{"id":6330,"date":"2014-08-27T20:13:22","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T20:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/?p=6330"},"modified":"2014-08-27T20:13:22","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T20:13:22","slug":"theyre-moving-the-texas-political-center-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=6330","title":{"rendered":"They're moving the Texas political 'center' line"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I concur totally with Paul Burka’s assessment of the Texas political landscape.<\/p>\n

There ain’t any Texas Republican politicians who can be described as “left of center” by any stretch of the imagination.<\/p>\n

Burka’s comment comes on the heels of a Forbes magazine piece that describes Texas House Speaker Joe Straus as a lefty.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.texasmonthly.com\/burka-blog\/left-center-speaker<\/p>\n

As Burka writes: “This commentary has all the earmarks of a Michael Quinn Sullivan put-up job.”<\/p>\n

And who is Michael Quinn Sullivan? He’s an ultra-right wing political strategist who’s earned the scorn of many mainstream politicians, namely Republicans. One of them is state Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo, who barely defeated a Sullivan-backed stalking horse — ex-Midland Mayor Mike Canon — in this spring’s GOP primary for Seliger’s Senate seat.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say that Seliger cannot stand Sullivan.<\/p>\n

Back to the article in question and the description of Straus as a “left-of-center speaker.”<\/p>\n

It ain’t so.<\/p>\n

I’m inclined to go along with one of the comments attached at the bottom of Burka’s blog post for Texas Monthly. “I guess it all depends on how you define ‘center,'” the comment starts out.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the Texas GOP has been moving the center line farther to the right with each election cycle. I’m not at all sure where the center<\/em> really is these days. It’s not the center that I used to define it, which is that a Republican could be a strict conservative on social issues but more moderate on fiscal matters … or vice versa.<\/p>\n

These days, the “perfect Texas Republican” appears to be a fiery conservative on every single issue under the sun.<\/p>\n

As Burka notes: “Straus actually wants to move the state forward economically by building roads and badly needed water projects.”<\/p>\n

If that makes\u00a0Straus a flaming lefty, well, you go for it, Mr. Speaker.<\/p>\n

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  I concur totally with Paul Burka’s assessment of the Texas political landscape. There ain’t any Texas Republican politicians who can be described as “left of center” by any stretch of the imagination. Burka’s comment comes on the heels of a Forbes magazine piece that describes Texas House Speaker Joe Straus as a lefty. http:\/\/www.texasmonthly.com\/burka-blog\/left-center-speaker … Continue reading They're moving the Texas political 'center' line<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-political-news","category-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}