Tag Archives: Ron Paul

Texas Means More to the Nation Than to Texans

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Though I like to believe I think broadly and that I have strived to shed provincialisms, I am a Texan by birth, and I am heart-broken at the beating my home state is taking and has taken since George W.  Bush became President under suspect circumstances in 2000.

It is hard for people, perhaps, to understand what Texas means to Texans.  But more so than in sheer nativist or parochial loyalty, my sentiment for the state is rooted in the view that it is essential to the future of the country.  So my feelings are more than resentments about how the national press is making a joke out of Texas through the lens of the national political stage.  If Texas fails as a state – which it might well do if its growing HispanicLatino population does not accelerate its economic and social standing – the country will fail.  Think California, which remains on the ropes and whose educational system – meaning its future – has cracked.  California schools no longer are the foundation from which the state blasted into the future and took the world – not just the country – with it.  Continue reading →

Small Steps in the Direction

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Because HispanicLatinos already are a great part of the nation’s military and will be a larger part still in the years ahead, they should monitor President Obama’s recent decisions to assert American power in the South China Sea.  From Australia to the Philippines to Thailand, the United States is creating pockets of American strength to make sure China’s growth as a world power does not retrace the erroneous path that Japan took more than 70 years ago.  Left unchecked, a totalitarian Japan swept across the Pacific and only a bloody effort led by the United States pushed them back.

You have to be on top of things to know how cleverly China is going about its business as it senses that the balance of power not only in that region but in the world is moving away from the United States.  Building gigantic commercial ports that also can accommodate the large naval vessels it is constructing at high speed is one of the easier examples.  China is active on all fronts, from Iran to Latin America to outer space.  No one begrudges them their advancement as a world power and their development as a new and important nation.  But let us make sure that the Chinese rise to power is not predicated on thinking that the United States is going to go silently into the night. Continue reading →