This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have budget news from across the region, the repercussions of the Charlie Kirk murder in the area, some immigration-related news, some stories from our churches and mosques, and a smattering of general news from more serious items like the latest on the Robert Roberson case to lighter fare like the “Oscars for influencers” held recently in Frisco. And more!
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of classical violinist Isabelle Faust whom I wish would come to the Dallas area. She plays a lot of baroque composers including some of the “minor” composers whose works are left out of the general repertoire.
Let’s take a dive into some budgets since it’s that time of year:
- After a lot of wrangling (and I cut a lot of stories once the budget was actually approved), Dallas City Council approved a $5 billion budget for 2025-2026. Mayor Eric Johnson was one of the three votes against the budget.
- Dallas County has also adopted its budget for the upcoming year, spending $828 million without raising the tax rate, although of course property values and inflation will raise actual tax numbers. The budget passed 4-1 with Commissioner John Wiley Price voting against.
- And here’s the Fort Worth city budget for the new fiscal year: $3 billion, lower property taxes, and increased service fees. The Fort Worth Report is doing yeoman work on the details of city spending, so check out the related stories if you want to know the nitty gritty of how the city is spending its money.
- You know who didn’t get their budget process finished? Tarrant County, where the two Democratic commissioners skipped the vote to deny a quorum for a vote on the tax rates. Of course County Judge Tim O’Hare and the Republican commissioners retaliated by passing an $825 million budget that cut the Democratic commissioners’ staff to one person each and limited their travel budgets to $1,000, as well as eliminating road and bridge crew jobs.
- For information about the budgets of Tarrant County suburbs, check the Fort Worth Report, which covers Arlington, Bedford, Colleyville, and Granbury this week.
- KERA is also on the budget trail, covering Denton County and Frisco this week.
- And the Dallas Morning News covers Plano’s $800 million budget.
- Finally, check out the Texas Tribune’s piece on how Texas towns and cities are dealing with the economy and budget issues features Fort Worth among other Texas cities.
Next we move on to Charlie Kirk and how our local folks are dealing with his murder and the social media and legacy media storm that has followed. I’m sparing you the Star-Telegram’s detailed coverage of local memorials in favor of more interesting and substantive stories:
- Fort Worth City Council got into it after Councilwoman Elizabeth Beck posted Kirk’s own words about the Second Amendment and its costs with a picture of Kirk and the word UNFORTUNATE photoshopped over it. Her post came before Kirk died and she deleted it after his death. Like most people who have been yelled at for lack of sympathy for quoting Kirk, Beck expressed that political violence has no place in America. Of course, that didn’t keep Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French from calling for her removal from office on Xitter.
- A bunch of students at UNT were caught on video having wrong feelings about his death. I haven’t watched the video, which is apparently a reaction video to the shooting video that’s gone around, but it’s had more than a quarter of a million views on TikTok. State Rep. Andy Hopper, who represents UNT, contacted the president of the school over the students and their wrongthink.
- In the wake of threats by Texas Education Agency head Mike Morath to suspend the licenses of teachers who posted wrongthink about Kirk’s murder, the Star-Telegram tells us what these investigations could mean for educators with some help from an official from a teachers’ union and a constitutional law professor at SMU. The TEA was unsurprisingly silent. More about Morath’s threats from the Texas Tribune.
- The Dallas Observer covers the same turf but includes the story of a Lake Worth ISD employee fired for supposedly celebrating Kirk’s death. Not only was she sacked, she’s considered a threat to campus and her child was also kicked out of school.
- As you probably know, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel after one of the media groups that own their affiliates removed his show from their schedule. The group in question is Irving-based Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliates and may own a lot more by the end of next year. They’re trying to buy Tegna, the owner of our local ABC affiliate WFAA (whose website I quote on occasion). So the Kimmel cancellation is a function of corporate consolidation and a predicted and predictable outcome of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
- Local Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett has been in hot water with Republicans since she stepped on the national stage. Recently Charlie Kirk went after her and she hit back this week. This is all Great Replacement Theory garbage; if you’re not terminally online enough to know, it’s about how liberal pinko commies bring in Black and brown folk to replace white folks in the US, so grossly racist as well as factually wrong. I continue to wish Crockett good luck in dealing with the kind of people who believe this crap.
- Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones compared Kirk’s murder to the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. He might have been trying to make a point about violence but he also might have phrased it a little better.
- And Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Plano) got hoisted on his own hypocritical petard by getting mad at his colleague and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico for not posting about Kirk’s murder fast enough.
- Last, but not least, the Star-Telegram editorial board thinks it’s a bad idea for the TEA chase down social media posts and fire teachers for wrongthink. I frequently disagree with the conservative slant of the Star-Telegram’s opinion page, but it’s nice to see free speech people advocating for people to actually have free speech.
And a few items of immigration-related news from North Texas:
- I don’t usually talk about the “if it bleeds, it leads” crime news that happens here in Dallas, but recently we had one that hit the national news: a worker at a motel beheaded his boss and is now charged with capital murder (and click through with care because the details are upsetting). Turns out the suspect was an undocumented Cuban immigrant with a criminal history in Houston and Florida including auto theft, assault, and indecency with a child. Which is why the President went on a social media rampage over the weekend (again some upsetting details of the crime, so take care before clicking) as part of his ongoing fixation with bashing immigrants. The kicker is that the victim, the manager of the motel, was also an immigrant from India. The suspect, in addition to the pending charges, is also under an ICE immigration detainer.
