A week from Wednesday the city council will vote on a zoning deal adjacent to Klyde Warren Park, where the developer wants permission to build a residential tower more than 60 percent higher than the law allows. It’s permission to make 60 percent more money. Oh, but you know our…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, you may have heard, is “deeply concerned” about eXXXotica, the three-day porn expo that arrives in Dallas on Friday. Alas, he wrote in a letter to the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which had objected to the event taking place in the city-owned Convention Center, there was nothing…
It’s easy to get lost in all the affordable-housing stuff that’s been swirling around City Hall for the past couple of years. First HUD was really mad at Dallas over its housing policies, then it wasn’t, then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs…
Last we checked in on Rick Perry’s quixotic second bid for president, our erstwhile governor had picked a fight with the 2016 Republican field’s irresistible force, Donald Trump. Perry, desperate to get into August 6’s Fox News-sponsored first GOP debate, was doing everything he could to raise his national profile,…
Every once in a while, often in the hottest weeks of the year for some reason, I get an enormous hankering, a craving from deep in my soul, a raw hunger that can only be quelled with a great steaming plate heaped high with the well-sauced meat of that great…
I have so many conflicts of interest here, I shouldn’t even open my mouth. But, you know. In a letter to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, the Dallas Women’s Foundation has expressed its “deep concern and disgust” that the Dallas Convention Center will host a porn convention, Exxxotica Expo, on August 7…
Erstwhile Texas governor and current presidential candidate Rick Perry’s campaign is in danger dying before it really gets underway, but Perry is doing everything he can to avoid a premature exit. Perry is stuck somewhere below 5 percent in national Republican primary polls. In any election from 2012 backward, low…
Dallas City Hall took a big head-slam yesterday in the Cityplace Sam’s Club suit. 5th Court of Appeals Judge David J. Schenck shot down the city’s argument that neighbors had no right to sue over a big-box store on the east side of Central Expressway north of Haskell Avenue. Schenck…
Two recent city documents to call to your attention: 1) showing that we have spent almost $610 million so far on the Trinity River project, which is mainly unbuilt, and 2) showing that we need to spend $121 million, which we supposedly don’t have, just to stop our terrible street…
The so-called bike share program at Fair Park may be a scarcely utilized disaster. That doesn’t mean that a well-considered bike-share system, with stations placed strategically at points throughout the central city so riders can travel from where they are to a place they might want to go (rather than…
One of the more amusing vagaries of the theater inspired by campaign finance laws since the Citizens United case opened the sluices for corporate giving is the little dance candidates must do with their Super PACs. Formal campaigns can’t officially coordinate with Super PACs, but, because Super PACs can accept…
If you didn’t already know the attitude of the overflow throng that came to the Sheraton downtown to hear Bernie Sanders, it was absolutely clear less than five minutes into the Vermont senator’s speech. “Bullshit,” came a shout from the crowd as Sanders described Texas all-Republican state government. This was…
Big picture, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project shouldn’t change much. In endorsing disparate impact theory — the notion in civil rights law that a policy can be found illegally discriminatory through a statistical analysis of its effects…
Philip Kingston says that despite what you may have heard, he really does care about his fellow city employees. So much so, in fact, that he’s been crowd-sourcing — with the help of white board put up at City Hall — a list of things city of Dallas workers want from…
Well, it turns out that the city councilman who the general public has known as Rick Callahan since he was elected to represent District 5 in 2013 actually prefers to be called Rickey Callahan. This is incredibly awkward. The councilman recently changed his official City Council name—which appears on the…
Attention homosexuals, sodomites and godless cowards who, through misplaced compassion or cowed silence, abet the gay destruction of the American way of life. Christians are sick and tired of being bullied, and they’re not going to take it anymore. No doubt you’ve heard this rhetoric before. Lord knows there’s been…
“Revered” is a bad word, I know, for Dallas playwright, social activist and teacher John Fullinwider, because it means old. But, look, he is old. And he is revered. He had a piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News yesterday suggesting a much better approach to the…
In November 2014 Mayor Mike Rawlings braved a breath-catching chill and the self-defeating inadequacy of the notion that two isolated docking station could constitute a functioning system and enthusiastically kicked off a bike-sharing program at Fair Park. Rawlings gleefully hopped on one of the $8,000 bikes (the city paid $125,000…
Five months ago I told you about David Jensen, a semi-retired art-handler and antiques collector who lives in a warehouse in West Dallas. He’s right in the path of major real estate developments that are changing that realm from a disused industrial wasteland to an urban oasis. He moved there…
Sometimes, you don’t realize what you had until it’s gone. Amid what’s been a downright depressing stretch for newly minted Texas Governor Greg Abbott — on gay marriage, guns, military exercises, etc — our former governor, the immaculately bespectacled Rick Perry, has gone out and started sounding like a centrist,…
Here’s a mental exercise: Think of the rain that falls on your head as if it were continuing to fall through the soil beneath your feet. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Rain falls fast through the air, hits the earth, then falls slowly through the soil until it reaches…
On the one hand, it might be comforting to know that the new, huge, taxpayer-funded but privately operated detention camp in South Texas for immigrant women and children is providing its young inmates with vaccinations. On the other hand, one should remember that vaccines, while life-saving, are not candy but…
