Politics & Government

Nearly four months have passed since the Las Vegas mass shooting spurred outrage over bump-fire stocks, which gunman Stephen Paddock attached to 12 of his semiautomatic rifles before he killed 58 people and injured hundreds more. A bump-fire stock replaces a rifle’s butt stock, or “shoulder stock,” and lets the…

Oh, no. Not again. Forgive me, but I know this setup so well by now, it’s like my old pal, Count Dracula, dropping by again for another visit from the tomb. I open my Dallas Morning News yesterday and choke on my coffee when I see the front-page headline: “DALLAS…

Within hours of publication by the Dallas Observer on Tuesday of a story detailing flaws in the unopened Margaret McDermott Bridge over the Trinity River, the Texas Department of Transportation fired off a heated response — but not to the Observer. The three-page TxDOT letter sent yesterday, which alleged “inaccurate and…

Two years ago in a gushing “interactive” story, The Dallas Morning News described the new Margaret McDermott Bridge across the Trinity River downtown as “heavy metal ballet,” saying the city’s second cable-stayed bridge, named for a wealthy Dallas socialite, was “as much art as engineering.” Maybe more ballet than engineering…

The race card is real. But it depends on who uses it for what purpose. Local case in point: Ten days ago, Dallas County Republicans sued in Judge Eric Moyé’s 14th District Court to get 128 Democratic candidates kicked off a March election ballot because, according to the Republicans, there…

Ted Cruz told a giant lie this week. Actually, it was more like a series of whoppers, designed to roll back his essential role in the 2013 shutdown of the federal government just as Washington emerged from Shutdown 2018. Cruz’s lie came the same week as his claim that anyone…

The Dallas city auditor’s office rolled out its final report late Friday afternoon on the four City Council incumbents voted out in last spring’s municipal elections. The results, which show hundreds of dollars in unaccounted-for meals and event tickets paid for with cash from city-funded officeholder accounts, don’t look great…

At this week’s Dallas City Council meeting, one of those very odd moments occurred when the people up onstage seemed suddenly to fall into a weird other language, Martian or something, and the people out in the peanut gallery were all craning around looking, at each other to see if…

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday that if it doesn’t step in to shut down the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program before the end of June, Texas might sue the federal government to end the program. Paxton’s statement came in an amicus brief…

Downtown Dallas appears set to get its first sizable block of affordable housing in nearly a decade with the building of a new residential tower near the newly reopened Dallas High School building on the Central Business District’s eastern edge. The project by Matthews Southwest, the developer behind the old…

Let’s not you and me try to answer the question of whether 2018 will see a huge, biblical, roaring, wrathful, tsunami-sized day of reckoning for Republicans in which they will be abraded from the surface of the earth. For the sake of conversation, we’ll take that as a given. And…

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued G6 Hospitality, the Carrollton-based parent company of Motel 6, in an Arizona federal court Tuesday afternoon. According to the suit, several of the company’s hotels gave guests’ names and personal information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017, leading to…

Now that the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area is on the list of 20 finalists for the new Amazon second headquarters, I feel compelled to offer two observations: First of all, there is no such thing as a second headquarters. Companies are like people. It is in their nature to have…

The Dallas County Republican Party wants a slew of Democrats, candidates for offices ranging from justice of the peace to U.S. House representative — kicked off the ballot ahead of Texas’ March primary. Dallas County’s Democratic Party chairwoman failed to personally sign the candidates ballot applications before they were submitted…

A heterogeneous mass of marchers espousing support for women’s rights paid little mind to the blustery conditions muffling their chants of, “Women! United! Will never be divided!” Hovering nearby, however, were women threatening unity with ideas out of step with traditional feminism — they oppose abortion. Wind did not prevent…

You don’t have to be a parent to get this, but if you are a parent, it will help. You need to look at this video. If this were a movie, it would be called “Saga of the Dumbest Cop on Earth.” This video, released by the Dallas Police Department, is of…

Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax issued Dallas’ five dockless bike-share operators a warning Thursday night. The companies, Broadnax wrote in a letter to LimeBike, ofo, Spin, VBikes and MoBike, need to relocate all bikes violating a new set of rules established by the manager. According to Broadnax’s letter, the bikes…

The world learned Thursday morning that journalist and author Michael Wolff has sold the TV rights to his searing, maybe factual, exposé of the Trump administration, Fire and Fury, for more than $1 million. For that kind of money, one can expect an A-list cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman would have…

The new Dallas city manager gave the City Council a briefing Wednesday on his new scientific analysis tool for the city. I watched. I have a prediction. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the new city manager will be burned as a witch. Sorry, I am not actually taking…

At some point after Dallas recovers from the current crisis of life-threatening 40-degree temperatures and snow dustings, work should begin on removing the fake kayak rapids that the city built in the Trinity River near downtown in 2011 at a cost of $4 million. And our struggle to figure out…