So you think nobody likes a bully. You’re wrong. I think bullies may be getting popular around here. Over the last two years we’ve been reporting in the Dallas Observer on a campaign by Belo Corp., owners of The Dallas Morning News, to refashion its metastasizing campus of land at…
Look, I’m a Laura Miller fan. I was thrilled when she got elected mayor. Her victory was a sea change. But lately I’ve been a little seasick. I know you’ve been watching the potholes on your street as closely as I have on mine, patiently awaiting the arrival of the…
The Dallas system–weak mayor, strong city manager–is supposed to be businesslike. So why is the city in the financial ditch so badly? If Dallas City Hall is so businesslike, why wouldn’t it have seen the economic downturn coming and hedged its bets just a little? Maybe nothing is businesslike about…
Assistant Dallas City Manager Charles W. Daniels has not returned my phone calls concerning the potential of an explosive and toxic waste dump on city of Dallas property on the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard and within a few hundred feet of a hotel. I notice that over the course…
The fake-drugs scandal, in which the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office used faked-up narcotics evidence to make cases on innocent Mexican immigrants, is scary because it illustrates a total disregard for the law. But maybe it seems far away from the average citizen, way over…
How can this picture be hard to get? Put yourself in it. You’re a kid. You and your little brothers live with your two devoted parents. Your dad is a hard-working guy who owns his own small business. You love your dad. He and your mom are the pillars holding…
Last week I wrote a column saying that some of the more extreme claims made by police representatives during the recent debate over police pay didn’t ring true. It’s hard to believe they’re starving to death on the average $60,000 a year we’re paying them when so many of them…
I’m confused. We’re all confused. Most people honor the cops. Dallas police officers put themselves between us and bullets. Common decency requires that we honor and respect somebody who does that for us. But what about this police pay business? C’mere: Get in the car. I’ve been thinking about the…
In June the Dallas plan commission totally slam-bammed Wal-Mart’s zoning request for an in-town superstore. Next month Wal-Mart is going before the Dallas City Council to get the plan commission’s unanimous no-vote overturned, but things look no better for them. So how smart is Wal-Mart? I have a clue. When…
I predicted projectile vomiting at the last Dallas City Council meeting. So I was off by maybe 20 percent. Instead of projectile vomiting, the Dallas City Council whipped out a big old rusty-bladed knife and stuck it in the ribs of the Palladium deal. I told you there was strangeness…
Something very weird is going on at City Hall. People are speaking in tongues. Maybe the budget crunch has crunched them. We may need to send in a rescue team with Prozac. It’s all about a major proposed reorganization of the staff that nobody wants to talk about publicly yet…
Right after the appeals court ordered a new trial in former Dallas City Council member Al Lipscomb’s bribery case, the U.S. attorney in Dallas should have done a plea bargain requiring Lipscomb to run for mayor. Lipscomb for mayor. At least then he could just bring it on. We could…
The whole panhandling issue was deliberately designed to put liberals like me in a bad mood. I’m walking across a parking lot toward the Stewpot Ministry on Young Street across from First Presbyterian Church downtown. It’s about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and now here comes a guy who is obviously going…
Don’t tell me we can’t fight City Hall. So what if they’re all a bunch of suits down there, they’re goofballs, they’re numbskulls, they’re going to do what they want to do anyway, so it’s useless, and it’s boring. Great. Please do not allow me to waken you from your…
Think about every single thing you’ve seen the Dallas City Council do in the last year: • Defy the mayor and give away tens of millions in tax money to two billionaires who didn’t need it for a sports-cum-lingerie mall on a toxic waste dump outside of downtown. • Run…
Wait a minute. The conference is over? The Roman Catholic bishops have left town already? And we’re not going to talk about the gay priest thing? Only in Dallas. This always was a town where people knew how to avoid talking about the obvious. And Dallas is, after all, where…
Very best theater of the absurd this city has seen, ever. Absolutely. Our eyes witness these events, but our brains can’t believe it. First, city council members Mary Poss, Alan Walne and Ed Oakley are leaders of the pack in giving away $43 million in tax money to two billionaires,…
The real joke about the vote-fraud law in Texas is the vote-fraud law in Texas. Let me tell you a little story I happen to know about: A candidate in a recent Dallas election lost the race by a very tight margin after deliberately steering clear of any possible hanky-panky…
The white-folks version of local history is that back in the Time of Genius, the great fathers wanted to protect the citizens from tension, so they agreed to do all the governing themselves. The African-American version is that back in the time of Colonel Sanders, rich white bigots invented the…
Did members of the Dallas City Council vote to make a huge “gift of public funds”–tens of millions of tax dollars to the Palladium deal in exchange for private business favors–when it had evidence the city was getting totally chumped on the deal? That’s the issue. That will be the…
For years, Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson told witty jokes about how nobody really knew what a county judge was. Now Margaret Keliher, the Republican candidate to replace Jackson in November, is trying to turn the joke into a campaign strategy. Keliher is a sitting civil district judge in Dallas…
You’d think Terri Hodge would be in a conservative mode. Her administrative assistant, Felicia Pitre, goes on trial in June on a 10-year felony charge of messing with a blind lady’s absentee ballot. Other players have retired entirely from the absentee vote game, given the heat surrounding it in recent…
