Someone might have to pass some smelling salts to help revive me if what I read actually comes true.
It is that Rep. Ronny Jackson, the Amarillo Republican who’s curried favor with the Donald Trump cabal of kooks, might run for the U.S. Senate in 2026. Yep, the one-time White House doc might challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in four years presuming Cornyn decides to seek re-election.
That means if Jackson actually wins in 2026 then the whole state will have to endure his tweets, his ongoing assault against those who disagree with his MAGA-loving demagoguery.
The guy is a carpetbagging clown show barker who moved into the 13th Congressional District specifically to run for Congress from the Texas Panhandle.
Jackson is a Trumpkin through and through. He doesn’t deserve re-election to his House seat, let alone election to a seat in what once was known as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
Lindsey Graham once thought and talked like a traditional Republican, such as the time he said that abortion laws needed to be settled by states.
Now, though, the South Carolina Republican is ratcheting up the argument, pitching for a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Which is it, Sen. Graham, state issue or national prerogative?
Politicians on both sides of the divide have criticized Graham’s about-face. Then, of course, are those of us who dislike the government dictating how a woman can govern her own body.
Public opinion polls suggest Graham is on the losing side of this debate. He isn’t dissuaded. Graham believes the nationwide ban will become law despite those polls and despite some election results that suggest Americans want to retain a woman’s right to choose whether to end a pregnancy.
I will give Graham some credit for recognizing the need for excepting cases involving rape and incest from the ban. Certain statewide bans, such as what’s been enacted in Texas, require girls impregnated by their lecherous uncles or fathers to carry their pregnancies to full term.
However, Graham is getting way ahead of himself if he believes most Americans will line up behind what he’s proposing. According to the Huffington Post: “I am confident the American people would accept a national ban on abortion at 15 weeks,” Graham told “Fox News Sunday.” “And to those who suggest that being pro-life is losing politics, I reject that.”
Instead, he has joined the wacky wing of the Republican Party that now wants to nationalize what used to be part of the GOP mantra: it is better to leave some things up to the states than to have the feds impose their iron will.
Rick Perry might have been a politician ahead of his time a dozen years ago as he sought re-election to his post as Texas governor.
Perry announced to the state’s editorial boards — and I was a member of one of them in 2010 — that he wouldn’t visit newspaper offices to seek editorial pages’ endorsement.
Why, he would just “talk directly to Texans” and not mess with newspapers’ editorial pages.
Well, you know what? Perry’s strategy worked. Virtually every newspaper in Texas endorsed the Democrat running against Perry that year, former Houston mayor Bill White. The Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked at the time, was among the papers that gave its “blessing” to White.
I will never forget the reaction we got from our readers. Many of them responded to us as if we had endorsed the Son of Satan himself.
What’s more, Perry was able to cruise to re-election, much as he had done in every year he ran for the office.
What’s the lesson here? It is that voters no longer rely on newspaper editors’ “wisdom” in helping them decide how to cast their ballots. In many cases, readers’ minds are made up. They have heard all they need to hear about candidates and their views on pressing issues of the day.
This trend saddens me. I edited opinion pages in Amarillo for nearly 18 years, for nearly 11 years in Beaumont and for a half-dozen years in Oregon, City, Ore., before my career ended in August 2012. I was proud of virtually all the endorsements we made during those years. Moreover, I took pride in the respectful reaction we received — even from readers who disagreed with what we offered.
Newspapers aren’t as “respected” these days as they used to be. That, too, saddens me greatly. Those of us who write for newspapers, be they major metro dailies or community papers, aren’t “the enemy of the people.” We seek to do our job with fairness and accuracy. When we offer commentary, we do so with the same noble motives.
Rick Perry didn’t see it that way when he stiffed editorial boards’ desire to visit with him on why he sought to return to public office.
The tumult and tempest arising from the arrival of immigrants and, yes, refugees from Latin America have in their way taken me back to an earlier time in Texas when such new arrivals spawned violent protests and outright hatred.
Republican governors have taken great joy in sending migrants to Democratically held jurisdictions in a ploy to stick it in their ear. You favor welcoming these folks? Here, you can have ’em!
The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and with the end of the shooting in Vietnam thousands of refugees fled from Southeast Asia to the United States. They didn’t want to live under communist rule, so they found their way to the Land of Opportunity.
