Posts Tagged ‘Texas’
Who Do You Nominate for the Bum Steer Award?
They say you can always tell a Texan, but you can’t tell them very much. Or at least some have said that about me.
Though I’ve been away from the state of my birth for almost as many years as I lived there, I have continued to subscribe to the Texas Monthly wherever life has taken me. It’s a great magazine in general, but I especially look forward to their annual “Bum Steer” awards, in which they skewer the high, the low, and the absurd. The intro to the just published 2010 awards reads, in TM’s typically diffident (and alphabetical) fashion:
Read MoreWho Do You Nominate for the Bum Steer Award?
They say you can always tell a Texan, but you can’t tell them very much. Or at least some have said that about me.
Though I’ve been away from the state of my birth for almost as many years as I lived there, I have continued to subscribe to the Texas Monthly wherever life has taken me. It’s a great magazine in general, but I especially look forward to their annual “Bum Steer” awards, in which they skewer the high, the low, and the absurd. The intro to the just published 2010 awards reads, in TM’s typically diffident (and alphabetical) fashion:
Read MoreIt was a year of accomplice apes, bedraggled Bugattis, Christlike Cheetos, dim-witted deli-owning Democrats, egregious errata, fatal foreplay, gun-toting golfers, heartless high school hoopsters, ignoble implants, jackass judges, killer Kims, laughingstock legislators…shameless Stanford, territorial T-Boone, useful urine, vituperative vixens…and zero tolerance zealots.
Bidding Adieu to Bud Shrake
Journalist and author Bud Shrake died yesterday. He was a Texas archetype with my home state’s uniquely expansive sense of humor and political history, as you’ll see in this clip from an interview he did recently with Texas Monthly president and editor-in-chief, Evan Smith. Note the connection with Jack Ruby, who shot JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Larry McMurtry, probably my favorite Texas writer, rated Shrake “an intriguing talent, far superior to his drinking buddies,” the latter clause of which might have been the ultimate compliment. He’ll be laid to rest next to the late Gov. Ann Richards who often said theirs was the best relationship she ever had.
Read MoreMIDNIGHT AT THE PING PONG PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY
Ping . Vermont’s presidential primary with its 15 delegates split 9-6 is called as expected for Obama.
I’m watching CNN and thinking about my first and only Texas precinct convention, in 1972. I’d learned from the League of Women Voters how my natal state’s Byzantine primary system worked, and I’d decided to participate from the ground up. As I recall only a few dozen people showed up; we met in someone’s living room; consequently, though I was a first time attendee I was elected to attend the county convention. I did attend that convention, but realized it would be impossible for me to participate further because of family obligations. So despite the friendly county judge who offered to put my name in the hopper for the state convention (that’s how it was done and probably still is), I declined.
Just as the predominantly Democratic Texas I grew up in changed its stripes to majority Republican (I allege that after I left for Arizona, the state went to hell) the current Texas Democratic party rules in which 2/3 of delegates decided in voting primaries and 1/3–the superdelegates—decided in precinct conventions or caucuses could well have changed over the years. But some fundamentals stay the same.
Pong. Early in the evening John McCain was declared the far and away winner in Ohio and Texas.
Republicans don’t have to pretend to be democratic. They understand elections are about gaining or retaining collective political power. That’s their big advantage. The Democrats turn themselves inside out trying to look democratic while in actuality their convoluted rules shore up the entrenched power of the party operatives as much or more than the Republicans. Their pronouncements express their egalitarian principles but their results tilt toward the political machine.
The Republicans will fall in line behind McCain, just as McCain sucked it up, accepted Bush’s hug and carried his water after being viciously assaulted by the Bush-Rove disparagement machine in 2000, and just as Mike Huckabee submitted himself graciously after the Texas numbers put McCain’s delegate count over the top and sealed him as the Republican presidential nominee.
The Democrats, says pundit Paul Begala, want to fall in love. More than that, I think, Democrats want to believe they are voting for the best ideas and ideals. And they love to put a fine comb through the arguments about who has them in purest form.
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