Tag Archives: 2026 election

national news

Waiting for ‘restoration’

Joe Biden’s presidency is going to be measured favorably, I believe, by those who earn a living making such judgments. President Biden’s single term likely won’t be held up against the likes of those who won re-election, but a single word does come to mind when I ponder Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office.

The term is “restorative.” Biden was able during his four years in office to restore much of what we came to expect in our head of state, head of government and commander in chief. Biden respects and honors the trappings of the office. He inherited an office in 2021 that had been all but ruined by the term of Donald J. Trump.

I want another restorative presidency to take hold in the 2028 election. Trump will be gone … thankfully.

One of the key tasks of the next president will be to return the decorum and dignity that the U.S. presidency deserves. Such a restoration can come from any one of the individuals in both parties who will seek the office in a couple of years. It might be that Joe Biden, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, is the godfather of D.C. decorum. He has been at or near the center of power for more than five decades.

The good news of the 2028 election includes he guarantee that Donald Trump will be gone. The bad news will be that the MAGA movement he created will take some to disappear. I sense along with others that the MAGA cabal is beginning to fall apart. I have noted on this blog many times that America doesn’t need to be “made great again.” The U.S. of A. has been great all along.

May the next president of the United States restore the dignity Americans deserve in their highest elected office. And may the next president represent the very best of us, not the worst of us.

political news, State news

This could be the guy

All right, boys and girls, I want to extol the virtues of a young man I find highly attractive as a candidate for public office, but I will stop far short of predicting he will attain that office in 2026.

Democratic state Rep. James Talarico of Austin is running for the U.S. Senate held by John Cornyn, the San Antonio Republican who now is bragging about how closely he works with the nation’s felon in chief, Donald Trump.

Where to begin about Talarico? I will start with his history as a Presbyterian seminarian. He is a former school teacher. He detests Christian nationalism, calling it “a cancer on our religion.” Talarico has called Christian nationalism “the worship of power — social power, economic power, political power, in the name of Christ” and has accused Christian nationalists of turning Jesus “into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear-mongering fascist”, arguing that it is “incumbent on all Christians to confront it and denounce it” in a 2023 guest sermon that has more than 1 million views on YouTube..

Talarico is being hailed by Democrats as a potential party rescuer. It remains to be seen, of course, whether he will collect enough stroke to take office in January 2027.

But here is what makes him so attractive to voters such as me. He doesn’t hide his faith. He touts it proudly, but he also understands that we should practice our faith in houses of worship, not shove it down the throats of every Texan … even those who do not worship a deity.

He opposes Republican efforts to display the Ten Commandments in public places, such as county courthouses and public schools. He calls such displays “un-Christian” and “un-American.” Talarico understands what should be obvious to anyone who reads the Constitution, that the founders created a secular nation and they wrote zero references to Christianity or Jesus Christ in the nation’s governing document.

Will this young man knock the veteran pol out of office? I am going to hope it happens.