When the City Council voted in January to supply the Dallas Police Department with license plate scanners that automatically check vehicles against a law enforcement database, the decision was nearly unanimous. Most council members viewed it as a useful crime-fighting tool and little more. Only Angela Hunt expressed any serious…
Last year, as part of its ever-so-hesitant embrace of things that aren’t cars, the city of Dallas eased its parking requirements a bit. The idea was that, by shrinking the sea of asphalt the city requires shops and restaurants to surround themselves with, the measure would help foster the denser,…
First, a bit of background. For the past several months, Battleground Texas has been laying the groundwork for a Democratic takeover of Texas. It will be a long process, requiring the development of the on-the-ground political infrastructure needed to reliably turn out Democrats to vote, Latino ones especially. So far,…
There wasn’t much interest in the City Council elections this year, evidenced mainly by the fact that hardly anybody showed up to vote in them. We don’t blame you. It was a Saturday, and there were probably waffles somewhere. But the runoff election in District 14 between Bobby Abtahi and…
Picture a long, steep staircase. Now, picture an extremely obese individual climbing up it. There’s a lot of sweating and heavy breathing, no doubt, accompanied by a chorus of unseemly grunts and muttered curses. There’s a not-too-distant risk of cardiac arrest. In this scenario, put forward on Monday in the…
When Ron Kirk began pitching the Trinity River Project in the late 1990s, no one was thinking about the Texas heelsplitter or the Texas pigtoe, or the Mexican fawnsfoot, the smooth pimpleback, or the Texas fatmucket. There was no real reason to. Back then, the species were sufficiently abundant that…
Cathie Adams, the president of the Texas Eagle Forum who briefly chaired the state’s Republican Party, made her thesis clear early in a recent presentation to the Far North Dallas Tea Party with a quote from author Paul Sperry. America is fighting a perfect enemy, one protected by religious freedoms…
It’s not easy being gay in El Salvador, which, in addition to being the second most violent place on earth, is not particularly hospitable to LGBT citizens. A 2010 report presented to the United Nations by several human rights groups described a number of grisly murders. In one case, the…
After this month’s city elections, we repeated a quote that District 14 candidate Bobby Abtahi gave to the Morning News alluding to Philip Kingston, his opponent in next month’s runoff, as “someone who sues their neighbors.” Kingston wasn’t pleased. He called shortly after to offer a barbed response, calling Abtahi…
It’s hard to overstate how completely the city of Dallas has neglected its aquatics system. It hasn’t built a new pool since 1978, when it built an indoor facility near Bachman Lake. The number of pools operated by the city dropped from 107 in 1983 to 17 today. Those that…
U.S. Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, is not a subtle man. So when he announced that he would boycott a GOP fund-raising dinner because Senator Ted Cruz will be attending, it’s not surprising he talked to BuzzFeed about it. “I don’t think we should be acknowledging people who…
Unless Governor Rick Perry uses his veto, Texas is set to enact the most stringent email privacy protections in the country. The legislation, passed unanimously, would require state law enforcement agencies to secure search warrants before accessing emails. Previously, Texas mirrored federal rules, which make a nonsensical distinction between recent…
Delia Jasso has long been an ally to the LGBT community. One of her first major initiatives upon joining the City Council in 2009 was to organize the LGBT Task Force. More recently, she was among the first to put her name to a resolution in support of gay marriage…
Drivers and liberals can breathe easy: Central Expressway is still officially Central Expressway. The state legislature opted over the weekend to retain the familiar name for the roadway’s entire length. That said, the three-and-a-half mile stretch between Knox Street and Northwest Highway will also be called George W. Bush Expressway…
Man. We remember a time, long ago last legislative session, when all your state lawmakers wanted to do was talk about abortion and how much they hated it. They were super-duper against it, as they could not seem to stop talking about, so much so that they cheerily decimated the…
The Texas House and Senate have both passed the “Merry Christmas Bill,” which allows public schools to openly celebrate Christmas without fear of legal action. The bill specifically allows teachers to say “traditional greetings” for “traditional winter celebrations,” such as Christmas and Hanukkah and, theoretically, others that aren’t specifically mentioned…
The debate over Ursuline’s soccer field jumped the shark a dozen years ago when an outcry from the school’s Preston Hollow neighbors convinced the City Council to reject the school’s request to install lights. The defeat sent Ursuline back to the drawing board. Last May, it unveiled a new, more…
Harold Simmons, the Dallas billionaire and owner of a West Texas radioactive-waste dump, won yet another tailor-made piece of legislation Tuesday. When all seemed lost, and his bill was hung up on a technicality — a point of order pushed by Representative Lon Burnam, his lonely, perennial opponent — the…
Yesterday when my wife, son and I were driving back from Lubbock, the news on my tablet told me that Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, and Tea Party leaders in 25 states had released an open letter urging congress to dump…
John Carona, our Republican state senator from Dallas, learned some hard lessons this session about how his fellow lawmakers’ business interests tend to dominate the doings in the legislature. Last month, Carona’s bill to try to reform the incredibly predatory payday loan industry was picked down to its skeletal bones…
Ralph Isenberg and Domingo Garcia haven’t always been enemies. Back in 2010, in fact, they were all set to dine together at a fundraiser with President Obama, until Isenberg was unceremoniously disinvited by the White House. Their relationship has since gone south, reaching its nadir this month with Garcia’s Cinco…
Downtown’s city-owned Omni Hotel has been a roaring success since it opened a year-and-a-half ago, routinely filling up and helping score such convention-business coups as the annual gathering of the American Meat Institute and the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Expo. But the Omni was only one component of the city’s…
