Tag Archives: Colin Allred

political news

Whether to vote early

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I am in the midst of an intense internal struggle between what I normally do during election season and what I am tempted to do for this one.

Do I vote early or do I wait until Election Day?

Readers of this blog know what I have said previously about early voting vs. waiting until Election Day to cast my ballot.  I have sought to avoid the unwelcome surprise that can occur between the day I vote early and Election Day voting. My candidate might mess up mightily, you know?

There is nothing on Earth that Donald Trump can do to win my vote. I have declared him unfit for public since long before scored that fluky win in 2016. I do not anticipate Kamala Harris doing anything to make me regret voting for her.

What about down-ballot races? I detest the Cruz Missile, the US senator named Ted Cruz. I also deeply admire US Rep. Colin Allred, who is challenging Cruz.

Do I sound like I am talking myself into voting early? Possibly.

I am going to wait a while longer before I decide.  This election will be safe and corruption free. The question for me is whether I want to know whether I am part of the trend when the polls close on Nov. 5, or whether I am swimming against the tide.

local news, State news

Ted Cruz: unlikable and mean

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I will go to my grave — hopefully not anytime soon — wondering for all I can muster how Ted Cruz continues to hang onto his seat in the U.S. Senate.

I cannot think of more unlikable and mean-spirited senator than Rafael Edward Cruz. He has cast his beady eyes on a bigger prize since the day he declared his Senate candidacy in 2012. He was elected that year and ran immediately for the presidency in 2016.

He damn near lost his Senate seat in 2018 to Beto O’Rourke. Now he’s running again, this time against another Texas congressman, Colin Allred of Dallas.

Allred says the polls have the two of them tied. Maybe so. Maybe not. Polling I see shows Cruz with a slim lead.

What in the world has this guy done for Texas? What legislation has he authored that brings tangible benefit to the state? I cannot think of a single piece of legislation that has Cruz’s name stamped on it.

I can, however, recite a couple of notable instances where he embarrassed himself and the state. How about the time he filibustered in favor of a government shutdown, reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” from the Senate floor?

My favorite moment, though, occurred when Cruz sought to jet off to Cancun with his family in February 2021 while Texans were freezing to death in that killer winter storm. Someone caught him on the lam to Mexico. He returned … and then blamed his daughter for talking him into taking the family for a vacation.

Oh, how I want Allred to win this seat. Allred vows to work with Republicans. I intend to hold him to that pledge if he manages to win. Cruz, though, is lost forever to the cause of bipartisanship.

I’ll say it again: Good government requires compromise and Ted Cruz does not know to work in that environment.

local news, political news

Cruz needs to be shown the door

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Of all the men and women I have watched in politics over many years as a journalist and now as a civilian with a keen interest in public policy, Ted Cruz stands tall among them as the most loathsome.

The junior U.S. senator from Texas keeps getting sliced and diced by the state’s largest newspaper — his hometown sheet, in fact — over this and that policy issue. The Houston Chronicle has peeled the bark off Cruz’s backside most recently over his blocking of high-speed Internet service coming to Texas.

But in reality, the Cruz Missile is now trying to rebrand himself as a bipartisan senator, someone with Democratic friends and colleagues. My goodness … this guy is utterly without shame.

He has spent the bulk of his nearly dozen years in the Senate doing two things: trying to advance his own political ambition and trashing Democrats at every opportunity.

He damn near lost his first re-election bid in 2018. Now he’s facing another Democrat who’s abandoning his House seat to challenge him. The foe this time is Colin Allred of Dallas.

Oh, how I want Allred to win. I want another senator who can work with pols on the other side of the still-great chasm. Our state’s senior senator, John Cornyn of San Antonio, at times shows promise in steering clear of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

Cornyn needs a partner in that bipartisan effort. From my vantage point, it doesn’t appear to me that Ted Cruz is wired in that manner.

Which is precisely why I want Colin Allred to give Ted Cruz the boot in the backside.

local news, political news, State news

Cruz seeks to rebrand himself … yeah, right

Rafael Edward Cruz, aka Ted Cruz, is trying to pull off the biggest rebranding effort in U.S. Senate history.

The Republican firebrand now calls himself a “bipartisan” member of the Senate, citing his working relationship and friendship (if you dare believe that) with leading Senate Democrats.

It’s a joke, I’m tellin’ ya. Except that I ain’t laughing at it … except perhaps in derision.

Cruz is in for another tough re-election fight, this time against Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas, who — according to many leading polls — is in a dead heat with the two-term senator. Cruz was first elected in 2012, then won a bitter re-election battle in 2018 against former Rep. Beto O’Rourke by about 3 percentage points.

Ted Cruz angles for a bipartisan rebrand | The Texas Tribune

Allred, serving his second term in the House, has established a bipartisan reputation in the lower chamber and says Cruz’s effort is a bald-faced sham. Allred told the Texas Tribune: “I don’t think Ted Cruz is fooling anybody,” Allred said. “He spent 12 years being the most divisive — and proudly so — partisan warrior in the United States. And I think it’s kind of laughable actually that at this point, when he’s in a close race, that he wants to now stress, ‘Oh, actually I have been working in a bipartisan way.’”

He’s nothing like the bipartisan statesman he is portraying himself to be. Recall how he filibustered in the Senate in trying to kill the Affordable Care Act. He has been a front-row election denier, questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election that gave us Joe Biden as president. He has been virtually silent about the 1/6 assault on our government and has endorsed the 45th POTUS’s bid to win back the White House after losing to President Biden in 2020.

According to the Tribune: “When I first arrived in the Senate 12 years ago, there was such a thing as moderate Democrats. They existed. You could work them,” Cruz said at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Texas Policy Summit last month. “There aren’t any left. The Democrats, they hate Trump so much their brains have melted, and what’s happened is they have gone crazy off the edge to the left.”

Now he wants us to believe he’s willing to work with Democrats whose “brains have melted”?

Hah!

local news

Allred’s calm vs. Cruz’s fire

Colin Allred knows he has a steep hill to climb if he hopes to knock Ted Cruz off his U.S. Senate perch. If he continues to acknowledge that Texas remains a solidly Republican state, he will have to go after the Republicans who cannot stomach Cruz’s bellicosity and his self-serving aggrandizement.

Allred is a Dallas-area congressman who recently announced his intention to battle Cruz in 2024. Cruz, meanwhile, has said he intends to seek re-election, although he hasn’t yet made it official.

If Allred is the Democratic nominee for the Senate, I am going to do all I can from my North Texas venue to assist him. I might even donate some money. Hey, I can do that now I am no longer employed by a media organization.

The Texas Tribune has published a story comparing Allred’s measured, calm, across-the-aisle approach to governing to Cruz’s fire-breathing partisan rants. Allred doesn’t yell at witnesses during committee hearings, unlike Cruz, who seems to delight in seeking to shame and embarrass those who testify before the committees on which he sits.

The Tribune reported: “Knowing how to work with everyone, knowing how to listen to people, how to engage, how to come up with solutions, and really, how to bring people together — that’s what leadership is,” said U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat whose friendship with Allred grew after both flipped Republican-held seats in 2018. “And frankly, that’s the leadership we need in our state right now.”

Can you imagine anyone saying something like about the Cruz Missile? Well … I cannot.

Democrat Colin Allred brings contrasting style to race against Ted Cruz | The Texas Tribune

I can’t even begin to predict that Texans will endorse Rep. Fletcher’s view of the leadership that Allred would bring to the Senate. I am left only to hope that Texans have grown weary of Cruz’s bombast … and his utter lack of accomplishment of anything constructive during his time in the Senate.

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