Recently in Politics Category

I have spent much of the last year or so writing either on the Chronicle or here about this and that. Most of the time the topic has trended to education, but I hate to dominate the conversation with shop talk. Recently, our conversations have trended towards poverty, welfare, and NASA. Now, those are three you normally don't see in the same sentence. It's high time we take stock in where we are and where...

My good friend, Susan Bankston, fellow founding member of the OFPBAOT (Old Farts Progressive Bloggers Association of Texas) has returned to her roots!  Those of you who are fans of Kiss My Big Blue Butt remember that Susan ran the World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon for some time previous, the only sane voice in Tom DeLay Triple ZZZ Crazzzy Country.  She changed it to KMBBB after the '06 election, but we at the Hurricane are...

From a press release yesterday by Marcy Winograd, candidate for Congress in the 36th district of California:"If the President wants to appease the neo-conservatives, the deficit hawks, I would encourage him to cut our bloated military budget, which is now paying for multiple perpetual wars that create new enemies."...

Some people never learn:"De facto Republican Centrist Democratic senators have circumvented party leadership to approach Maine GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins about reviving healthcare talks.Democrats such as Sens. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Bill Nelson (Fla.) and Max Baucus (Mont.) have approached Snowe within the past week to discuss her potential support for various healthcare proposals....Snowe said Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance panel, approached her in the past week to get her general...

Whatever happened to that calm, cool, and collected candidate from the 2008 presidential campaign? This latest move is born out of sheer panic over the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts and, by the way, something for which candidate Obama criticized John McCain for proposing during the campaign:"President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his...

Today, Houston stalwart, oil man, and all-around good guy, Bob Mosbacher, died at MD Anderson after a years-long battle with pancreatic cancer.  He had sworn to fight the disease to the last and he certainly did that with grace, dignity, and the style for which he had always been known.  I knew Bob socially and through our businesses, and I respected him  greatly.  He was a real renaissance man, loving sailing, politics, and, of course,...

Pundits all over the political spectrum continue to turn the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's senate seat into this weird notion that Democrats should somehow start working with Republicans in a bipartisan manner. This rationale is irritating at best, because it implies that a) the Democrats weren't trying to be bipartisan in the first place and b) the Republicans would acquiesce to bipartisan efforts if the Democrats tried harder. Both are untrue....

Up 'til now I haven't been a proponent of the "pass something" idea on health care reform legislation, but I think the time has come. It has become such a convoluted mess and such a distraction that it's time to get it off the table and move on to economic issues. Like taking on Wall Street for instance:"President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to propose new limits on the size and risk taken by...

As I sat down to watch the election returns from Massachusetts last night the first thing that stood out was that the Democratic circular firing squad had already formed before one vote had been counted. The White House was blaming Martha Coakley for running a poor campaign, and the Coakley campaign was blaming the White House and the DNC for being too little and too late with their support. Which one is right? Both. Both...

Bob Franken's blog at The Hill entitled "Time For a Declaration of Independents" pretty much expresses what I've been thinking lately. "Maybe this is the year. After all the decades of lip service to the idea of third-party or Independent candidates, perhaps the time has come. Heaven knows the Democrats and Republicans have done their part to make the idea appealing.The two major parties have way more in common than their loyalists would like to...