In the interest of full disclosure, I am a small time breeder of horses. Our business is in a major decline and more Thoroughbred horses are now bred in Louisiana than in Texas. Why? Easy answer, their race tracks have VLTs. A bit of trivia. I own a two year old filly named MollyAnn — after Molly Ivins and Ann Richards. I would love to race her in Texas, at a race track where it was possible to pay the bills out of the purses. Right now, it cannot be done.

It is going to be a new era, and I hope that the new speaker is just the beginning — one small step toward a more civil and more progressive political environment.

I mean that question to be a serious one. This post tells those of us most interested in Texas politics nothing that we didn’t already know more than 24 hours ago. And it has the tone of a newspaper report the day after as well.

Where was this blog when the biggest upheaval in the state’s power structure in, what, five or six years, took place in the 72 hours prior to this post?

I know too well the constraints of operating a nearly non-profit enterprise like the TO, but if you aren’t going to use the medium to its full potential, and in situations where it is most needed, and can contribute the most good, why even have a blog at all?

I would really like to see this blog turn into the kind of free-wheeling, inquisitive, broad-ranged lefty equivalent of the magazine in its heyday. The medium lends itself to that. Instead, you’ve stood back and let BOR and Kuff and ITP take the irreverent tone and central information roles that the TO previously enjoyed.

Use it or lose it.