Here’s a thing that’s getting closer and closer to being totally unfathomable. The Dallas city manager is drip-drip-dripping information to the City Council about a yearlong federal investigation of housing programs, giving the council information barely a drop at a time. The piecemeal approach is less than fathomable, because none…
Following a federal court ruling ordering the Trump administration to continue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program last week in Washington, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made good a threat he initially made in 2017 and sued the federal government to halt the program. DACA, an Obama-era policy that…
Jonathan Stickland must be bored. Without serious opposition as he seeks his fourth term representing state House District 92 in the Mid-Cities or a back-of-House chamber microphone at which to bloviate, Stickland, the id of the Texas GOP, has waded into a nonpartisan City Council race in Euless. Stickland’s attack,…
Texas’ controversial voter identification law is slated to go into full effect for the first time, following a Friday afternoon ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. According to a three-judge panel in the case, a lower court exceeded its authority when it blocked the…
A lot of side-of-the-mouth talking took place during this week’s Dallas City Council debate on removal of the shabby Confederate war memorial next to City Hall, but let’s not lose sight of the big thing: The vote to keep that ugly monstrosity in place was led by three of four…
Monday wasn’t a great day for the Dallas County Republican Party. Already down to one countywide officeholder and a single spot on the commissioner’s court, the Dallas GOP and its new chairwoman, Missy Shorey, had its lawsuit against the Dallas County Democratic Party — the one that would’ve wiped dozens…
Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway has an idea to break the stalemate over what to do with City Hall’s Confederate memorial: Put Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on top of the damn thing. The Dallas City Council voted 9-6 Wednesday to put off deciding the fate of the Confederate…
Someday, perhaps when your grandchildren have grandchildren and the Cowboys have been pried away from some Jones scion’s cold, dead hands, Texas will adopt statehouse and congressional maps that are minimally acceptable to all interested parties. Until that day, however, the state’s political parties, voters and interest groups will continue…
Dallas City Hall is like Washington. We have a Deep State, and for all the same reasons. A new regime is in charge here, too. It’s making big policy changes. Those new policies have serious consequences in the real world. Some people in the real world are very unhappy, so…
Just a thought. I’m not a lawyer, certainly not a prosecutor. But after watching the extremely unsatisfying hearing before the Dallas City Council on Wednesday on this winter’s natural gas home explosion crisis, I wonder why authorities are not at least looking at the recent indictment in Wyandotte County, Kansas,…
Atmos Energy officials went to City Hall on Wednesday to say that the company has made good. Since the February gas line explosion that killed 12-year-old Linda Rogers, Atmos President and CEO Mike Haefner said, the company has done everything it can to ensure that its pipes, the ones that…
U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso got some good news Wednesday from one of the first major nonpartisan polls of his U.S. Senate contest with incumbent Ted Cruz. According to Quinnipiac University’s polling department, O’Rourke trails Cruz by just three points, 47 percent to 44 percent, within the poll’s 3.6 percentage…
Crystal Mason thought she was doing the right thing. Newly out of federal prison after a three-year stint for helping people file inaccurate tax returns, Mason was pulling her life together while serving out the rest of her sentence on supervised release. She’d found a job and headed back to…
After a brief hiccup in the form of a disputed set of recommendations from Dallas city staff, all signs point to the city of Dallas getting rid of the Confederate war memorial in Pioneer Park sometime later this year. During a City Council meeting last month, Dallas Assistant City Manager…
This is how it works at City Hall. The city gives a mixture of city money and federal money to a community group to build affordable housing. The group sucks down the money. But the group barely nibbles away at the construction project — doesn’t get it done, in other…
At the end of last week, I did a Facebook Live interview with Dallas Park and Recreation Board President Bobby Abtahi in which Abtahi gave evasive answers on some key questions. I did not nail down those issues in the interview, for which I blame myself. I do think it’s…
Voters in the city of Dallas will be able to give everyone who works in the city paid sick leave when they head to the ballot box in November if a coalition of worker’s rights groups gets its way. Volunteers with the Workers Defense Project and other groups will head…
Next year, when it’s time for Dallas voters to choose a new mayor, the good old boys, the inside slicks and the Dallas Citizens Council will do whatever they can to frame the race the way they always have: Their candidate will be the fiscally sound, conservative but very nice…
This week, the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based nonprofit think tank and research bureau, released a report that powerfully confirmed a wave of data from multiple sources over the last year, all portraying Dallas as harshly segregated along ethnic and economic lines. The only question is what to…
In an 8-7 vote Wednesday, the Dallas City Council signed off on a $15.9 million development agreement with a former city employee, over the objections of council members who believed that the deal should’ve gone through the city’s bidding process. Rodney Burchfield, who worked in the city’s economic development office…
Plano, an affluent suburb of Dallas maligned decades ago by finger-wagging liberals (me) as an all-white busing flight enclave, is at the forefront of a whole new kind of struggle for diversity, inclusiveness and enlightenment. Black poverty-cursed South Dallas — the scene a half-century ago of a civil rights struggle…
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday afternoon to face questions from the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees about foreign interference in U.S. elections and the theft of millions of Americans’ personal data. Most of the senators questioning the Facebook CEO pushed him on privacy issues and the…
