Back in 2006, Mayor Laura Miller joined with her colleagues across the country to sign the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a promise to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012, It was just Dallas doing in its part to chip…
There was some good news in the crime statistics presented to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee a few moments ago. Burglaries, the bane of the Dallas Police Department in recent years, are down by double-digits thanks to ongoing efforts to shut down fencing operations through which thieves turn their…
Back in December, the city of Dallas opened its Community Baby Cafe, which provides resources not for eating young children, as the easily confused might be led to believe, but for nursing them. Research has made the benefits of breastfeeding increasingly undeniable, so the city decided to launch CBC as…
Until recently, if you walked along the eastern wall of the Dallas Public Library, you would have to weave your way through a gathering of homeless people idling there. Never gave me much of a problem, but apparently something went down because, as Rudy Bush noted yesterday, Downtown Dallas, Inc…
Former EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz was the designated whipping boy at a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing this week, though it proceeded in absentia. Armendariz totally blew it off, to the supreme indignation of Chairman Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, and the assembled GOP congressmen. Maybe Armendariz decided…
Going in, I was assuming the Pride Month event at City Hall was for celebrating the previous days’ revelation that the Green Lantern is gay. It’s not Batman or Superman, but baby steps, right? But no one — not Councilwoman Delia Jasso, not any of the half dozen speakers, not…
Councilman Dwaine Caraway announced this morning at the City Council briefing that despite his half-decade long effort to get young men to pull ’em up, Dallas’ sagging epidemic is only getting worse. “It’s a doggone shame,” he said. Seems that Caraway recently spotted two young men strolling through the meat…
Republican candidates in Texas are historically bad at courting Hispanic voters, so it’s no wonder senate candidate Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst welcomes a novel approach: a debate in Spanish with his run-off challenger, the Tea Party sweetheart Ted Cruz. We hope this happens. We hope it happens with the same…
Please. Put away your hose, uproot your automatic sprinkler system, and watch sadly as your patch of St. Augustine scorches and shrivels until it’s a dusty brown wasteland, because it’s better than the alternative. Dallas Water Utilities and the Tarrant Regional Water District announced this morning that they are bringing…
The list of projects in Dallas that could, maybe, get a chunk of the paltry $7.6-million in Low Income Housing Tax Credits allotted for the Dallas-Denton-Collin-Grayson-Tarrant County region was whittled down to four a while back, and city staff told the City Council’s Housing Committee today how they would distribute…
Fort Worth Senator Wendy Davis announced this week that she’ll be teaming up with the Texas Department of Public Safety to remind state law enforcement agencies, once again, that a new law requires them to report how many untested rape kits they have in evidence. At the same time, she…
If Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins has a direct foil in the state of Texas, it’s soon-to-be-former Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley. Watkins, actively pursuing innocence claims and making Dallas the leading county for exonerations in Texas, is an outlier, albeit one who is gaining supporters around the country…
All you need to know about U.S. Representative Ralph Hall’s decisive win in the 4th Congressional District Tuesday night is that he went skydiving on Memorial Day. He wore a jumpsuit printed with undulating American flags and fell from the plane, plummeting briefly in free-fall, his arms flapping slightly, like…
Today, the unalloyed, wedge issue-driven, throbbing heart of the Grand Ol’ Party will cast their ballots so that the candidates can stop chest-thumping about who’s the real conservative and start running against Obama because, let’s face it, this is Texas and they don’t really have any one else to attack…
Americans United For Life, one of the nation’s largest anti-abortion advocacy groups, has released its annual report, Defending Life 2012, complete with an enthusiastic blurb from Governor Rick Perry. On the whole, they seem very pleased with Texas and its “aggressive legislative action” to restrict abortion. Texas, they write, has…
The primary for the U.S. Senate, House and a slew of local races is coming up — on Tuesday to be exact, with early voting ending today — which is why you’ve been seeing a ramp-up in the … revelations. Seriously. These just blew my mind. For example: Did you…
When I wrote yesterday about Mayor Mike backtracking from his backtrack on the Trinity Toll Road, I glossed over the real purpose of his visit to the Oak Cliff Chamber, which was to pitch his GrowSouth initiative. For the uninitiated, GrowSouth is the plan to revitalize southern Dallas, which Rawlings…
As a nickname, “Dead Bird” hasn’t fit so well since the city of Dallas’ airport in South Oak Cliff changed its name from Redbird to Dallas Executive a decade ago in hopes of sparking a revival of the 67-year-old airfield, which tends to be forgotten in the shadow of DFW…
View You too can see if your candidate lives in the Texas 33rd Congressional District When the polls close on the Democratic primary for Texas’ new 33rd Congressional District, surprisingly few of the nearly dozen candidates will have cast a vote for themselves. We received a note from a Friend…
With the race for the 33rd Congressional District by all accounts a two-man race that is growing pettier by the day, it’s easy to forget that nine other Democrats are jostling for third place in the May 29 primary. Unless, of course, you happen to glance up from the bumper…
Ever since Ted Cruz announced that Sarah Palin is endorsing him in his bid for Senate, we’ve been clustered around the office phone (we only have one), waiting patiently to hear a robo-call from ex-Alaska Governor Palin. It never came. That’s because, as it turns out, Palin’s calls may have…
Dallas has a knack for self-regard. Self-promotion? Not so much. The city’s efforts at branding itself (“Live Large. Think Big.”) are, well, embarrassing. We’ve had nothing with the catchiness, not to mention production values, of Las Vegas’ “What happens here, stays here.” But Vegas has a slush fund of $95.5…
