s continuing as we shudder, with Tweets like the ones above. And he’s right: There are other providers from which poor women can get health care. It’s just that, thanks to him, there’s no money to pay for it. See the whole Twihad below…
In this week’s cover story, we wrote about Dallas’ boarding houses, which are home to thousands of the city’s mentally ill, elderly, and disabled, as well as people recovering from alcohol and drug abuse. The homes aren’t regulated by any state agency, and despite a law passed some three years…
Pro-life groups in Texas are in an awkward position these days, as the Medicaid Women’s Health Program fights for its life. On one hand, they celebrate anything that they perceive as a blow to Planned Parenthood (which Catholic Pro-Life Committee of North Texas Executive Director Karen Garnett once memorably described…
I, the overbylined, hereby solemnly swear that Unfair Park (“The Blog”) will not, under any circumstances, devolve into a sycophantic shadow booster for the long-shot congressional aspirations of Jason Roberts (“That One Biker Guy”), even in the event that one Robert Wilonsky (“Biker Guy’s Cyber-Boyfriend”) returns to the blog after…
If you happened to stumble upstairs at the Londoner last night, you might have wondered just what the hell was going on. Why were so many of these men wearing suits to the bar? Is that a sweater vest in the corner? Everyone’s throwing the word “santorum” around with such…
State legislation requiring voters to present state-issued identification such as a driver’s license, a concealed-carry permit, or a U.S. passport or military ID was rejected Monday morning by the U.S. Department of Justice. “Because we conclude that the state has failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that the proposed…
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, who worked as a nurse before heading to Washington, dropped by Martin Bashir’s show on MSNBC to denounce Governor Rick Perry’s stance toward Planned Parenthood (and to call Rush Limbaugh “un-American”.) “I don’t even know this governor anymore,” the congresswoman says in the clip above. “I…
Update, March 10: Federal Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced late Friday in Houston that federal funding to the WHP would be cut. She said the program will wind down over the next several months, and that the feds are considering funding Planned Parenthood directly. In response, Allison…
