When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as ‘enemies,’ it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.
You can’t ignore politics, no matter how much you’d like to.
Texas is not a civilized place. Texans shoot one another a lot. They also knife, razor, and stomp one another to death with some frequency. And they fight in bars all the time.
In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what’s going on. You can’t find it in the papers.
Reading Ehrenreich is good for the soul.
If an armed nation were a polite nation, America would be paradise. We have more than 200 million guns in private owernship here. But our manners are not getting better.
In the first place, any group of folks willing to make asses of themselves in pursuit of a good time should be commended and encouraged: The spirit of human frolic needs all the help it can get.
Of course, it has never paid much.
Texas liberals are the camels of good news. We can cross entire deserts between oases.
The myth of the inevitability of economic globalization is based largely on the work of Milton Friedman, and easily the most underreported story of our time is that the current economy proves Friedman flatly wrong.
I think most of us become nicer as we get older, less judgmental, less full of certitude; life tends to knock a few corners of us as we go through. Cancer, divorce, teenagers, and other plagues make us give up on expecting ourselves – or life – to be perfect, which is a real relief.
I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.
The only problem was, the founders left a lot of people out of the Constitution. They left out poor people and black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. And it still goes on today.
Carl Parker observes, if you took all the fools out of the Lege, it wouldn’t be a representative body anymore.
He inspired all around him with awe at his work habits: According to several Reagan aides, in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal, there was serious talk of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office because he wouldn’t come to work – all he wanted to do was watch movies and television.
The odd thing about these television discussions designed to “get all sides of the issue” is that they do not feature a spectrum of people with different views on reality: Rather, they frequently give us a face-off between those who see reality and those who have missed it entirely. In the name of objectivity, we are getting fantasy-land.
The victor in the Democratic primary was State Senator Bill Sarpalius, who got a leg up one night in January when a disgruntled patriot slugged him so hard it broke his jaw and the jaw had to be wired shut for most of the campaign. For most politicians, that would constitute an electoral handicap, but since Sarpalius is not bent over double with intellect, it proved a boon. He’s a tall, nice-looking, apple-cheeked fellow, and if you don’t have to listen to him, he looks good.
All right, all right, so I love Lubbock. I never claimed to have exquisite taste. I’ll be there with the diehards to the end, trying to explain, “No, this is a griddle with some Monopoly houses on it: this is Lubbock.” Still, the life of all us Lubbock-lovers would be a lot easier if the Chamber of Commerce hadn’t adopted the slogan “Keep Lubbock Beautiful.” Keep?
The women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were afraid women would laugh at them.
Until June 26, 1918, all Texans could vote except “idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane and women.
That’s the trouble with this country, people keep messin’ up each other’s movies.