I am so laden, so heavily weighted, so freighted down with reverse-snob anti-suburban bias that I shouldn’t even open my mouth. But…oh, guess I will anyway. In the suburban Beulah Land of Frisco, Texas, I spy something interesting, which surprises me–a strange refracted image of our own urban woes in…
E-mail. It’s so great, politically. Probably my favorite of all movie scenes as a kid was when the villagers and peasants marched on Dr. Frankenstein’s castle at night with those torches. I think that scene may still be my own notion of political activity at its very best. Especially the…
Be honest with me. I can take it. If I say four little words, you get drowsy and want to lie down for a nap, right? Dallas City Charter Amendment. We know all about that in the newspaper business. Charter amendment stories are what we call “snoozers.” Do not operate…
At this very moment, the mayor and city council of Dallas are teetering on a precipice, dangling from a parapet, dancing on the edge, hanging by a thread from a cliff towering over jagged rocks above a cruelly surging sea–yeah, I would even say they were at the tipping point–of…
Hate to do this to you. I don’t like it when I read stories by other reporters based on unnamed sources. I have an ungenerous tendency to wonder if they made it all up. But in this case, the only people I could talk to were sources who would rather…
All through my damn holidays, a drumbeat. She asks, “What did the homeless people lose when the city threw their stuff into the garbage trucks?” I don’t want to talk about it. I’m off work. I want to buy a tree. The kid’s coming home. “I don’t know what they…
Wow. What a year. The city’s ship of state is pulling apart at the welds. Down in the engine room they’re up to their necks in saltwater. Somebody threw the captain overboard. A big pirate ship from the Park Cities just hove into view. They want us to behead the…
Take this apart: A citizens group brings forward petitions calling for a vote to gut the Dallas City Council and concentrate power in a “strong mayor.” Naturally, the council resents the suggestion. Who wants to be gutted? So they’re going to come up with a strategy to fight it. But…
There are two scary things about the “strong mayor” proposal probably slated for a referendum in Dallas next May: It seems to have roots in affluent venues in the Park Cities and North Dallas. And it would absolutely gut the Dallas City Council. But does being scary make it bad?…
“What am I, the Flying Dutchman?” I’m sitting on this DART train wondering. Outside I see a flat rolling moonscape, crumbling cinder-block walls, ranks of dusty 18-wheelers, an endless procession of small tumble-down frame houses. The back yard of Dallas. Add some minarets, I could be in Fallujah. And me,…
This is such a cover-your-ass world. Everybody has an excuse. Nothin’ ain’t nobody’s fault, never. The only antidote to c.y.a. is the phrase c.y.a. artists fear most–“on your watch.” As in, “It doesn’t matter how many layers of deniability you wrap around your big rear end. If it happened on…
I want to tell you, this town is a gypsy fortuneteller’s paradise. Give me a turban and a blue bathrobe, and I could make a million bucks here as “The Great Schutzkin.” It’s sooo easy. Two weeks ago I put the envelope to my forehead, concentrated real, real hard, and…
Remind me what the 911 emergency call system is for. Emergencies, right? For example, you walk out to the parking lot, and your car has been stolen. So you call 911. They get right on it. That’s the theory. Now let’s talk about the fact. A guy I work with…
I have a crystal ball. I’m going to predict the future. In detail. And you watch: I’m going to be right. In detail. A little swami music, please. A week from now, a consulting firm called McKinsey & Company will present the Dallas City Council with a report on what…
This is an open letter to U.S. Senators James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, John McCain of Arizona, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, and to U.S. Representative Don Young of Alaska and anyone else in Congress with an interest in the stalled surface transportation bill:…
If you read the fake-drug report, you’ll get the picture. The fact that nobody’s in charge and nobody’s accountable at City Hall doesn’t stop at City Hall. It trickles down. It’s a culture. Terence Hart and Lena Levario, the lawyers who conducted the investigation for the city and wrote the…
Come with me on a journey deep into the Dumpster of nitty-gritty gut-level local politics, down where the money meets the road and virtue is the lesser of two evils. Don’t forget your boots and a clothespin for your nose. A month ago, Mayor Laura Miller accused District 8 Councilman…
You can’t tell people from other places about Dallas–even when they move here. It’s too wacked. Start trying to explain to them how we didn’t have the ’60s: All of a sudden they have to make a cell call. The best we can do is live with it. But every…
Try this one on for size. What if Dallas is so screwed up that the only way to get it going right is radical surgery? What if we went back to something like the old business-guy committees that used to run everything before the yankee federal courts stuck their noses…
Maybe this is the way to put it, in order to get anybody’s attention in this town. Maybe I should forget about the fact that we have a deeply corrupted, dangerously out-of-control police department and just talk about the money. I pay about $1,000 a year in city of Dallas…
Jim Bryant is 75 years old, walks with a cane, sometimes suffers a dry throat from medication. He gets tired. But Jim Bryant is stubborn about principle. Today he has taken his cane in hand and come downtown to City Hall yet again to continue his quarter-century-long battle with the…
Wouldn’t you know. All the time I criticize the Dallas City Council and say they’ve screwed up, and they get mad at me because they think they’re doing such a damn stellar job. So last week I walk out of a city council session thinking for once they really did…
