So I’m doing a this-hand versus that-hand thing in my head on Obamacare. Everybody says the Republicans are going to make this year’s presidential election a referendum on the Affordable Care Act. I just want to be ready. On the one hand, Affordable Care will encourage tons of poor people…
Freelance photographer (and Observer contributor) Mike Brooks grew up in Hawaii. Pretty easy to fall in love with the visual arts there, but he didn’t start out as a music photographer. Since his days at the Punahou School in Honolulu, and two colleges in Northern California, he’s built a rep…
Sometimes I think the dumbest people to talk to about the newspaper business are newspaper people, of which I am one, obviously. Is it possible to scream blindness? David Carr, The New York Times’s media columnist — one of the few media reporters on whose word I truly hang, often…
It’s over 100 degrees these days. I know because, in addition to the endless polite conversations I’ve had regarding the topic, you keep taking pictures of thermometers. There is no ocean breeze to save us on these plains. There is only one savior: the pool. Enter Ku De Ta, where…
Dallas Mayor Mike (“I’m a toll road guy”) Rawlings has pitched a bunch of numbers to the media that he says prove Dallas should build the Trinity toll road before it fixes the existing freeways downtown. But thanks to some very handy detective work by three anti-toll road city council…
Dear Mexican: Barrack Hussein Obama, how you dare deprive Mexico of its young, educated people? These illegal aliens in the United States are the only hope for Mexico, and you want to keep them here. They could start businesses, create jobs and improve the standard of living for the people…
So Teresa Sullivan, the president who didn’t cut costs at the University of Virginia, got her job back anyway. Meanwhile making the rounds of newspaper op-ed pages is an essay by Jeff Selingo, editorial director of The Chronicle of Higher Education, saying the way to get college costs down is…
I don’t know how to tell my wife. We’ve got to put this sucker on the market and move the hell out of here. It’s coming! It’s headed right for us! The light! The light is coming! WFAA Channel 8 news had a story last night about a rich lady…
Chris Spinks’ folks raised him on a strict diet of classic rock. His friends upgraded that diet to all things Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords when he got a little older, starting with Social Distortion’s Live at the Roxy. From there, he played in a pop-punk band or two, landed…
I love you, Dallas. I really do. This city has allowed me the thrill of chasing the next great party, or finding the weird new watering hole. One side effect to all this socializing is a little bit of longing. I mean this as one part love letter, one part…
Every once in a while the guns get blazing so fast here on the interwebs that we fail to notice when somebody shoots true. Skimming back through comments on one of my recent items about the proposed new floating boat club at White Rock Lake, I found this ditty from…
The Highland Park White Rock Lake Carnival Cruise Ship story comes into tighter focus with each passing hour, and so far the real story looks a little worse with every new detail. Not to take the onus off the Parkies at all, but I’ve been getting strong indications that another…
Trying hard to think how to bring proper perspective to the absolutely stunning pronouncement by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week that the Trinity River in Dallas is not in danger of calamitous flooding after all. We have been told over the last three years that the only…
Dear Mexican: In anticipation of the upcoming Reconquista, I’ve decided that I need a Mexican girlfriend. I feel this will help me fit in better with our new Mexican overlords. However, Mexican ladies must be approached with particular regard to culture and customs, and that raises many questions. A well-known…
Oh, damn. Now white people are going to have to defend themselves on a second front. First it was the Mexicans swarming into the country and out-working us. Now the Asians are coming here in droves and out-smarting us. What’s left for whites? Bowling? The big news in immigration today…
In the DFW hip-hop scene, George Lopez has been doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it, well, for more than 25 years. He’s most famously known for running T-Town Music, his label and independent hip-hop outlet, since 1994, out of a bazaar in Pleasant Grove. He’s deejayed since ’83,…
See also: It’ll Do Club set to re-open See also: Video of opening night One of the best club signs in Dallas has always been It’ll Do’s, just off Elm and Carroll in East Dallas. I rode past it on bike rides and always stopped to take a picture of…
You’ll have to forgive us veterans of the newspaper business, but certain days — especially Mondays for some reason — are just self-referential days. Something in us wants to say to readers, “But enough about you.” We wake up way more concerned with ourselves than anybody else out there. And…
I just get a little tummy ache every time I see the Nasher Sculpture Center back in the news again treated like it’s holy Bethlehem. Please. The stuff in there is art, not the preserved teeth and hair of the saints. Renzo Piano, the architect, is on the front page…
Just when I have been doing some reporting on the role of younger leaders in our own fair city, young people nationally have come in for a minor hailstorm of criticism sparked by a commencement speech at a public high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. A teacher, David McCullough Jr., son…
Between the lines of a recently released FBI affidavit, we can spy the shape of a criminal complaint likely to come within the next two months in the Dallas County federal corruption case. The affidavit, made public May 29 when it was filed in a civil action against Dallas County…
Dear Mexican: I’m in this country illegally, but I have a current passport from the country I am from, and I have an international driver’s license. Occasionally, I fly commercially within the United States, and these docs are always sufficient. I wish to take a cruise to Alaska that leaves…
