On Saturday, when the other, more ordinary candidates for the Texas House of Representatives were probably making campaign calls or hanging out with their lame families, Arlington Republican Tony Tinderholt appeared to be on a bolder mission. Dressed in camouflage gear, Tinderholt posed for three photographs posted to Facebook Saturday…
If nothing else, Rick Perry deserves points for hubris. In California to stump up business for Texas — including a proposed factory to build batteries for Teslas — the governor responded to questions about the Texas GOP platform’s endorsement of dangerous reparative therapy for LGBTQ individuals by comparing homosexuality to…
Chivalry, you’ll be happy to learn, isn’t dead. Almost, maybe, but it still burns on in the heart of former Dallas police officer Michael Mosher. Mosher was one of seven officers who responded to a report of three potentially suspicious young men walking through an alley in the 6600 block…
House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor went down to ignominious defeat in his Republican primary in Virginia last night, becoming the first sitting majority leader to lose a party primary in the position’s history. In the upset’s aftermath, two North Texas representatives — Pete Sessions of Dallas and Jeb…
After a thankfully brief and largely unfocused debate this morning, the Dallas City Council amended city ordinances to allow bicycles in public buildings, remove unwieldy prohibitions against stunt riding and racing, and allow bicycle riders older than 17 to choose whether to wear a helmet. Changing the helmet requirements was…
Commissioners began considering whether to allow the installation of so-called historical racing terminals at Texas horse tracks at a Tuesday afternoon meeting of the Texas Racing Commission in Austin. The machines, which allow bettors to rapidly wager on replays of past races that have scrubbed of all identifying information, are…
Keller ISD board member Jo Lynn Haussmann was censured at a special meeting of the board last night. She was asked to resign, too, but that was never going to happen. She offered a half-hearted apology for the Facebook comment that led to the meeting — the one in which…
In a move that’s been a long time coming, the Deep Ellum Tax Increment Financing District Board met Monday to approve a recommendation to the City Council that the district be expanded to include the area that people actually think of as Deep Ellum. The core of Deep Ellum, the…
When we left you on Friday, there was a glimmering hope that Texas Republicans might consider adopting a more middle-ground approach to immigration, in an attempt to appeal to Hispanic voters. According to state Representative Jason Villalba, a more moderate stance would be critical to the survival of the Republican…
“Unless we adjust, we as a party are at tremendous peril of vanishing forever.” This was Jason Villalba, the state rep from Dallas, over the phone today, imagining the doomsday scenario that could break his Republican party, if far-right members don’t shuffle toward the center aisle on immigration. Villalba recently…
The Republican National Convention committee on Tuesday kicked off a week of host city-searching with a trip to Cleveland, the first of four stops. After Cleveland, committee members will make stops in Kansas City and Denver before rounding out the trip in Dallas late next week. Dallas city officials, for…
An early draft of the 2014 Texas Republican Party platform obtained by the San Antonio Express-News would get rid of some of its most strident anti-LGBTQ language while maintaining staunch opposition to marriage equality and any state or federal benefits for same-sex couples. The draft also includes an endorsement of…
After DeAndre Upshaw repeated his story, this time for the Dallas City Council, about the bouncers at Uptown’s Kung Fu Saloon who appear to discriminate based on race, the City Council had an idea. They could all meet there for happy hour. “You mention about no socks,” Councilman Dwaine Caraway…
OK. So maybe the bike-helmet mandate the Dallas City Council passed 18 years ago wasn’t really about protecting people’s heads. Maybe it was really about giving cops in general an extra reason to interrogate suspicious-looking people in poor, minority neighborhoods, and for one cop in particular to express an apparent…
As the Division Director of Immigration and Legal Services for Catholic Charities of Dallas, Vanna Slaughter has long received email updates whenever young migrants arrive alone in the Dallas area. For some time, she says, she’s received around 250 of these cases in a given month — already a large…
Councilman Tennell Atkins wanted the town hall meeting to be done “the right way.” That’s why he asked all his angry constituents to stop talking directly to him and instead write their questions down on little cards. The cards would then be passed to the front of a room, for…
Dallas, we have learned, does a wonderful job of building incredible parks over freeways. On that front, you might credibly say we’re world-class. As for providing residents with usable public green space in their neighborhoods, that’s a different story. Dallas’ rank on the Trust For Public Land’s annual Park Score…
In a recent chat with our Amy Silverstein, Dallas City Councilman Philip Kingston described the outcry over proposed cuts to Dallas Animal Services — and the public jockeying among departments for additional funding — as “absolute theater.” But c’mon. An online petition and a get-together at Lee Harvey’s? That hardly…
If you live in Dallas and your house or apartment is more than 22 years old, and if your commode uses 3.5 gallons or more per flush, the city would like to give you a free, low-flow toilet. There’s no catch. No strings. Ninety bucks of porcelain, yours for the…
Dallas City Hall has come a long way over the past 10 months. Last year, it was trying to chase Uber out of town with vice stings and surreptitious regulations. Now, it’s put forth some generally sensible recommendations to streamline the governing of the “transportation for hire” industry and put…
Anyone who’s been lulled into thinking that Texas Democrats might finally have their act together need look no further than Kesha Rogers. Rogers, a Lyndon Larouche Democrat who’s staked her U.S. Senate campaign on a promise to impeach Obama (she’s compared him to Hitler), somehow managed to get into a…
Dallas City Councilman Sheffie Kadane still isn’t sure Dallas should be fluoridating its water. “Have you seen toothpaste that has fluoride in the toothpaste?” he asked Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett this morning. “And have you read the disclaimer on it that says ‘Do not swallow, and if you…
