Yesterday, the Dallas City Council green-lighted a long-delayed, million-dollar renovation of the dog park at White Rock Lake. Built for a song a dozen years ago, it is crowded, muddy and in bad need of an overhaul. City Councilman Dwaine Caraway agrees. He, like the rest of his colleagues, voted…
When Denton City Councilman Kevin Roden first made his pitch to bring Sriracha to North Texas last October, it seemed like an impossible long shot. What chance did a lone municipal official, bearing no tax breaks or economic development incentives, have of convincing the manufacturer of the most delicious condiment…
HUD spent four years building its recently unveiled case against the city of Dallas, compiling statistics and gathering evidence to show that for years the city been illegally promoting residential housing segregation. Evidence that the city was steering affordable housing outside of downtown, the claim that formed the seed of…
A polar vortex has a good chunk of the United States in its grasp, which, in layman’s terms, means that it’s cold — absurdly, bone-chillingly cold. It’s the kind of weather that socks you in the gut and takes your breath away, that overwhelms Texas’ feeble electric grid. Already, the…
In 2013, Dallas residents were treated to an unprecedented whiff of Dallas city government, and the experience was something akin to opening that long-forgotten Tupperware container wedged beneath your car seat. The fumes aren’t going to kill anyone, but the noxious mix of incompetence and deceit is unmistakable. An unpleasant…
There’s no guarantee that U.S. Congressman Ralph Hall, who has represented Rockwall and Northeast Texas in Washington for so long that they named a lake after him, will survive next year’s Republican primary. For the first time in years, he’s facing a formidable challenger in former U.S. Attorney John Ratcliffe…
There’s a lot of stupid stuff floating around the Internet A&E’s decision to suspend Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson from the reality show for going public with his personal views on sin. “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there,” he told GQ. “Bestiality, sleeping around with this…
Senator Ted Cruz, the uncompromising Tea Party standard bearer, the bane of the establishment GOP, is the most influential man in the world (according to 11 percent of Americans, anyway). He almost singlehandedly led his entire party over the cliff during the government shutdown to defund Obamacare. His personal style…
The debate about voting in Texas over the past several years has focused on the controversial voter ID law that passed in 2011 and finally took effect over the summer. It was a necessary step to prevent voter fraud, supporters said, while opponents countered that it erected illegal hurdles to…
You remember Anna Merlan, right? The Dallas Observer staff writer who specialized in writing about norm-bucking local subcultures (strippers, the leather scene, atheists, etc.) Well, she’s doing the same thing in New York and just published a feature on the ladies fighting to defend their legal right to go topless…
Representative Steve Stockman, the Houston-area congressman famous for bringing Ted Nugent to the State of the Union and wanting to arm fetuses, was not the Tea Party’s first choice to run in the GOP primary against Senator John Cornyn. That honor belongs to Representative Louie Gohmert. Next on their list…
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst unveiled his interim charges to the Senate Committee on State Affairs Friday, and they are, to say the least, pretty ambitious. They read like red meat for the paranoid-hacker constituency at times, but they also include the bones of some common-sense privacy protections. And they may…
Now that Dallas has officially made it through Icemageddon 2013, there are plenty of totally legitimate questions to ask about the storm and its response. Here are a few: -Did TxDOT do an adequate job of staving off carmageddon? -Can DART not shut down the entire light rail system next…
If you’re not familiar with Tenaha, Texas, go back and read this The New Yorker piece from August detailing how police and prosecutors in the tiny East Texas town used civil forfeiture laws and a phantom suspicion of drugs to seize cars, cash, jewelry and anything else they could find…
No one expects Dallas City Councilman Sheffie Kadane to be an expert on drug culture. He comes across as a staunch teetotaler, someone who associates marijuana with Reefer Madness-style hysteria, who would turn off The Wire in shocked disgust. Yet his role as a municipal policymaker requires at least a…
Anyone visiting Klyde Warren Park over the the weekend — and judging by the crowd at 10 a.m. on Sunday, attendance bordered on nonexistent — would have been struck by how closely the unbroken white sheet resembled an ice rink. Ironic, given park officials’ promise of an actual ice rink,…
So far, none of the two dozen earthquakes recorded in North Texas since the start of November have caused any serious damage. The Eagle Mountain Lake Dam is fine. Homes and businesses are intact, save for the occasional hairline crack. No one has been hurt. There’s no guarantee that won’t…
Following up on the blockbuster success of the Tea Party Coloring Book for Kids and its masterful sequel, the Tea Party II: Why America Loves You “social-activist coloring book for kids” St. Louis-based Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. has come through with another sure-fire bestseller: Cruz to the Future, a…
Now that Dallas has been exposed for almost putting Uber out of business to make Yellow Cab happy, Dallas still plans to do something about Uber. What will be done is not clear. The City Council’s Transportation Committee is scheduled to review Dallas’ car-for-hire regulations next month. In the meantime,…
For the past few months, the Texas National Guard and the Department of Defense have been in a public brawl over gay rights. And last week, it appeared that the Defense Department, along with gay couples, emerged as the clear victor. Texas, Oklahoma and West Virginia are now complying with…
Driving in Dallas sucks for a lot of reasons (traffic, terrible drivers, humongous potholes, et al), but overzealous traffic cops aren’t one of them. This isn’t just the anecdotal experience of a guy who, having been ticketed three times in five months as a teenager in Richardson, discovered similar infractions…
Funding-wise, the Dallas Public Library is starting to recover from the financial crisis. After four straight years of cuts, the system has gotten more money in each of the past two years. The $22.4 million allotted for next year is far from the $32.4 million peak six years ago, but…
