For once the typical Texas shoot-first personality turns out to be a plus. We’ve been having a lot of daytime coyote sightings in my part of East Dallas lately, so I’ve been reading up. Robert Timm, a University of California wildlife specialist, has found that coyote attacks on pets are…
The GOP’s 2016 South Carolina primary is doing what primaries in the Palmetto State are wont to do: getting really, amusingly nasty really quickly. The home state of the patron saint of dirty tricks, the Boogie Man himself, Lee Atwater, wouldn’t have it any other way. Monday morning, Texas Senator…
To untrained ears, it can sound strange, sometimes even a little threatening. Ted Cruz or one of his representatives, out on the campaign trail, will say something that sounds a lot like someone pushing for theocracy — like someone who views the constitutional separation of church and state as a…
I don’t know about you, but I want to personally extend my own heartfelt thanks to Dallas city councilpersons Monica Alonzo, Mark Clayton, Sandy Greyson, Scott Griggs, Philip Kingston, Lee Kleinman and Adam Medrano for voting this week to defend the First Amendment. I know it wasn’t easy. It never…
This is exactly what Scott Griggs was worried about. As the Dallas City Council arduously debated whether or not to ban the Exxxotica adult expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center, Griggs told a packed house that the council was giving Exxxotica the best public relations it could hope…
A self-referential anecdote here at the top. I never do this. Indulge me. Several years back I’m starting out on a canoe trip in Canada with a bunch of guys. It’s the part I hate, carrying our canoes on our shoulders and our packs on our backs, stumbling down a…
More or less, the main voices on the Dallas City Council behind a proposal that will bar Dallas City manager AC Gonzalez from signing a contract with the eXXXotica porn expo in 2016 said Wednesday that they didn’t care if they got sued. Protecting Dallas from the convention — Rawlings…
Ray Hunt has done many good things for the city of Dallas. He built Reunion Tower, without which the Dallas skyline would just be a bunch of boring rectangles. He was an early financial backer of D Magazine, without which we would be unable to identify which Dallas women are the most…
Running a third party candidacy is no picnic. Just ask Russell Verney, senior political adviser to H. Ross Perot during the 1992 presidential election and his 1996 campaign manager. Perot headlined the two most successful third-party campaigns in modern U.S. political history. The Dallas native and billionaire received 18.9 percent…
This is very dangerous talk, dangerous for us all. You agree, I agree, we all agree that sexual slavery, especially the enslavement of children for sexual purposes, is an unspeakable evil. But doesn’t that make it all the more important to be careful and precise in what we say about…
Last August, just ahead of the eXXXotica Expo’s Dallas Convention Center debut, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, announced that he was “deeply concerned” about the convention. Seemingly, he was acting in concert with the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which drew a line between a harmless, tacky convention hawking dildos and overpriced photos…
When does escaping from the nanny state become an escape from sanity? Ted Cruz is urging New Hampshire Yankees not to be, in his inimical words, “coddled by a bunch of nanny-state liberals who want to control every aspect of your life, or die.” What if they need a nanny?…
Wednesday afternoon a consultant from Ohio spent more than two hours in a meeting room at Love Field Airport with the Dallas City Council to help them find ways to become nicer people. I went to it, because I was hoping I might pick up a few tips for myself…
If I were a better sport, I’d laugh. Yesterday The Dallas Morning News, which has been carrying on an editorial crusade against a Dallas landlord family, published a story under the headline, “City of Dallas’ case against low-rent landlord faces setback.” A setback? Really? Makes me wish I could get my…
When Deputy Chief Gary Tittle formally announced the Dallas Police Department’s new downtown panhandling crackdown on Monday, he was careful to define the target of the operation as “that aggressive panhandler, the one approaching an individual demanding money, asking for money, impeding their walkway on the sidewalks, getting out into the street,…
Fine, talk about Iowa all day, I don’t care, it’s a free country, but let me tell you something: All of that huge split they’re talking about today in the country’s presidential politics — I think of it as the gulf between the wacko, extremist, nut-ball, ignorant people and the…
It was a crisp but bright day in late December, and James was taking advantage of the sunshine to dry his pants on a chain-link fence paralleling St. Paul Street just south of downtown. At the bottom of a small embankment, squeezed between the Interstate 30 service road and Dallas…
Heading into the Iowa caucuses, the contest that could cripple his presidential run, Ted Cruz’s campaign is in flux. Having seemingly peaked in the Hawkeye State around the turn of the year — taking the lead in multiple polls from GOP frontrunner Donald Trump — Cruz has focused the attention…
I believe when you and I spoke recently about what needs to be done with Fair Park, the city’s sadly neglected 277-acre exposition park, I did make a clear distinction between the State Fair of Texas (big and wonderful) and the board that oversees it (small and stubborn). After an…
They couldn’t even acknowledge what had happened. In all of the responses — and that term is being used very loosely — from Texas’ statewide leadership to an investigation they ordered leading to arrest warrants being issued for two anti-abortion activists, not once did Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan…
I don’t really recommend that you read anything by anyone else but me on a regular basis, and I can’t be responsible, of course, for what might happen to you if you insist on making a habit of it, but every once in a blue moon somebody out there writes…
For some horrible reason lost to history and wrapped in political voodoo, the State Fair of Texas, one of the single most beloved icons of Texas culture, operates under the iron-fisted domination of one of the single most despised ownerships in the state, by which I mean State Fair of…