Many of those refugees settled along the Texas coast, seeking to resume their lives as fishermen and women. They sought to capitalize on the shrimp harvest opportunities. Not everyone welcomed them.
The Ku Klux Klan reared its ugly and evil head, raiding the Vietnamese shrimp fleets, cutting their nets and threatening the newcomers with violence if they didn’t leave the country. There was violence. Klansmen were charged with bringing physical harm and death to the Vietnamese.
Over time, though, the violence subsided. Today, in communities such as Port Arthur — with its substantial Vietnamese-American population — you find the influence of the descendants of those refugees in a most remarkable way. Check out the honor rolls of public high schools and you see plenty of names such as Nguyen, Phang and Lam. Yes, the children and grandchildren of those refugees excel academically and take that excellence with them into successful careers as adults
Do we really want to deny the current refugees — who flee communist tyranny in places such as Nicaragua and Venezuela — the same opportunity to succeed?
Were you to ask me to rank the worst political action committee active today in Texas, I would have little difficulty identifying my public enemy No. 1.
That would be Empower Texans.
Empower Texans took form in West Texas, which arguably is the birthplace of the modern state Republican Party. It’s a conservative region governed essentially by conservative politicians. Empower Texans, though, sees as its mission to carry its arch-conservatism across the state.
The PAC routinely “primaries” Republican pols who don’t adhere to Empower Texans’ rigid view of the world. I’ve seen this PAC in action in the Panhandle region, where I lived and worked for more than two decades before relocating in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex; indeed, Empower Texans is busy here, too.
Empower Texans has a number of its preferred candidates on the ballot in 2022. Many of them will get elected. What they do once they get elected to Congress or to the Legislature remains to be seen. However, if they are faithful to Empower Texans’ creed, they will seek to undercut policies that many Texans favor, such as being pro-choice on abortion and favoring sensible legislative solutions to gun violence.
Those, in my view, are the two issues of the day that have drawn Empower Texans into the fight. This group needs to be stopped.
The PAC wants a total ban on abortion, and it opposes any legislation that it deems capable of “disarming law-abiding Texans.”
That, in short order, is why this is the worst PAC working in Texas.
A North Texas woman got pulled over by a police officer because she was the sole occupant in a vehicle that was traveling down a high-occupancy vehicle lane — which requires two or more passengers to qualify.
Except that the woman is pregnant, so she has contested the citation issued in Dallas County, contending that her unborn child is a person, which makes the HOV restriction moot.
Hmm. How do I say this? This incident goes beyond absurd. It is ridiculous in the extreme, but it surely opens the door to endless debate over the whole “personhood” issue brewing now that Texas has made abortion illegal.
The driver in question, Brandy Bottone, said she isn’t trying to make this a “political” issue. Yeah, sure thing. It’s like the pro athlete who holds out for more money who then says, “It’s not about the money.” Of course it is … about the money. Bottone’s bitching about the traffic ticket is most certainly a political issue.
The Texas Tribune reports: Bottone argued that under Texas’ abortion laws, which went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, a fetus is considered a living being. She argued the same should be true when it comes to the state’s traffic laws. “I’m not trying to make a political stance here,” Bottone said, “but in light of everything that is happening, this is a baby.”
I have a fear that other would-be political activists are going to test this law and well could clog up municipal courts with ridiculous arguments that suggest that even though a woman is, say, six or seven weeks pregnant that she is therefore allowed to flout a reasonable law aimed at helping motorists who have actual passengers sitting next to them navigate their way through traffic congestion.
This whole matter appears to be taking an absurd turn.
Finding and keeping high-quality educators is a difficult enough job even when conditions are ideal. Throw in a killer pandemic and then politics on top of that, then the public school system faces a seriously daunting task.
The Texas Tribune reports a disturbing trend: Results from a new online survey of K-12 teachers in Texas, released on Thursday, shows most “seriously considered” leaving the profession this year, a 19% increase from two years ago.
Not good, man. Not good at all.
Earlier this year we saw Dallas-Fort Worth area school districts pummeled by resignations of superintendents, some of whom were leaving districts that as recently a year ago were honored for superlative work in educating children.
