The Dallas City Council is requesting a review of a city contract to develop nearly 100 units of affordable housing in southern Dallas after a member accused the developer of having a conflict of interest. Notre Dame Place, the nonprofit that submitted a bid for the project, is led by…
“Pod Bless Texas,” like a lot of ideas, was born out of failure. It was election night 2018 and Kendall Scudder, fresh off a suicide mission against incumbent Texas Sen. Bob Hall, no longer had anything to run for. Lillian Salerno, Scudder’s future co-host, had lost her own race a few…
Ellis County is now, officially, a safe space for guns, fetuses and conservatives. This week, the Ellis County Commissioners Court voted 5-0 in favor of a resolution declaring itself a sanctuary city for the unborn, hopping on a bandwagon started by anti-choice activists last year in Waskom. In the succeeding…
This may be an ill-informed and over-personal approach to a very serious matter, but I truly believe the whole Trump/Bolton imbroglio is about the mustache. Hear me out. OK, hear me part of the way out. Right after he was elected president, Donald Trump declined to hire John Bolton because…
Over the last two weeks, the saving grace of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial has been that the senators hearing the case have, at least in the Senate chamber, had to shut up. Sure, you could get your fill of their self-aggrandizing meanderings from the mics ready to catch their…
A North Texas concrete manufacturing firm will pay a $3 million fine for continuing to employ undocumented workers despite warnings, the Department of Justice announced on Monday. Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined in 2015 that more than 40 employees of Speed Fab-Crete’s Kennedale plant were not authorized to work in the…
Announcing a $100 million fund drive to find jobs for the perennially jobless, Potter’s House evangelist T.D. Jakes told Mitchell Schnurman at The Dallas Morning News this week, “If you have to go to work in the morning, you’re not hanging out on the streets at night with a gun.”…
It took Dallas almost two years to get the results of the police staffing study it commissioned from KPMG, one of the world’s biggest auditing firms. Judging from what DPD brass told members of the City Council on Monday, actually making any hay from the study’s conclusions is going to…
The task ahead of Texas Democrats is like the one Dirk Nowitzki and the rest of the 2010-11 Mavericks faced before that season’s playoffs: monumental, but squarely within the realm of possibility. The rewards are similar too, for both groups, should they find success. The Mavs turned back the tide…
The Supreme Court issued a ruling that allows a new immigration restriction to go into effect until a lawsuit against the rule is decided.
At a little after 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Ben Bailey stood at the edge of a grove of trees above Cottonwood Creek, where a muddy, plywood-covered path curved around into the woods. “Hello!” Bailey called out, over the roar of traffic nearby on U.S. Highway 75. At first, no one answered,…
We have to stop being played for suckers on race, crime and poverty, both here in Dallas and as a nation. Take murder. In recent weeks, two significant local studies and one exciting policy proposal have come forward to combat the social and moral dysfunction that drive murder in particular…
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, protector of the Texas Senate, is prepared to rewrite one of the chamber’s oldest rules for the second time in less than a decade. Speaking Thursday on a panel presented by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, Patrick said he will have the votes necessary…
We probably should have seen it coming. Impeachment is an arcane, anachronistic and deeply partisan process, so of course it’s right up Ivy League nerd Ted Cruz’s alley. Despite lamenting the impeachment process since its specter was raised this fall, Cruz has taken every opportunity afforded him to present himself…
Let me just give you a quick current example of how we get screwed up in this town. This Tuesday, DART, the regional transit agency, had to eat crow and go back to the drawing board on a new $1.25 billion rail line through North Dallas after both City Council…
In 2011, Texas booted Planned Parenthood from the state’s Women’s Health Program, starving the family-planning provider from federal Medicaid funds. Almost half of Planned Parenthood’s Texas clinics closed, depriving many in the state of critical medical care. Two years later, the federal government cut off funding to the program, because…
For one minute, let’s not call it the murder problem. The word, murder, makes people understandably crazy. Let’s go easy on the murder and just call it the general social messed-up-edness problem or GSMP instead. Better? We now have two recent independent reports on GSMP, one assembled by the administration…
Dallas Area Rapid Transit promised Tuesday to alter plans for its new rail line after two North Dallas council members objected to an updated design that would elevate portions of the track. Planners had proposed raising the entire track 5 feet, saving at least $10 million and limiting construction impacts…
There’s something about public memorials Dallas can’t get quite right. Sure, Robert E. Lee has been kicked out of Turtle Creek Park, but the traitorous general’s fellow travelers are still standing, albeit shielded from public view, on Pioneer Plaza near City Hall. Efforts to take down both memorials to treason…
They should just come out and say it. Everything would be so much easier if Texas Republicans would just admit what they, their constituents and their fellow travelers know to be true: They don’t care whether President Donald Trump did what he’s alleged to have done in the articles of…
Stripped of specific context, Thursday’s events in Washington were remarkable. Ninety-nine U.S. senators — Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe was absent, dealing with a loved one’s medical emergency — swore an oath promising to impartially weigh whether President Donald Trump’s conduct merits his being removed from office. It’s historic, only the third…
Lawyers for the city of Dallas and Yvette Gbalazeh have agreed to settle the activist’s 2018 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the city’s panhandling ordinances. Gbalazeh said she will receive $20,000 and a meeting with the city’s police chief. She said the settlement sends a message: “There’s going to be consequences…
