Editorial
The GOP Machine in Texas Seems to Finally Have Slipped a Gear
Could Austin’s Paid Sick Leave Victory Be the Start of a Progressive Labor Movement in Texas?
Progressive activists can take a lesson from Austin’s paid sick leave campaign, which succeeded in part because it reached people typically excluded from politics.
In my nearly three years covering city government in Austin, I’ve seen a lot of big crowds show up at City Hall. But the hundreds who showed up last Thursday ...Read More
Four Things to Watch as Election 2018 Gets Underway in Texas
Above all, this is a time for nutty, weird politics.
We have extremely bad news for you: It’s election season again. It has been a year filled with too much Politics, but more is coming, and will keep coming, ad...Read More
Something Yuuuge was Missing From Franklin Graham’s Waco Revival
At a Waco rally, evangelist Franklin Graham signaled rock-solid support for the GOP agenda. But support for President Trump? Maybe not so much.
In mid-October, evangelist Franklin Graham and his “Decision Texas” entourage stopped off at Baylor University in Waco, mainly to bring souls to Jesus but a...Read More
Burning Down the House: Joe Straus and the End of the Moderate Texas Republican
A tremendous amount now depends on whether a Straus-type successor can be elected speaker.
Joe Straus’ reputation is that of a boring and studious moderate, but that’s dead wrong. The speaker of the Texas House is a freak, a space oddity, an aberr...Read More
University of North Texas Creates Privatized ‘Free-Speech Zone’ Around Donald Trump Jr.
The event reinforces an ongoing assault on press freedom and the First Amendment in an ultimate ironic twist for free-speech rights.
It’s unclear whether we’ll know the exact details of what Donald Trump Jr. has to say when he speaks about “freedom of speech and issues of na...Read More
Fox and Friend: Sean Hannity and Robert Jeffress Share the Self-Love at Church
Jeffress’ megachurch, like others, is a television set with an unusually large studio audience, a fact that Hannity’s Sunday's appearance underlined.
Great changes are afoot in the Kingdom of Man, but how now arrangethèd is the furniture in the House of the Lord? On Sunday morning, attendees of the First Bap...Read More
Federal Prisons Don’t Even Try to Rehabilitate the Undocumented
The Bureau of Prisons fails to provide basic resources to undocumented prisoners.
Flickr/Thomas Hawk Editor’s note: This commentary was published in collaboration with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the cr...Read More
Texas GOP’s Favorite Meme-Maker is Now Helping the Far-Right in Germany
After mastering the art of race-baiting digital campaigning in Texas, Vincent Harris has graduated to working for German nationalists.
screenshot from Twitter On Monday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote about the role played by the Austin-based political consultant Vincent Harris in the rece...Read More
Even Hurricane Harvey Can’t Temper GOP Hostility Toward Texas’ Big Cities
Governor Greg Abbott scoffed at Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s request for emergency funds, saying he "has all the money that he needs."
On August 4, less than a month before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick appeared on the Fox Business Network with a diagnosis for ...Read More