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…
Just a month ago, the marshaled conservative forces against Donald Trump seemed to have a foothold. Their man, whether they liked it or not, was Ted Cruz, and Cruz had just put up his strongest showing of the 2016 primary in Wisconsin, beating Trump by a shade over 13 points…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is not going to take Target’s announcement that they want people to use the restroom of their choice sitting down — or standing up, as it were. In a letter provided by Paxton to Fox News that we managed to track down on a Breitbart…
What mystery? Republican leadership offered Republican primary voters a choice between 16 conservatives and a white guy. The voters have spoken. Yesterday morning after Trump nailed the Republican nomination, I’m reading Nate Silver, I’m reading The New York Times lead editorial, reading Ross Douthat, The Washington Post editorial, The Wall…
Halt! Or should I use the German, “Halt!” An idea is afloat out there, almost certainly well meaning, for dealing with the city’s homeless population by creating a concentration camp at a disused military base where you and I won’t be able to see the problem any longer. Who else…
After being throttled in a make or break Indiana primary, Texas’ Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential nominating contest, ceding the GOP nod to New York real estate mogul Donald Trump. “We are suspending our campaign, we left it all on the field in Indiana,” Cruz said, managing…
Last winter’s Dallas City Council battle over the city’s soda contract was way more fun than it had any right to be. Cases of soda landed in council offices in a way that smelled a lot like patronage. There were long exchanges about something called pour rights, and City Council…
All of the pundits and all of the cues and signals are telling me I’m supposed to be angry and suicidal right now. Even though that seems like a conflict in and of itself, I still want to do what’s expected of me, but it’s really hard because I live…
Tuesday, Ted Cruz will face the biggest, and perhaps last, hurdle in his campaign for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination. If manages to knock off Donald Trump in Indiana, he’ll have something approaching a 30 percent shot at keeping Trump for gathering the 1,237 delegates the New York real…
Tracy Murphree, Republican candidate for Denton County sheriff, announced he had said all he needed to say in regard to his Facebook post claiming he’d beat a transgender woman if he caught her in the bathroom with his daughter. “This whole bathroom thing is craziness I have never seen.” he…
