Opinion & Commentary

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…

On the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News this morning, two local epidemiologists with national/international reputations weigh in for more aerial spraying to combat West Nile disease. Robert Haley, the Gulf War Syndrome expert, and James Luby, an expert on St. Louis encephalitis at UT Southwestern, call for some…

Well thank goodness Friday has finally arrived so we can have a little privacy here on the lawn, without all those damned readers butting in. Normally when they’re around I don’t like to do inside baseball, because, you know, it just makes them get all anxious and nattery. Then that…

Story in The Dallas Morning News this morning touts Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington as the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country between July, 2011, and some unspecified date in 2012. Hold on, Dallas. That’s not us. In fact the sad saga of our own city’s growth, not mentioned in the story,…

Welcome to Alice Column, in which Alice Laussade writes stories about things on (roughly) the same day of (roughly) every week, making it (roughly) a column. Got an idea for a column? Start your own blog and write it up, you lazy shit. Allergies are total assholes. They’re bigger assholes…

Dear Mexican: I would be interested in hearing your point of view regarding our raza always voting for someone with a Latino last name, without even considering if the vato/vata is qualified for a particular office. Often I hear comments like, “If he is Latino, it makes up for all…

A few weeks ago I had coffee with a guy from another state who was here looking into some local political issues. At one point he kind of bent forward across the table and said in a lowered voice, “I understand there used to be some group here called ‘The…

Showing up to see a starving local rock band from the neighborhood is a nice gesture within itself, but to show up ready to work…for free…well, that’s support worth noting here. The DFW rock scene, specifically, has been pretty lucky to have James Villa showing up the last 12 years…

So this is easy, isn’t it? Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins himself will prove whether he’s a crook or not by refiling or not refiling his big case against Al Hill III. What’s it going to be? Either he does follow through on his threat to refile, because he…

So Trinity East, the gas drilling company that did a secret deal with the Dallas city manager to drill on city-owned parkland, is threatening to sue an environmental group because the group demanded more transparency about previous drilling operations. The drilling company has threatened to sue the Texas Campaign for…

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…

There are signs — hints, indications, wisps of smoke in the wind — suggesting we might get out of the JFK 50th observations in one piece after all. I’ve been quick to suggest Dallas would blow itself to smithereens with a bizarre compulsion to shut down free speech at Dealey…

So who is this Democrat judge, Lena Levario, who not only stands up to Democratic Party golden boy Craig Watkins, our embattled district attorney, but holds him in contempt of court? Does she not understand the most basic tenet of Dallas County Democratic Party philosophy — that Dr. King died…

I’m trying to think if there is a way the latest news about Plano-based JC Penney could be any more depressing. I was already pretty depressed when I read about the billion dollars in 2012 losses on a four billion dollar drop in sales this morning, and that was before…

Dear Readers: The Mexican is currently dealing with deportation issues but will return next week once he builds his 15-foot escalera to climb over that pesky 14-foot wall. In the meanwhile, here are some oldies-but-goodies. Dear Mexican: It seems that whenever Chicano professors want to show off their mexicanidad, they…

Nothing could be crazier or sadder. It is the continued determination of a small group of people in Dallas to tightly control public observations of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here. They want to banish the public from Dealey Plaza where it happened so that no one…

The big news in local politics today is supposed to be that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has publicly slammed Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins over how his office handled a civil suit. Yeah. Sorry. Somehow this doesn’t rise quite to the level of man-bites-dog for me. More like…

Welcome to Alice Column, in which Alice Laussade writes stories about things on (roughly) the same day of (roughly) every week, making it (roughly) a column. Got an idea for a column? Start your own blog and write it up, you lazy shit. Remember when Big Tex’s on-fire face was…

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is pushing a personal and public agenda against domestic violence, which used to be called wife-beating. Of course the TV news had to do a story about husband-beating to keep everything correct, and I’m against that, too, along with journalist-beating, French-people-beating and pan-flutist-beating. But let’s concentrate…