The family of Antoinette Brown, the woman mauled and killed by a pack of loose dogs in South Dallas earlier this month, is demanding $5,000 from the city of Dallas in order for the city to avoid a lawsuit, interim City Attorney Chris Bowers said Thursday. Bowers told the city’s…
Ken Paxton is taking his potty problem to the feds. Wednesday afternoon, Texas’ attorney general announced that he, along with a cadre of other states and school districts, was suing the United States, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor and the…
Leave it to local Democrats to play the Susan Hawk mentally ill district attorney story exactly wrong. I swear the local Dallas County Democratic Party could turn the second coming into a debate about immigration. Hawk, as you know, is our recently elected Republican DA who went on a covered-up…
First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress sure does think a lot of things. He thinks that leading his parishioners to raise $135 million to build the baptist Bellagio on St. Paul Street downtown is being a good steward of the Lord’s cash. He thinks that Catholicism represents the “genius of…
A picture is emerging — very slowly from the fog of local politics — of the way Dallas probably is going to address its desegregation problems with the federal government. The city is under major pressure to redress decades of bad behavior by putting more “affordable housing” (code for racially…
Don’t tell Dallas it hasn’t done anything for racial desegregation. Since 2004 a $22 million trust fund that grew out of a Dallas housing desegregation case has been used to bankroll an aggressive campaign to push integrated housing into highly resistant affluent white majority areas. Didn’t know that? Maybe you…
One of the most cherished lines in American movies – “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” – may take on new and bitter meaning here in Dallas, where backers of a proposed new six-lane toll road along the Trinity River through the center of the city are about to get the…
During a contentious debate last week over handing $3 million to Costco for the retail giant to build a North Dallas store, opponents argued it would get built somewhere in Dallas with or without the money. They lost, but not before wringing a crucial concession. Costco gets its — actually,…
Quick! Somebody tell the mayor! The homeless are being unacceptable again! A month ago Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings toured the “Tent City” homeless encampment beneath a cat’s cradle of freeway overpasses at the intersection of Interstate 30 and I-45, one mile due east from City Hall. He told people living…
In the way of actual action, very little interesting happened at the 2016 Texas Republican Convention, held at the now Exxxotica-free Key Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center. The state’s activist GOPers managed to restrain themselves from supporting secession from the United States — yes, it was actually discussed as a potential…
Less than a week after Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton insinuated themselves into Fort Worth ISD bathrooms, the duo is set for fight with the Obama administration. Thursday night, the White House announced that any school receiving any federal must allow transgender students at…
I have been reading all of the responses to my column earlier in the week saying the city may need to start shooting stray dogs, including the comments suggesting I’m the one who should be shot, thank you very much. All I can conclude is that a whole lot of people…
Watch the Dallas City Council work itself up over about $1.2 million in cost overruns stemming from the continued effort to build the the streetcar line from Union Station to Oak Cliff, it’s easy to empathize with the vocal minority on the council who are critics. Jennifer Gates’ complaint that…
One of the biggest impediments against the city of Dallas stopping dog attacks like the one that killed Antoinette Brown in South Dallas last week is that the city, no matter how many reports it receives about a bad dog owner or how many dogs it confiscates from that owner,…
Getting tired of people taking Donald Trump to task on his philosophy? Think that’s like criticizing him for not being able to stand on his toes in ballet slippers? Yeah. Me, too. He never promised us a philosophy garden. But the things the man says also do point inevitably to…
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick showed up at the Fort Worth ISD school board meeting Tuesday night to stand in the proverbial bathroom door. Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton discovered this week that the district, in a purely administrative move made in April, clarified that students at the…
Shoot the dogs. And I owe an apology to Dallas City Council member Ricky Callahan for making fun of him a couple weeks ago when he said the same thing. It should not have taken the horrific story of Antoinette Brown to get me up to speed. Brown is the 52-year-old…
According to Dallas Police, the reason the department took so long to publicly announce the fatal mauling of a southern Dallas woman last week was that investigators didn’t want the owner of the dogs that attacked Antoinette Brown to ditch the canines. Five days after the attack, when the department…
It looks like the Continental Avenue Pedestrian Bridge, one of the city of Dallas’ more pleasant recent additions, will be getting a new name. The city council’s transportation committee voted unanimously Monday to recommend naming the bridge after former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to the full city council. The recommendation…
When I saw last week that Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings had sent a letter to Austin regulators in support of a bid by the Hunt family of Dallas to take over our local electric transmission utility, all of the “how high” jokes I have ever heard in my life started…
Texas’ Child Protective Services is in crisis. In the wake of the brutal, March 13 death of 4-year-old Leilana Wright in Grand Prairie, a parade of news report have documented that the agency, through some mixture of incompetence and an acute staffing shortage, is fundamentally incapable, as currently organized, of…
This week Robert Wilonsky at The Dallas Morning News and Peter Simek at D Magazine both have been telling some of those important but very painful stories we all need to hear about the city’s racial history. I just want to make sure we don’t throw the old guy out with…
