We’ve been here before, but Dallas’ Confederate war memorial, the one that dominates Pioneer Plaza between City Hall and the convention center, appears to be in its final days. Dallas city staff gave City Council members three options Wednesday for what to do with the 60-foot behemoth. The council could…
Stephen Young has a great piece up on our website now analyzing police staffing in Dallas and whether we need more, fewer or the same number of officers than we already have. As he explains in his story, the overall problem of police staffing is surprisingly complex, with many moving…
Dallas’ XFL franchise is set to make a far bigger front-office hire than anyone could’ve expected when Vince McMahon’s Alpha Entertainment announced plans to revive its football league in December. According to multiple media reports, the league will announce that former University of Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops will be…
Today the Dallas City Council, after a year of crass weaseling, will try once more to decide what to do with the huge, lugubrious Confederate War Memorial that stands 400 feet from Dallas City Hall like a very bad billboard for the city. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to decide how…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton never met a piece of the Affordable Care Act he wasn’t going to doggedly try to take off the books. The latest example, promoted Tuesday by Paxton’s office, is an attempt by Texas and seven other states to permanently block federal regulations protecting the trans…
Former El Paso U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke ended his vagabond run on Tuesday afternoon, emerging from the haze of dentist appointments, morning runs and road trips to sit for an interview with Oprah in Times Square PlayStation Theater. The interview isn’t set to air on the media maven’s Oprah Winfrey Network…
Repeat the words enough times and the message becomes fact: Dallas needs more cops. Ask the mayor. “Dallas needs more cops.” Ask a City Council member. “Dallas needs more cops.” Ask the cop unions. “Dallas definitely needs more cops.” Ask Dallas’ only daily newspaper. “We’re scared, so Dallas needs more…
Sexual assault survivors and advocacy groups joined with Republican and Democratic legislators at the Texas Capitol on Monday to tout 20 filed or soon-to-be-filed bills aimed at helping victims of sexual assault seek justice in the aftermath of their attacks. The proposed changes begin in both the House and Senate…
The bad news for traffic scofflaws and anyone else walking around with a Dallas C misdemeanor warrant is that it’s warrant roundup time. The good news is, this time the city’s offering a discount on your warrant fees, if you’re willing to go through a little trouble. If you’ve got…
Here we go already, off to the slime pits. Bring a towel. Last week mayoral candidate Scott Griggs was one of a handful of City Council members caught with dodgy campaign donations in the past, and you’d have thought he’d shot and killed a child. The donations were dodgy, not…
Someone get Texas Secretary of State David Whitley one sequined glove, please. Last week Whitley dethroned the late Michael Jackson as king of the moonwalk, appearing to move forward while walking backward. On Jan. 25, Whitley and Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that as many as 58,000 noncitizens may have…
Dallas County health officials announced late Friday that an 89-year-old Dallas resident is the sixth person in the county to succumb to the flu this month. Dallas County Health and Human Services doesn’t release any additional information about virus or infection victims. Each of the six Dallas County deaths this…
It’s hard to overstate what the Dallas Mavericks pulled off Thursday afternoon. In exchange for disgruntled point guard Dennis Smith Jr., Wesley Matthews and DeAndre Jordan and two future first-round draft picks, the Mavs acquired center Kristaps Porzingis, Courtney Lee and Tim Hardaway Jr. from the New York Knicks. Porzingis,…
A little more than three months after promising this day would come, Dallas’ Roman Catholic diocese made good Thursday, releasing the names of 31 priests with ties to Dallas who were the subjects of credible allegations of sexual abuse. Joining with Dallas, dioceses across the state released the names of…
D Magazine’s Tim Rogers got the scoop Wednesday afternoon. Three Dallas City Council members — mayoral candidate Scott Griggs, Philip Kingston and Omar Narvaez — received thousands in campaign donations from attorney James Stanton III’s four children, who are ages 5-11, according to the Morning News. The donations don’t violate…
William Barr, nominee to become U.S. attorney general, was right. Unindicted co-conspirators don’t get enough respect. Barr said at his Senate confirmation hearing: “If you’re not going to indict someone, you don’t stand up there and unload negative information about the person. That’s not the way the [Justice] Department does…
It’s still January, a couple of months away from the meat of the 2019 Texas legislative session, and it’s already easy to see the difference in the way Dallas state representatives and senators are representing their city. Wednesday afternoon, Nathan Johnson, the Park Cities and North Dallas state senator who…
In the Tuesday morning television coverage of the four Houston police officers who were shot the night before, the most heartbreaking and infuriating words came from Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers Union. “We are sick and tired of having targets on our back,” Gamaldi said. “We are…
Friday afternoon came the breathless proclamation from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Secretary of State David Whitley: Ninety-five thousand noncitizens were on Texas’ voter rolls, and 58,000 of them had cast ballots between 1996 and 2018. Friday night and Saturday, progressive groups and Democrats pushed back, suggesting that…
Maybe North Texas has already sprawled too far. Tuesday morning, Frisco police issued their latest alert about a coyote attack, continuing a wave that first struck the city last year. This time, cops got a call at about 7 a.m. that a jogger had been attacked about 20 minutes earlier…
No matter who one asks, be it members of the Dallas City Council, Dallas Police Department brass or Dallas’ police unions, all involved agree that DPD has to do a better job of retaining and recruiting police officers. For the department to increase the ranks to 3,700 or 3,800 officers…
Texas’ long fight over voter ID, settled just last year, is already old news. The state’s new battlefront in the war for and against voter rights is over citizenship verification, and it looks like Texas could be in for another round of litigation. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and newly…
