Texas ain’t a battleground. It’s more like a slaughterhouse, especially if you are a Democrat. And the candidacy of Wendy Davis made matters worse. Democrats have a ten-year uphill climb to get back to being a viable party in Texas. Davis was never going to win. Celebrity is insufficient. But she also made all the…
Nothing has changed, yet. The new poll on the Texas governor’s race and other statewide campaigns, which was released yesterday, shows the Republican Greg Abbott with a comfortable 51-37 lead over Democrat Wendy Davis. The numbers come from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) in North Carolina. Generally, this is what political analysts had been expecting…
There was a moment in the Ann Richards campaign against George W. Bush when I knew in advance she had lost. The late governor was speaking to a Girls’ State assembly, which is a little legislature created annually for high school students to meet for a day and learn about government. Richards, in a moment…
We lived in a small house, 850 square feet, six kids, Daddy and Ma. The neighborhood was all southerners that had moved north to work in the factories. Daddy told me late in his life that he had left the sharecropping of cotton in Mississippi to move to the unknowns of Michigan for $1.25 an…
The accident that changed Greg Abbott’s life was so improbable as to be almost statistically immeasurable. A healthy 27 year-old, he was jogging through the Houston community of River Oaks in 1984 when a large limb broke from a tree and fell on his back. Abbott, who spent months in rehabilitation, was made paraplegic. Financially,…
Instead of a romp through various topics of interest, Fridays will sometimes be devoted to a single subject, which is today’s case. Our attempt will always be to provide a context and perspective we don’t see elsewhere, and that’s why this piece is about abortion and the Texas men trying to control women. As more…
God apparently wants creationism taught in Texas public schools. Or at least the Texas Tea Party does. Conservative and semi-crazy State Senator Dan Patrick won a big victory over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the state’s Republican primary, and appears likely to defeat the eleven-year incumbent in the May runoff. Patrick’s conservatism is the type…
The Texas Tribune is becoming more transparent, even though they have long insisted they were already completely transparent. Keep those two opposing notions in your head and consider this quote from a piece last Friday by the Trib’s Emily Ramshaw, “When you’re asking for peoples’ trust, being as transparent as possible is always the right…
If you are close to becoming a naturalized Texan, (not sure such an entity is culturally recognized) or you were born over the sacred soil, you have the innate sense that tells you about the approach of the historic Battle of the Alamo anniversary. In fact, yesterday marked the 178th year to have passed since…
As a precinct captain among the “self-appointed integrity cops,” I take great pleasure in noting that the Texas Tribune still says it’s doing everything it needs to do for transparency, but they are still going to make some changes. Never mind that no one can process that contradiction; give the Tribune credit for allowing Executive…