Private property still legal in Dallas! Or should I say, legal again. The Dallas City Council just voted unanimously to approve a plan to keep several businesses on Rock Island Street, right behind the Trinity River levee down by the Corinth Street bridge. Council members Steve Salazar, Pauline Medrano and…
The Dallas Morning News’s City Hall blog today carries two items in which Dallas city council member Dave Neumann and our mayor, Tom Leppert, alternately bitch about and then sort of pooh-pooh the problems the city is having getting the Trinity River levee system repaired.Dallas must fix its levee system…
There’s a great story by Steve Thompson on Page One of The Dallas Morning News today about old industrial businesses on Rock Island Street, a quaint one-block lane tucked between the Trinity River levee and Lamar Street a mile due south of downtown. Several businesses there are fighting to keep…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *A sentence I thought I’d never live long enough to type: The American League Championship Series — Texas Rangers v. New York Yankees — starts one week from today at Rangers Ballpark…
Dear Mexican: Mexico is truly an amazing, beautiful country! Huge oil reserves, mineral deposits second to none, tourist potential unparalleled! God gave Mexico every possible advantage. And yet the Mexicans, in all their wisdom and intellect, have turned it into a backwater, undeveloped narco-ruled Third World cesspool of corruption and…
Texas GOP VoteRNC Chair Michael Steele and Stephen BrodenThis afternoon, The Dallas Morning News endorsed Stephen Broden, the Republican vying for Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson’s seat in the U.S. Congress. Fascinating — in no small part because Johnson has been the No. 1 purveyor of federal pork for The News’s…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Sobering number right outta the gate: Since July 1 the Texas Rangers are 42-40. Are we fooling ourselves thinking they’re an elite team that can actually win a playoff series against…
Trey Garrison, a writer I admire and a contributing editor at D, has an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News today suggesting that Tuesday’s suicide at the University of Texas at Austin makes the case for allowing all students in Austin to pack heat when they go to class…
So, just for grins, let’s do this. Let’s take off our war helmets, put down our skull flails for maybe 10 minutes on this whole Dallas property tax hike issue and talk about something bigger. I like the tax increase adopted by the city council last week. But I not…
Dear Mexican: I understand NYC isn’t your jurisdiction, but maybe you have some insight, or maybe this is also a problem for other smart and successful Latinas. My question is: Why is it so hard to find an educated Mexican—or hell—even a Latino man who isn’t a pretentious hijo de…
Robert, don’t post this item, because I know you won’t, because I know you hate me, but this is something I posted as a comment on an earlier item, and then I changed my mind, and now I’ve decided it’s too important and deserves its own item. It’s about the…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Times like these make me regret that I stopped referring to Wade Phillips as “Stumbledoofus.” After missing two crucial field goals in two weeks, David Buehler should be on a short…
Wow. When did the whole topic of taxes turn into wild scary voodoo? Please. Taxes are numbers. Numbers are not snakes. A majority of the Dallas City Council has already voted once in favor of raising the current property tax rate by 4.9 cents per $100 in the value of…
Dear Mexican: What punishment could America give that would FINALLY make crossing America’s borders—repeatedly—unpalatable to Mexicans, when even Mexican natives admit that it is at least as harmful to Mexico as it is to America, and the “needless paperwork” in our immigration process is to TRY to filter out habitual…
City of Dallas Facebook pageFrom yesterday’s Pavaho Pump Station groundbreaking, though feel free to write your own captionDidn’t even get my print-edition column out the door this week before I got a major correction, and this one from a person who would know — city council member Angela Hunt. She…
I was supposed to meet Ernie Santos Saturday morning at Twin Peaks in McKinney. I’m digging into an Observer cover story on metroplex motorcycle clubs/gangs and he, being a member of the Dirty Bastards, invited me to a sort of meet ‘n greet with his crew. Seems one of their…
O.K., I’ve been laughing up my sleeve over the mayor’s whining remarks last week, complaining that certain unnamed “federal partners” aren’t being very nice to him. Hanging around City hall last week for various dumb events, I was able to chat up a couple of people who are keeping quite…
*Of all the teams that lost in Week 1 of the NFL season, betcha there’s only one that spent the last couple days explaining and defending their organizational flow chart: Your Dallas Cowboys. *On one hand I believe the Dallas Police Department officers who clubbed and beat the runaway motorcyclist should…
Dear Mexican: I work at a large hotel in Orange County where 80 percent of the employees are Latin American, primarily Mexican. I love all of them and enjoy working with them. However, the one thing that bothers me is that when they are speaking to each other, they speak…
If I tell you something weird is going on at Dallas public school headquarters, that’s not exactly a news bulletin, is it? But what if I’m talking about something deeply weird? Last week the school district headquarters staff tried to launch a major search and destroy mission to bring down…
I guess grassroots just aren’t what they used to be. Today an announced “grassroots” outpouring of support for embattled 30th District Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson amounted to a dozen preachers speaking to 20 human beings and 40 empty folding chairs in the Flag Room at City Hall. “We have come…
*If you’re Miles Austin are you more giddy about a six-year, $57 million contract or the fact that you get to look/touch/hit this on a regular basis? *Look, I’m as Muslim-skeptical as legally allowed, but I do see this as double-standardy: A couple dudes build a Mosque near Ground Zero…
