Growing up in Egypt, Sahar lived in a city near the sunny Mediterranean Sea. In the center of her hometown is a shrine to her great-grandfather, considered a saint in the Muslim faith. But her parents did not require her to wear a hijab, and her mother didn’t wear the…
The wolf is at the door in South Dallas. The very near future could see massive dispossession and displacement there to dwarf the city’s long, ugly history elsewhere of dispossession and displacement. The elected leadership of South Dallas not only will fail to raise a hand to protect it. They…
Last month, the Dallas City Council met for a daylong retreat at the city’s new Holocaust museum. It included, apparently, a dance party. “Mayor, you really did get the best dance,” said Kimberly Tolbert, the city manager’s chief of staff, at a briefing last week. “Just continue to remain light…
As much as we hate to do it, we’re about to give First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress more of the thing he loves more than anything else in the world: attention. If you’ve driven through downtown Dallas or made the rounds on the internet in the last week or…
Many, many good candidates won their primaries last week in Texas. This story is not about those candidates. No, this story is about all the bad candidates — some with bad ideas, some with questionable moral compasses and some who are just washed up — who managed to survive Tuesday,…
If we were to be perfectly honest with each other, which we never will be, we would agree on a few things about voting in Texas and in Dallas. Rich white Republicans would prefer to see fewer, rather than more middle class and poor nonwhite Democrats show up at the…
A little more than 21 hours after polls closed in Dallas County, Texas’ last major outstanding election result finally came in: Long-serving Dallas state Senator Royce West finished second with 14.5% of the vote in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, advancing to a May runoff with former Air Force helicopter…
Maybe it was the resounding victory in South Carolina on Saturday night. Maybe it was Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg dropping out. Maybe it was Beto O’Rourke and Whataburger. Whatever it was, it worked. As late night turned into early morning in Dallas and around Texas, former Vice President Joe…
At the very top of the ticket, Texas’ primary felt a lot like the other primaries that were held on Tuesday. Former Vice President Joe Biden, thanks to a lot of help, caught Sen. Bernie Sanders as Sanders headed down the homestretch, trying to turn the Democratic Party on its…
As polls in some of Texas’ biggest counties closed Tuesday night, the Lone Star State’s 2020 primary is shaping up as a good one for former Vice President Joe Biden. The state’s Democratic Senate race seems destined for a runoff, and Dallas County’s most rancorous state House race, surprisingly, does…
Each year, the Dallas City Council meets to plan strategy. At last year’s session in June, council members contemplated “2020 Priorities” scrawled in Sharpie on rolls of butcher paper. They placed stickers next to their favorites, creating a conspicuous cluster. “I think what emerged from this — clearly — is, public…
If you have any inclination toward preserving your sanity — or prefer a slightly less Trumpy version of Christianity — chances are you missed First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress’ interview with former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. The interview occurred right in the middle of First Baptist’s Sunday…
If there was any doubt which presidential candidate Dallas’ elected Democrats prefer, it’s gone. Former Vice President Joe Biden, fresh off clobbering Sen. Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, rolled out waves of familiar faces for the crowd at Gilley’s in the Cedars on Monday night, before making the…
If you’ve paid any attention to the coverage of Tuesday’s presidential primary in Texas, you might have noticed a theme. Texas’ prominence on the primary calendar is treated like a novel thing, like this is the first time the state will have played a big role in choosing either party’s presidential…
The new federal public charge rule took effect temporarily this week, significantly expanding the number of factors immigration authorities weigh when considering green card applications. While the new regulations will absolutely affect Dallas area green card applicants, immigration advocates caution that the rule applies to a very small number of…
Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation, already passed by the Senate and more than a century in the making, that would designate lynching as a federal crime. The vote was 410-4. One of those four was East Texas’ Louie Gohmert, a frequent subject of the Observer. Gohmert…
The big thing, before we peer down the rabbit hole, is that none of the numbers — none of the polling, none of the early vote totals, nothing — is as important as each and every person who is eligible to vote getting out there and casting a ballot over…
Are you a socialist if you don’t want families to get blown up in gas well explosions? Is it socialism to try to get your city to live within its means? Clearly, the term socialist will get a stiff workout between now and November. I got a wake-up earlier this…
When voters in Dallas County head to the polls for Texas’ March 3 primary, they’ll be using a new electronic system to cast their ballots that’s designed to combine the ease of electronic touch-screen voting with the security of paper ballots. But recent research has shown that the type of…
The basic outlines of the argument could have been surmised from any number of Dallas City Hall disputes that have gone down the last couple of decades. One faction on the City Council wants to do something that they believe could — maybe, they aren’t really sure — do something…
Two years after pushing one of its weekly meetings to the afternoon to better accommodate residents who can’t easily get off work on Wednesday mornings, the Dallas City Council is one step away from moving all of its City Council meetings back to their traditional 9 a.m. start times. Monday,…
Many adults in the United States wrongly believe this year’s census will be about citizenship status, and some worry about participating because of it, according to two recent studies. Dallas-area immigrant and refugee organizations say that concern and confusion are symptomatic of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce immigration to…