- Star-Telegram columnist William Bradford Davis opines that the Supreme Court’s decision in Noem v Perdomo is equivalent to the Dred Scott decision. Noem v Perdomo is the ICE racial profiling case we’ve all heard so much about.
- Congresswoman Julie Johnson wants better treatment for inmates at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, including more access to lawyers as well as facilities improvements. She’s also looking into our local ICE office, which I’ve talked about recently because of its appearance in the news for keeping detainees too long and in illegal conditions.
- One of the women arrested in the protest/shooting at the Prairieland ICE facility in Alvarado was interviewed by KERA. She was apparently in her car playing phone games when the shooting happened; she had taken friends to the protest. Also, she’s trans and facing medical discrimination and general transphobia from Johnson County jail officials.
Some religiously-related of various sorts from around our part of the state:
- The trial of Raunaq Alam for vandalizing a Euless church with anti-Israel slogans ended with a conviction for vandalism, but the jury rejected the hate crime enhancement added by prosecutors. The pro-Palestinian activist was sentenced to 180 days in jail and 5 years’ probation.
- Governor Greg Abbott recently signed HB 4211, which amends the Texas Fair Housing Act in several ways, and is mostly targeted at the EPIC City planned community. Meanwhile, an investigation into EPIC City by the Texas Workforce Commission has been resolved with no admission of wrongdoing by Community Capital Partners, the group behind the development. This is the second investigation of EPIC City tobe dismissed; Senator John Cornyn called on the US Department of Justice to investigate EPIC City earlier this year and they ended their probe in June.
- There’s an ongoing effort to build a mosque in McKinney. Opposition by the neighbors has now stepped up to include vandalism of the coming-soon signs with large crosses and the words “Jesus Christ”.
- The True Texas Project celebrated, as it were, the run-up to September 11 by sending an Islamaphobic email blast attacking officeholders of Muslim descent. If the name True Texas Project rings a bell, it’s because they’re a bunch of Christian nationalists and white supremacists who appear in the news now and then. KERA’s stories about them will remind you of what you’ve forgotten.
- The DMN goes to town on the list of a dozen north Texas pastors who have resigned or been removed from their positions for moral failures since June 2024. That’s the date when the scandal around Robert Morris, formerly of Gateway Church, blew up.
- One of the recent cases of sexual sin moral failue is John McKinzie, formerly lead pastor of Hope Fellowship Church in Frisco. Nobody knows what he did, but he felt bad enough about it, or about the possibility of getting caught for it, that he quit.
- And Diego Fuller of Journey Fort Worth Church was arrested on September 1 on a charge of sexual assault but will still be preaching at least part time and writing sermons when he can’t. He says the allegations against him are absolutely false.
And a few random items from the news:
- More than half of local charities in North Texas lost funding in 2025 according to a survey of 3,000 nonprofits in the region. Unsurprisingly the DMN editorial board doesn’t like it. The Fort Worth Report covers the same survey with the details that the nonprofits lost $127 million in the first six months of 2025, mostly from federal sources.
- Robert Roberson’s execution date for the shaken-baby murder of his daughter is next month and he’s not ready to die. This is where his appeals stand. Roberson has the enmity of Attorney General Ken Paxton, but he has some big-name defenders, including the author John Grisham, who’s writing a book about Roberson’s case.
- The latest on the sale of the Dallas Morning News is that Hearst has increased its bid from $15 to $16.50 a share ahead of the shareholder vote next week. Alden Global Capital, the disfavored suitor, is bidding $20, but the key shareholder strongly prefers Hearst. Meanwhile, D Magazine tells us why Adweek thinks Hearst is buying up all these newspapers: cross-pollination with their magazines. Also, Collin County’s favorite boy, Attorney General and would-be Senator Ken Paxton is investigating the proxy advisory firms involved in the sale. Turns out the advisory firms sued the state over a recent law that would keep them from advising clients over DEI practices. It also just so happens that the founder of Alden Global Capital is a major Republican donor, not that Paxton would try to put his thumb on the scale for a big Republican money man or anything.
- On one of our host’s favorite topics, driverless vehicles, I bring you some news about driverless semis and an editorial from the DMN about whether we’re ready for Waymo’s self-driving not-a-taxis (they’d like more regulations). Also, from Reddit, here’s a photo of a Waymo vehicle spotted in Dallas last week.
- The Dallas Area Rapid Transit board has approved its plan for service cuts with a reduced budget. Read up about DART’s latest wrangling with Plano at that link. Meanwhile, DART’s Silver Line, which travels from Plano through other northern suburbs to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, but does nothing for Dallas residents like me, will officially open October 25. On a semi-related note, the DMN’s Curious Texas looks into what happened to Dallas’ streetcar network of the 1930s, complete with a 1919 map of the system.
- Dallas was extremely humid this summer. Not Houston levels of humid all the time, but there were definitely some days with the old “can’t see through my glasses for the fog” problems.
- If I had to get married all over again, I’d consider asking the bubbliest wedding officiant in Dallas to do the job.
- Frisco recently hosted the LTK Awards, which are sort of an Oscars for influencers. As a self-acknowledged fat chick, I follow some mid- and plus-size influencers on social media. They presented a very different version of this event, including some definite mean-girling of the heavier influencers, as if our money moving through the LTK shopping platform isn’t as green, or at least electronic, as that of thinner folks.
- This week I learned that Dallas is a top 3 city for polyamory after Atlanta and Houston.
- And last, while it’s the wrong season for zoo borns, please enjoy this reel of a young chimpanzee playing with a visitor through the glass from the Dallas Zoo.