What drove them away? In too many cases, it was the constant hectoring from parents over mask mandates and other restrictions made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Tribune reports:
For its third annual survey on teacher satisfaction, the Charles Butt Foundation last spring sent an online questionnaire to 1,291 Texas public school teachers who were randomly selected from the Texas Education Agency’s 2020 roster of teachers in the state. All of them responded.
The Charles Butt Foundation is a nonprofit organization named after the chair and CEO of H-E-B, the largest privately held employer in Texas. The foundation’s goal is to make public education more equitable across the state through community partnerships.
I tried my hand at substitute teaching in 2012 and learned right away I am not wired to work with other people’s children. My brief exposure to classroom work filled me with admiration for those who see it as a calling.
Therefore, I am unsettled to learn that politics is getting in the way of those who are dedicated to guiding young minds and to teaching them skills they will need to succeed.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but Texas can ill-afford to let good teachers go because of political pressure. Our public school system, for which we all pay, suffers as a result.
Well now, it turns out Texas is No. 1 in a category of states that should bring plenty of shame.
Texas has more Oath Keepers members than any other state in the Union. Who are the Oath Keepers? This is one of the groups involved in inciting the 1/6 insurrection against the government, the attack that sought to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election … the one that Donald Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden.
Oh, but there’s more.
Among the more than 3,300 Texans listed as members of Oath Keepers, some of ’em are law enforcement officers. They include two constables and four chiefs of police.
The findings come from the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to rooting out evil among us. They have hit the mother lode when it comes to Texas’ involvement in the Oath Keepers, many of whom were photographed prancing through the Capitol on 1/6 carrying Confederate flags and shouting “Hang Mike Pence!”
Hey, you want more? Try this: One of the constables serves a precinct in Collin County, where I live with other members of my family. When I saw the Collin County connection to this far-right-wing group of fruitcakes, my thought turned immediately to a gentleman I have gotten to know — who happens to be a constable in Collin County.
My friend ain’t that guy. What’s more, you know of course that constables in Texas also happen to be elected politicians who run for the office either as Democrats or Republicans.
For the record, the Collin County constable associated with the Oath Keepers is Joe Wright, who serves Precinct 4. Constable Wright has some explaining to do to his constituents who might be concerned about this fellow’s link to an organization involved in one of the darkest days in U.S. history.
We elect our legislators to, um, legislate. Isn’t that the rule of thumb? Sure it is.
However, when I see U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s name, the junior Republican from Texas usually is telling us what he opposes. The guy cannot affix his name to any constructive legislation, which is why he pulls down that six-figure salary.
Cruz said today that he opposes legislation codifying same-sex marriage. He said it violates Americans’ religious freedom. I’m not sure I get it, but that’s what Cruz said.
Back to my point. Cruz won election to the Senate in 2012. He hasn’t distinguished himself as an author of legislation that benefits American lives. He continues to rail as a gadfly, raising hell and calling Democrats and sons and daughters of Satan.
That’s when he isn’t seeking to get away from doing his job, which is what happened when he sought a vacation in Cancun in February 2021 while Texas were freezing to death in the killer winter freeze.
I am going to say something good about a friend of mine who happens to be serving his final term as a Texas state senator.
Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, has just endorsed a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, sticking his finger in the eye of the incumbent Republican who — as has been reported many times — has earned Seliger’s scorn.
This news gives me hope that there might be more Republicans ready to toss aside the Texas Senate’s presiding officer in favor of an individual who can do a better job of working across the aisle than Patrick has been able to do.
The Democratic candidate is Mike Collier, who ran against Patrick four years ago. This past weekend, Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, who also is not seeking re-election this year, declared he is going to support Collier over Patrick.
Hey, I don’t begrudge either of these fellows for waiting until they became lame ducks before tossing Patrick under the proverbial bus.
Seliger detests Patrick. The feeling is mutual. Seliger also detests the founders of Empower Texans, the right-wing political action committee that backs Patrick. Seliger detests Seliger because the Amarillo lawmaker hasn’t been sufficiently loyal to Patrick’s archconservative legislative agenda.
Seliger also had the bad form of uttering a snarky comment about a key Patrick aide. Patrick got his revenge by stripping Seliger of his committee chairmanships and relegating his committee assignments to back-row panels about which few of us know.
I am going to hope that Sen. Seliger — a fellow I have known since the moment I set foot on the Caprock in early 1995 — can find the time to campaign for Collier and speak from the gut about the nastiness that Dan Patrick embodies.
