As Dallas and the rest of Texas crept slowly to the Christmas vacation Thursday afternoon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton addressed a matter of religion for many Texans. State law, he said, allows for people with licenses to bring their handguns into places of worship, unless a church, synagogue or…
Robert Jeffress, pastor at First Baptist Dallas, committed himself to Donald Trump and his presidency in 2016, positioning himself as the evangelical face of Trumpism. This year, for better and worse, Jeffress has reaped the consequences of that commitment, repeatedly finding himself at the center of the Trump universe because…
Chief Deputy Marian Brown, former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez’s third in command, will serve as interim sheriff until voters elect a new one in November. Valdez is stepping down to run for governor. Brown, a 29-year law enforcement veteran in her fourth year with the sheriff’s office, is running…
Earlier this year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it’s targeting the seat of U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, the Dallas Republican in District 32. Sessions has drawn four competitive Democratic challengers — former Obama appointee Lillian Salerno, former WFAA-TV reporter Brett Shipp, former Hillary Clinton adviser Ed Meier and civil…
Six months ago, it wasn’t hard to imagine how Texas’ 2018 midterm election would go. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, backed by his $40 million war chest, was going to sweep to re-election with the rest of the Republican party’s statewide candidates. El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke would fall to incumbent…
Not my place, but would somebody else who knows what’s what please step forward and offer to give the new Dallas city manager and his top people a 45-minute seminar on recent city history? They seem to be good people, but they’re kind of traipsing out with a basket and…
When the president is on Twitter suggesting a U.S. senator is a whore and his fellow Republicans are on TV talking about how much they hate the FBI, guess who gets lost in the shuffle? Why, it’s our own Rick Perry, our former Gov. Oops. Where is that boy, anyway,…
There was a moment this year when The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, which serves between 8,000 and 9,000 homeless people a year, almost had to shut its doors because of a stupid software problem. Not its software. Somebody else’s. Although The Bridge had a sophisticated software system, it was paying…
People who watch this stuff closely for a living were not surprised at the end of last week when The Dallas Morning News got Marlon Rollins kicked off the Dallas park board. For one thing, it was a fair shoot. He was vulnerable. For another, it was inevitable because Rollins…
What good do you think it would do for Dallas to carry out the moral, political and social equivalent of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission process of the late ’90s? What if we took a deep dive into the specific decisions in our past that put us where…
Can a reporter become an elected official? I know it’s legally possible, but isn’t it some kind of crime against nature? When WFAA-TV (Channel 8) investigative reporter Brett Shipp announced his resignation last week to run for Congress, most of the immediate comments painted him as an ingénue, a guy…
To our regret or good fortune time only will tell, but Dallas is a great laboratory for viewing the forces roiling around American cities. We’ve got thunder overhead, rumblings in the basement and maybe a great day ahead. Nationally, the divide between cities and everybody else has been consuming ink…
A big picture isn’t necessarily good because it’s big. What if the picture misses the elephant? How does that help? During Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ state of the city address Tuesday, he announced he is launching an initiative he calls Goals for Dallas 2030, fashioned after a 1960s thing called…
Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez is running for governor. The sheriff will resign her post Wednesday morning, before officially kicking off her campaign at Texas Democratic Party headquarters in Austin. “Like so many hardworking Texans, I know it’s tough deciding between buying food, finding a decent place to live, and…
Over the weekend, an unknown group of suspects peppered Southern Methodist University’s Park Cities campus with white nationalist banners and posters opposing the LGBTQ community and urging white men to “reject the opioid beast.” Texas Vanguard, a white supremacist group, claimed responsibility online for putting up the material, posting photos…
This last week has caused me to think about something that really never occurred to me before. Maybe it should have. So now I wonder whether U.S. Reps. Joe Barton and Blake Farenthold are bigger hypocrites than former President Bill Clinton. Are they the same grade of hypocrite? Are they…
Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston agreed Friday to pay the just more than $8,000 penalty assessed against him by the city’s chief financial officer in July for missing too many meetings over the previous year. Although he paid, Kingston still disputes the decision and calls it a “witch hunt.”…
From gritty bars to the courthouse steps, a great cry of the collective human heart went up in Dallas last week for a dog named Lamb of God, slated to be killed by the city because she bit a child badly. But this really is not open for debate. The…
I more or less pay the rent by telling you what’s wrong with City Hall. So I’m a little worried. Not sure how this is going to work out. It looks as if I may have to tell you what’s right with City Hall. I ask only this: A couple of…
Finally, after years of hard work by advocates and despite a last-minute push by Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, Dallas Police Department officers will begin citing and releasing Dallas residents for marijuana possession Friday, rather than hauling them to jail. The way it works is simple: Get busted with…
Republican U.S. Representative Joe Barton, North Texas’ longest-serving House member, will not seek re-election in 2018. Barton’s decision comes amid pressure from fellow Republicans in North Texas and around the country after an explicit photo and suggestive texts from the congressman became public. “I am very proud of my public…
When somebody takes a hard-line position on a City Hall issue and won’t say why, it’s no big surprise to find out later he had something in his pocket that he didn’t want to share. But in East Dallas, I believe I have found a tribe of people who may…
