The big drumbeat at City Hall, led by Mayor Laura Miller and echoed by The Dallas Morning News, is that the city’s civil service system is corrupt. It protects dishonest, shiftless bums who need to be fired, according to our mayor. Normally this is the kind of drumbeat to which…
The Texas Legislature is moving toward a two-year corruption investigation focused on Dallas. Two House of Representatives committees may combine forces to look for civil rights violations, acts of official oppression, solicitation of bribery and other crimes and corruption at Dallas City Hall. The spark for this was testimony the…
The message from Dallas City Hall is that it can’t really fight crime. The message is that you need to do it yourself. Or else. And, man, does that message ever come across. Ask Barbara Edmondson, an apartment developer and operator. She spent a quarter-million dollars rehabbing 20 townhomes in…
This is the story of Bozo. At first it’s funny. Then it’s not funny. Then the punch line makes you want to punch somebody. The question is who. Punch Bozo? Punch the cops? The city attorney? The mayor? Sam Jamal-Eddine? The city of Dallas says Jamal-Eddine is the proper punchee…
Over a period of months, a Texas House committee has heard sworn testimony that Dallas City Hall is impotent in the face of one of the worst urban crime rates in America and wants to blame private business. Business people from Dallas painted an ugly picture in which the city…
I’m gonna vote for it. You do what you think is right. It took me forever to make up my mind, so I understand. But look: These last couple of weeks, a stark reality has been staring me in the face. If the Blackwood proposal to get rid of the…
Part of the illusion we try to maintain in the news business is that we know what’s happening. We try to look sharp. When you sell newspapers for a living, you don’t want somebody else to point out that you forgot to put your pants on this morning. That’s not…
The Dallas County sheriff makes people disappear right off the face of the earth, and you and I have no earthly way of finding out where they are or what has happened. It’s like the damn desparecidos in Argentina 25 years ago. County officials are pointing fingers at each other,…
Think about it: Some really outlandish stuff has been written about Beth Ann Blackwood and her husband, Tom Thomas, the lawyers who brought us the strong-mayor proposal on the ballot May 7. They’ve been called “Park Cities bubblati,” whatever that means. One guy compared the arguments for their proposal to…
Whoa there, pod’nuh. Let’s pull this buggy over and catch our breath for a second. Some major developments occurred last week, and I didn’t see news of it oozing out from the usual media. There were stories about the details, for sure, but I didn’t see anybody pointing out the…
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…
