R.G. Ratcliffe, former investigative ace for The Houston Chronicle and long one of the top reporters in Texas (maybe the top), has a wonderful piece up this week on the Texas Monthly politics blog about Bill Hammond, chief executive officer of the Texas Association of Business (state Chamber of Commerce)…
Be right with you. Sorting through some stuff here at home. This is the room that has become the unofficial warehouse. Ah, here it is. The box of keepsakes from our child’s first days. Yesterday I attended an event at City Hall where Mayor Mike Rawlings announced the pending announcement…
Shiggy bops drawbacks. I’m serious. I have been searching through basic literature on both vaudeville dance steps and the major propaganda techniques. I will explain. I wanted to find a basic category of propaganda for the position taken by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and the Dallas Citizens Council on the…
In watching the battle over school reform in Dallas, it’s worth keeping in mind sometimes that Dallas is far from being the Lone Ranger. Issues similar to our own are stirring strongly parallel responses in cities around the country, the best example at the moment being Chicago, where today the…
Guess what. To my own absolute amazement, that stupid toll road — you know the one! — turns out to be the one thing people want to hear about in this election. Otherwise, they’re asleep. Typical timing for me. I had just gotten to the point where the words, “Trinity…
You know the story about the new Dallas County District attorney, Susan Hawk. She covered up a stint in rehab when she was running for election. It all came out recently when she went through some dramatic office turmoil. See also: Dallas County DA Hawk Chats at SMU, Says Little…
Wow. You really have to be careful these days what to make of things people tell you about Dallas School Superintendent Mike Miles and school reform. A few days ago somebody told me Miles was going around town giving speeches saying he wants to fire all the teachers who have…
News bulletin from Corruptdrunktown: a grand jury under the drunk lady who is the Travis County district attorney in Austin has declined to indict University of Texas Regent Wallace Hall. The drunk lady’s grand jury devoted months to finding some way to criminally indict Hall, who is from Dallas. Hall…
It’s a good time to be a fan of live music in Dallas. With the smashing success of The Bomb Factory’s reopening last weekend, it’s clear that the local scene, and in particular its hub in Deep Ellum, is the strongest it’s been in ages. Thousands of people flocked to…
Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk and former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson, two wild and crazy guys, had a shared piece on the opinion pages of The Dallas Morning News yesterday under a headline, “Congestion will worsen without Trinity toll road.” If you asked Kirk and Jackson to produce a…
Last week, barely 24 hours before the Dallas school board was to vote on a complicated school construction proposal, two major media published stories saying the district has been conspiring to strip-mine federal subsidy money out of poor schools and spend it instead on more affluent kids. That’s huge. If…
Liz Goulding is the former leader of Slow Food Dallas and a contributor to the Dallas Observer. The Dallas City Council this week voted on a motion to accept a number of language changes in the community garden ordinance passed in 2011. Among other things, the word “community” was replaced…
The kid from Highland Park who got caught singing a racist chant on a fraternity bus at Oklahoma University has apologized, but some of the twitterati aren’t buying it. See also: Highland Park Grad Who Sang Racist Chant at OU Fraternity Says He’s Sorry @GEEPENNIN tweeted: “Pettit’s apology is rehearsed…
When you walk into one of the city’s better restaurants, there’s a certain set of expectations that you bring along. If you’re planning to drop a pretty penny on a decent meal, you expect great service, top-notch food, and a great atmosphere. You also probably expect for a basket full…
OK, here comes a great chance to see what the Dallas school board is really made of. Spotted this on the agenda for tonight’s meeting: The board will vote on a legal settlement for a fired employee who was the board’s own employee, not an employee of the superintendent of…
Last week I attended a community meeting for the La Bajada neighborhood, an old working class Hispanic community at the foot of the fake Calatrava suspension bridge in West Dallas. A new entertainment district is already well established cheek by jowl with the neighborhood, and developers nearby are ready to…
What does it mean to be a product of Harvard and/or Princeton? Does it imply a mandatory elevation, a certain stature beneath which a person cannot sink? Now that Ted Cruz has declared his candidacy for president of the United States, I have been forced finally to come to grips…
Less than a mile from D/FW Airport, brand-new street signs proclaim the names of two newly paved streets snaking through acres of raw dirt — the corner of Al Razi and Al Hazen. In the distance, the first new house in the Al Hamra subdivision soars up off the ground…
Hang on. We had a piece here the other day saying State Representative Rafael Anchia had introduced legislation in Austin to “kneecap” the proposed Trinity toll road project in Dallas, and, true enough, that’s what Anchia’s bills might do. But in addition to blocking certain state funding from being used…
From the very beginning, top Texas legislators and key officials at the University of Texas have offered only one response to revelations of wrongdoing brought forward by UT System Regent Wallace Hall of Dallas — absolute denial, backed up by a yee-haw hog-hunting bloodlust for Hall’s scalp. The more they…
While SXSW rages on to the south of us in Austin, another festival has set up shop in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area to cater to a niche of it own. Imagine the Warped Tour crowd: your 15-year-old mall metal kid; your aspiring 19-year-old Instagram model; your “bandana wrapped around the…
By Nick Gaitan After all these years, it’s easy to take Carlos Santana for granted. Far too many of us may try and dismiss his work with an Onion-style joke about “Smooth.” But what Santana has done for music, and particularly Latin culture, over his decades-long career should never be…
