All through last week’s City Council briefing on the city’s ancient and unresolved Trinity toll road controversy, I kept thinking I sniffed the unpleasant scent of burning human hair that you get when someone is being thrown under a bus. Kept looking around the council chamber, sniffing. Couldn’t find it…
Ted Cruz has officially lost it with Donald Trump. Texas’ Canadian-born junior senator went after the GOP’s presidential front-runner Thursday afternoon with all the bluster he could find, putting an end to any hope the two candidates could revive the congenial relationship they had earlier in the campaign. “It’s not…
Coming soon to a city near you (very near you): the prize fight of the century. In the one corner, with a left fist loaded with lawyers and a right glove packed with money, we have the Big Contender, Dallas City Hall, determined never to admit that the “whitewater feature,”…
Dallas’ quest to keep Exxxotica out of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center will keep its puritanical legal eagle on the job, thanks to the majority of the Dallas City Council that voted to keep Scott Bergthold on the team defending the city against the porn convention’s lawsuit. Bergthold, a…
The city of Dallas will not be piloting a cite-and-release program for marijuana possession after all. Wednesday morning, the Dallas City Council shot down a long-in-the-works proposal that would’ve required Dallas police officers to issue tickets, rather than making arrests, when they discovered Dallas residents with less than four ounces…
At the end of last week, the Dallas City Auditor issued a report (copy below) saying the city handed out $29.9 million to housing contractors in a three-year period and forgot to keep any records to show whether any of the housing got built. Oh, and they also forgot to…
There was a day when the three men who sat in front of me in the Dallas City Council chamber for Monday’s Trinity toll road meeting could have said jump, and the entire Dallas City Council would have fainted from embarrassment for not having thought of it themselves. But this…
Nothing about Donald Trump is new. In any major American city, no one need dig far to find people who exhibited the traits that make Trump so appealing to the Republican electorate, and Dallas is no different. None of its residents may have had all of Trumps’ charms rolled into…
They’re the superheroes of the Democratic Party, swooping in to save the day with their super vote before a misguided populace burns the Democratic establishment to the ground by selecting a candidate who spews radical ideas as if it were 1972. Birthed in the flames of George McGovern’s ’72 presidential…
OK, Dallas City Council, this is between us and please don’t tell our readers about it here at the Dallas Observer, in fact please don’t tell the Observer about it, either. I wish you would go into a smoke-filled room, shut me out totally, draw the blinds, refuse to comment,…
Mr. Trump, this is from me, an old middle class white guy watching from the sidelines here in Dallas. You said if they took the nomination away from you at the convention, “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing many, many millions of people.” I’m looking at your people, Mr…
Presented (mostly) without comment, here’s Dallas City Council member Rickey Callahan bringing in St. Patrick’s Day, and his birthday, with a lovely, lilting brogue and a song. Thanks, Rickey, and District 8 council member Erik Wilson, who brought our attention to this video…
President Obama came to a good place last weekend to tell people what this election is about. Dallas may not be the only bull’s eye in America for a discussion of ethnicity politics and voting rights, but it’ll do. In our own backyard and in the nation, some white people…
Ted Cruz is in trouble. He didn’t have the worst night of the four remaining GOP presidential candidates — that honor belongs to Marco Rubio, who got walloped by front-runner Donald Trump in Rubio’s home state, Florida — but he didn’t do anything to derail Trump’s anger-powered locomotive of a…
Just because Dallas doesn’t have a plan for dealing with the inhabitants of the homeless tent cities it plans to bulldoze on May 1, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a plan. That’s the plan. No plan. That’s always Dallas’ plan: no plan, no people. How many times does the…
Finally the land-play at the southwest corner of downtown Dallas has been rendered semi-public and a known fact, with last week’s admission by The Dallas Morning News that the property on which the paper sits may be sort of somewhat on the market. And by the way, land can be…
Slowly, but surely under the leadership of new executive director Kelly Gottschalk, the moribund Dallas Police and Fire Pension System seems to be digging itself out of the chasm dug during the leadership of former director Richard Tettamant. According to new data released by the pension fund on Thursday and…
Thursday morning, Mike Rawlings, for better and worse, presented the case for his term and a half as Dallas. Speaking to a crowd gathered for something called the City Makers Summit put on by The Atlantic and JP Morgan Chase, Rawlings offered a sampling of the things that make his…
One of the most striking things about the run-up to the trial in Three Expo Events v. The City of Dallas — the fight over Dallas City Council’s vote to ban the Exxxotica adult expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center — is the unanimity with which both sides…
It was hard to tell from the breathless news coverage of Ted Cruz’s hanging on to win the Texas primary and stay in the race with Republican front-runner Donald Trump last week, but the Lone Star State had yet another election with terrible voter turnout. Despite Texas Republicans casting a…
Last weekend was a good one for Texas’ Canadian-born junior senator, Ted Cruz. He won caucuses in Kansas and Maine — Cruz’s chief rival, Donald Trump, did note that Cruz likely did well in Maine because it was “close to Canada” — and finished closer than expected to Trump in…
Anyone from Dallas sitting down to watch the first couple of episodes of season four of Netflix’s House of Cards over the weekend was bound to have felt like they took half a step or so into the uncanny valley. Keeping spoilers to a minimum, the season begins with First Lady…
