As they try to carve out a permanent niche in the ultra-competitive American car market, Tesla and billionaire founder Elon Musk have had to position themselves as sprightly Davids disrupting the lumbering Goliaths of Detroit and Japan. They have no other choice. They can’t afford the untold billions legacy automakers…
Subrina Brenham, the businesswoman challenging Tennell Atkins in the District 8 City Council race, was driving along Lancaster Road this morning when she noticed something odd: One of her campaign signs, the large rectangular variety you see plastered on the sides of buildings and fences, had been cast aside in…
Before term limits and elections change the complexion of the Dallas City Council in unknowable ways, Scott Griggs and Angela Hunt want an up-or-down vote on proposed natural gas wells along the Trinity River. Last month, the Dallas Plan Commission voted down the permits for drilling outfit Trinity East, which…
Have you ever been drunk? Have you ever wondered about how drunkenness affects your maze-completing ability? Have you ever wanted to test your drunken maze-completing ability using a taxpayer-funded smartphone app that constantly shames you about your drunkenness? If you answered yes to all those questions then you’re in luck…
In recent years, as North Texas’ feral hog population has exploded, Arlington, Irving and other suburbs have taken to rounding up the swine and selling them for bacon. Now, it’s Dallas’ turn. Robert Wilonsky brings news this morning that the city is looking for someone to harvest its feral hogs…
Vickery Meadow sits just across Central Expressway from Preston Hollow, but it’s a world away. One is home to multi-million dollar houses owned by the city’s business and civil elite. The other is a mind-blowingly diverse pocket of 25,000 people living in low-rent, crime-plagued apartments. Both places are wrapped into…
Update at 1:19 p.m.: No, the peacocks are not being removed. That’s the word from city spokesman Frank Librio, whose full explanation follows after the jump. Original post: Last weekend, someone called 911 to report “loose fowl of various kinds running freely in the street in an area very close…
A half hour after sunset on Thursday evening, a young couple was walking along the White Rock Lake Trail. They were passing through the small wooded area by the spillway at the southern tip of the lake, headed toward the water, when a man passed headed in the opposite direction…
The last time I set foot in Valley View Center three or four years ago, it was eerily reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic zombie flick, and not the old-school kind with the undead lurching forward with laughable slowness. The zombies that come to mind are the type that are puma-quick and…
From a purely aesthetic point of view, Ori Raphael is dominating the District 11 City Council yard sign war. His opponent, former park board member Lee Kleinman, went with blocky, mustard-colored letters superimposed on a blue background, his enormous first name partially obscured by a silhouette of the Dallas skyline…
It didn’t take long for the District 2 City Council race to turn into a mud-slinging match, even if the mud has come from only one side. The first volley came last month from Herschel Weisfeld, who seized on Adam Medrano’s refusal to discuss his sexual orientation to question his…
The city of Dallas has been criticized at times for the agonizingly slow implementation of its 2011 Dallas Bike Plan. Two years after its adoption, only about 10 percent of the planned 1,127 miles of bike lanes and trails have been been put in place. That would seem to indicate…
The LGBT Resource Center at Texas A&M University, like its cousins at the University of Texas and the University of Houston, is an innocuous arm of school bureaucracy that offers an array of resources to gay and transgendered students. There is a guest speaker program, a lending library, networking opportunities,…
It’s been a decade since the city of Dallas announced the development of a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, a quest that, as a short stroll downtown will tell you, has fallen short of its goal. There are still plenty of people without homes. That’s not to say the…
As you may recall, Texas’ 2011 plan to redraw political boundaries was so brazenly partisan, so undeniably bent on reducing minority influence, and the evidence was so mountainous and convincing that a federal court didn’t even bother cataloging it all in its ruling against the state. “The parties have provided…
It wasn’t long after Gary Isett parked a Kip’s Big Boy statue on his front lawn at the corner of Abrams and Trammel that people started taking notice. First, passersby, then the Lakewood Advocate, then the Morning News. D’s Tim Rogers reminisced about that time in high school he took…
There remains a pressing need for meaningful, statewide regulation of payday lending in Texas, since the industry has shown a willingness and ability to skirt restrictions passed by Dallas, Austin, and other cities. Those reforms look like they are still at least a couple of years off. Despite high hopes…
It’s been eight years since the Dallas City Council passed its homeless feeding ordinance, which barred charity groups from serving food except at certain designated sites. And it’s been just more than six years since two of those groups, Big Heart Ministries and Rip Parker Memorial Homeless Ministry, sued the…
Last month, when the city finally released details about plans to privatize the Dallas Farmers Market in hopes of making it a going concern, it prompted celebration among the many who have been dismayed by the market’s stagnation and demise. The proposal calls for a number of improvements, the most…
The attention of the country, or at least that segment of it that’s politically aware enough to pay attention, is focused squarely on the U.S. Supreme Court,which this week is debating a pair of potentially momentous cases. Hollingsworth v. Perry, which was argued today, could do away with California’s Proposition…
Ted Cruz has barreled into Washington with the force of a crazy, toupee-haired meteorite smashing through the Capitol dome. But for all his rhetoric about Obama and communists and how they are pretty much the same thing, Cruz has distinguished himself from fellow wingnuts by keeping relatively silent on the…
It took a house burning to the ground and a woman being murdered, plus an additional six months, but Dallas police have finally acknowledged just how abysmally run its 911 call center was. Deputy Chief Scott Walton said as much today during a briefing before the City Council’s Public Safety…
