Tag Archives: Kennedy

Gail Does Texas

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So Gail Collins sorta ruined my weekend.  The columnist for The New York Times could not have known that I had not planned to pick up another book this week, especially with the EuroCup competition starting today.  Still recovering from Robert Caro’s latest forest-killer on Lyndon Johnson, I thought I had made enough time for a story about the history of the Mossad.  Reading about LBJ and about how Israel ruthlessly wages universal war against its enemies is not easy.  It is going to take me longer to read 200 pages of Collins’ As Texas Goes... as 1,000 pages of Caro.  Laughing consumes more time than you think.  It has been years since I went from beef and bourbon to cotton candy, and you know how long that takes to eat.

There no doubt will be more to say on Collins’ book (on page 32 so far) but I saw her hawking it on MSNBC on Wednesday.  In the ensuing discussion with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, none of them could put a finger on why Texans feels their state is so special.  They like most people could not get beyond the surprise that, for good and bad, Texans care a lot about their state – a state that seems to have inordinate influence over the nation’s life, as Collins believes.

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Justices Damage the Nation and HispanicLatinos — Its Very Future

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The damage the Supreme Court inflicted on the country with its wrong-headed ruling in Citizens United should be evident enough even to its most ardent proponents, except for the columnist George Will, of course.  The justices, with the likes of Will pulling at the floodgates, enabled multi-billionaires to pour millions of dollars into a presidential campaign that demonstrates how unceremoniously and crudely Citizens usurps the constitutional intent that the vote of any one individual is no more equal than the next.

Now come the warning signs that the court is going to undo programs that seek to increase the number of minority students in institutions of higher education.  The court has accepted for review a case involving The University of Texas at Austin that five justices will use almost undoubtedly to roll back so-called affirmative action programs.

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