At first glance, there seems little danger that R.D. Rucker, Democratic candidate for the 292nd Judicial District, might actually win. After all, the days when a Democrat would automatically sweep into office are long gone. Dallas hasn’t elected a Democrat to a trial court bench since 1992, when John Creuzot…
Dallas Morning News executives have threatened to halt publication of the Dallas League of Women Voters’ election guide because of the league’s official opposition to the Trinity River project. The executives who summoned league leadership to a knuckle-rapping session over the river issue were from the paper’s news side, not…
Asbestos I can recall I’m very impressed with the reporting in your Fred Baron article [“Toxic justice,” August 13]. It is a pleasure to read an article that uses no-nonsense words to tell it like it is. The amount of effort put into the article comes through loud and clear…
He will never forget the date: March 25, 1990. That’s the day Mark Aguirre, dressed in Detroit Pistons blue, came home to Reunion Arena to play the Dallas Mavericks, the team that made him the No. 1 draft pick nine years earlier and then swapped him for a washed-up player…
At 2:55 on Monday afternoon, minutes before the school bell rings to dismiss classes at Plano’s Rosemary Haggar Elementary School, Joy Ramsier, suburban mother of two, takes to the streets. Armed with clipboard and pen, she mans her post near the school property line, under the shade of a sprawling…
In public, at least, the charges are somber, the rhetoric bare. The school board race between Richard C. Evans and Se-Gwen Tyler revolves around a high school diploma, which Evans finally admits he doesn’t have. Local educators line up to voice sober thoughts about the benefits of such a diploma,…
Details, details We have long held off taking swipes at the Log Cabin Republicans for two reasons–pity, and the fact that the premise of the gay GOP group is itself so absurd that it defies what passes for commentary to Buzz. Gay Republicans? What’s next, an all-hetero Judy Garland fan…
When Cheryl Kellis learned that plans were afoot to convert the 12,000-square-foot Baptist church across the street from her tidy frame house into a music club and restaurant, she feared the worst–loud music, traffic jams, and weak-bladdered stumblebums turning her front lawn into a latrine. Owners of The Palace and…
Darlie’s defenders The pictures in your article [“Defending Darlie,” August 6] should awaken some people to what has been done to my daughter. There is so much more that we cannot make public because of her appeal. If you think for one moment that the officials in our judicial system…
Animal act Who says U.S. District Judge John McBryde, often described as churlish, doesn’t have a sense of humor? Buzz figures the Fort Worth judge must have some notion of the comic, otherwise he would have hurled his gavel at the lawyers representing two petitioners in his court recently–Barney the…
A federal jury deliberated for only three hours before convicting William Risby, a roofing contractor, last Friday on 64 DISD-related counts that included charges of kickbacks, embezzlement, and conspiracy to defraud the school district of more than $385,000 for roofing repairs that were never performed. But as the proceedings unfolded…
Getting the “facts” straight I can’t understand the absurd diatribes that get posted every week against Robert Wilonsky and the other music critics of the Dallas Observer. Case in point: the reactions to Wilonsky’s dissing of Pearl Jam. Outraged readers wrote that Wilonsky was ill-informed, poorly educated, smoking crack, and…
Fred Baron is one of the good guys. Or so he says, loudly, repeatedly, as though it were an incantation to make the questions go away. The legendary plaintiffs’ attorney marshals his defense with high drama: hushed apologies, and a grand array of verbal feints and bobs. It all adds…
To hear lawyers at the Dallas law firm of Baron & Budd tell it, they are frontline warriors in a battle against callous corporations whose product, asbestos, claimed the lives and health of thousands of working men. But the first casualty of war is truth, and at Baron & Budd,…
Torrential rains lashed the crowds that had gathered outside the state prison in Huntsville, two disparate camps that had come to noisily support and prayerfully protest the execution by lethal injection of convicted murderer David Wayne Spence in April 1997. Inside the death chamber, the 38-year-old beefy, blue-eyed Spence would…
On a summer day in 1969, as American hearts pounded in cadence to Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, NASA engineer Tom Moser’s heart almost stopped cold.XAbout two weeks before the epic launch, Moser’s boss at the Johnson Space Center in Houston had assigned him a top-secret mission. Congress…
Buried at the back of a report by the Army Corps of Engineers is an admission that the $2 billion Trinity River project may make flooding in the region worse, not better. The Corps says the increased threat of flooding should be allowed because of the project’s value as a…
The doctor is out Dallas Independent School District board candidate Richard Evans, the self-described “doctor”(as in bogus Ph.D.), has been quiet in the wake of reports that he may have dropped out of high school and never attended an accredited college or university. That may be because Evans has been…
Annexation politics In “Raw deal” [July 23], on governor emeritus (from the Latin “e” meaning “out,” and “meritus” meaning “deserved to be”) Clements’ land by the south end of Lake Ray Hubbard, Jim Schutze gets the fundamentals of politics right. This is rare and difficult. Schutze again shows what everyone…
There’s a chance that Richard Evans’ tardiness on this Thursday evening is a faux pas, an innocent error made while the Dallas school board candidate juggles his busy campaign schedule. But it’s more likely that Evans’ fashionably late arrival is just another calculated campaign tactic designed to propel the “management…
Dallas Observer Editor Julie Lyons recently won a first-place award in sportswriting from the National Association of Black Journalists for her July 17, 1997, article “The Saint,” about Lone Star Park jockey Marlon St. Julien. St. Julien, 26, is the only prominent black thoroughbred racing jockey in the United States…
The best things in life “People pay for value, and most people disregard free things because they intrinsically have no value because people don’t pay for them.” That bit of, um, wisdom spilled from the lips of D magazine publisher Wick Allison, as quoted in The Dallas Morning News. He…
