Marva Beck told a reporter that her first priority as a new state representative is a tougher voter identification law. Really? Not, say, to help Texas schools address ever-accumulating and costly state mandates? Not to better serve the mentally ill? Not to dig the state out of its Texas-sized…
DetailsThis is for those in the “not a lick of difference” camp. Yes, you folks in the squishy, independent center, and you folks of the so easily disgusted left. This is also to you relatively progressive candidates who campaigned as if — yes, ’twas not a lick of difference. Yeah, boy, there’s a difference, and…
DetailsDukaki — n., pl.; (1) progressive politicians vaporized at the polls for campaigns in which they chose not to tell voters what they stand for; (2) Candidates who go out with no bang, only whimpers. We start this discussion with a fact: The stimulus bill worked. USA Today veritably screamed it in an editorial…
DetailsMy wife expressed alarm that the mute on the TV remote is being unresponsive, or at least slow on the draw. I suggested that the problem is simply structural fatigue. A mopey mute is a serious matter right now. Put in personal terms: Through Nov. 2, if viewing TV — baseball…
DetailsDENVER — Actually doing something about homelessness seems like the stuff of fifth-grade essays or beauty queens’ answers of 25 words or less. But it takes more than 25 words for Mike George to explain how he sank into the social chasm that nearly left him a corpse on the pavement. It took more than…
DetailsThe man in the good suit and great hair came expecting to make a sale: He prefaced it with, “I know you care about children.” He was talking about education, and since I wrote about it a lot, he figured, well . . . It turned out that the…
DetailsThe 2004 film “Day Without a Mexican” conjured a moment when a mystery fog spirited away all of California’s Latinos, and then imagined how the state would fare without that industrious labor force. Assessment: not well. Not so fast, asserted Megan Clyne in National Review, a publication whose mission…
DetailsSure, I might have missed it. Since reality TV started chewing its way through the television schedule like a weevil in a cotton boll, what’s to watch? Nonetheless, I’m confident I have seen something on TV rarely if ever tried by Democrats: A candidate is going right after his opponent’s attempt…
DetailsLooking back, I must have written 10,000 words about that old building on East Waco’s Clifton Street. It was a decrepit nursing home at one time. Then McLennan County converted it into a makeshift juvenile detention center. In the ’90s it got upgraded and expanded. That meant young detainees would have…
DetailsBack in my early 40s, my doctor presented me with a curious diagnosis: high blood pressure. This made no sense. I was healthy and active. My cholesterol was perfect, as was everything else save my hairline. The doctor said that lots of otherwise healthy people have the condition, and science has no ready…
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