OK. Let’s just cut to the ethical chase on this whole stupid WRR radio station tower-swap deal. This is ridiculous. The city council needs to put some people in chairs, turn on the bright lights and the tape recorders and ask some straight questions. The council will hear this week…
Phew. This talk about changing up the city-owned radio station sure has some odor to it. A group of people in the radio business have offered to “swap towers” with WRR-FM, the city-owned classical music station. WRR gets one of their broadcast towers and some money. They get the WRR…
Hey, wait a minute. What just happened? You tell me. Did a skinny liberal Jewish Democrat woman who is a short-haired ex-muckraker just run for mayor of Dallas and win by 16 great big percentage points over a well-known tenured Republican, mainly with support from the arch-conservative, arch-Republican, arch-Christian, arch-white,…
Go ahead and vote for all the stuff on the city’s half-a-billion-plus bond proposal. They’ll call you a rat if you don’t. Obviously, The Dallas Morning News is going to run an op ed piece every other day between now and the May 3 election telling people that good citizens…
The sleaze artists not only are out there hard at work preparing to steal and bamboozle votes from old people in the May 3 Dallas election: They may even be working overtime. They want to get in their last good harvest before the vote-fraud reform bill shuts them down. State…
Mary Poss has an ethics issue that isn’t going away. One person has been fired; allegations have been made of illegal behavior by state officials seeking to protect Poss from bad publicity; a whistleblower suit has been filed; a criminal complaint has been made. At every step of the way…
Wait a minute. Before we snap to the conclusion that the new Trinity River plan unveiled last week by Mayor Laura Miller is yet another civic scam, know this: I’ve been sitting here for a week staring at it, and the more I stare, the more the hair stands up…
This is all I ask. Remember the sailboats. I know we’ve been over this before. But since we last talked about it, the Dallas City Council has passed final ballot language for the bond election on May 3. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page: The…
So I guess this is the new post-ECAOBM era at the Dallas Observer, in which ECAOBM stands for Eric Celeste’s Article On Bob Mong (“Snooze Alarm,” February 13). Celeste, a talented young editor, a former student of mine at SMU who regularly addressed me as “Professor Schutze,” now one of…
Three weeks ago I get a call from an old friend who also happens to be a friend of the police chief. He reminds me that I wrote positive things about Terrell Bolton in 1999 when he was made chief of police in Dallas, and he says Bolton wants a…
At first the debris field was exciting. Normal people don’t have precedent for dealing with spaceships exploding over their heads. Driving southeast from Dallas down U.S. Highway 175 a few hours after the crash, you could see it in people’s eyes–the alert panoramic gaze of shock and anticipation. But late…
At first the debris field was exciting. Normal people don’t have precedent for dealing with spaceships exploding over their heads. Driving southeast from Dallas down U.S. Highway 175 a few hours after the crash, you could see it in people’s eyes–the alert panoramic gaze of shock and anticipation. But late…
I was unable to get Councilwoman Mary Poss to call me back to confirm or deny this story, so let’s take it as one man’s version and assume there are two sides: Over a period of a year or more, Robert Reynolds, a senior city auditor, had appeared before Poss…
This is Dallas, a conservative bastion. But the county government is setting up a system for spying on private citizens that would have turned old Joe Stalin green with envy. The county has signed a $40 million contract with a French multinational corporation to take over all of its information…
No one–least of all Ed Sebesta–would argue that Ed Sebesta of Oak Cliff brought down Trent Lott. But I can make a pretty good case that Lott would still be majority leader of the Senate if Sebesta had never been born. I have written about Sebesta before: A computer engineer…
Let’s do this. Let’s not talk about all the big things that happened at City Hall in 2002. To be honest, there weren’t any. Nothing happened. As usual. So what about this? Why don’t we talk about what should have happened? Let’s say, for example, that a strange green gas…
Let’s say some guy–we’ll call him Derwood the Philosopher, a made-up person–has worked out his own private philosophy, Derwoodology, the bottom line of which is that it’s OK for Derwood to go back on his word. He even tells you about it. “Thanks to my philosophy, I can go back…
Today’s pop quiz: How do you accuse the police department of anti-black racism, when the chief is the city’s first black chief and most of his senior staff are minorities? Veeery carefully. Last week a coalition of African-American organizations appeared before the city council and put on a powerful, angry…
Architecture, I don’t know. Good taste, not my department. But I think I am capable of recognizing a really bad media butt-kicking when I see it coming, and this idea of messing with the Kennedy Memorial would be A-number-one on my list. The idea is to move the assassination memorial…
So you think nobody likes a bully. You’re wrong. I think bullies may be getting popular around here. Over the last two years we’ve been reporting in the Dallas Observer on a campaign by Belo Corp., owners of The Dallas Morning News, to refashion its metastasizing campus of land at…
Look, I’m a Laura Miller fan. I was thrilled when she got elected mayor. Her victory was a sea change. But lately I’ve been a little seasick. I know you’ve been watching the potholes on your street as closely as I have on mine, patiently awaiting the arrival of the…
The Dallas system–weak mayor, strong city manager–is supposed to be businesslike. So why is the city in the financial ditch so badly? If Dallas City Hall is so businesslike, why wouldn’t it have seen the economic downturn coming and hedged its bets just a little? Maybe nothing is businesslike about…
