Public campaign financing isn't perfect and can doubtlessly be improved upon as we go.
Those who think of freedom in this country as one long, broad path leading ever onward and upward are dead damned wrong.
Anyone who has ever spent time listening to a legislature knows the astonishing speed at which all presiding officers and reading clerks can spit out the formulaic incantations of parliamentary procedure.
Good thing we've still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented.
One seldom expects the country's president to adequately note the passing of a rocker, but Jimmy Carter's assessment of Elvis Presley's appeal - 'energy, rebelliousness and good humor' - is remarkably close to the mark.
I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years.
'The New York Times' is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.
Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
What we call politics now and what most political writers write about is the empathy and the bonding and the word choice and the horse rights, and it has nothing to do with what's really happening to people's lives.
I intensely covered Bush when he was Governor of Texas.
In Congress, there are some who are unashamed to aspire to eloquence, even to scholarship, but the only state legislator I ever knew who would not join in the mispronounceciation of a word for the sake of camaraderie with her fellows was former State Senator and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
I never saw anything funnier than Texas politics.
The stakes they play for in politics are paper and money. The chips they play with are your life.
The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn't admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn't just get a head start by being his father's son - it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life.
Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is Levittown.
I do object to those who jump from political hackery to flackery and expect respect.
As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic shih tzus in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism.
Jimmy Carter was unquestionably the most moral president of my lifetime, but he wasn't much of a president.
I'd worked for the 'Dallas Times Herald' for ten years, and its death was a kick in the gut the like of which I cannot recall ever having experienced.
All my life, I've been sort of a professional optimist, full of good cheer about matters political and journalistic. I always thought I'd get older and become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But it's not happening.
Those who imagine polygamy to be handy cover for promiscuity are apparently off the mark. If polygamists share one quality, it is that, polygamy aside, they are extraordinarily strait-laced.
Legislative language is governed by a law of etymology that is also the ancient code of the bureaucracy: It doesn't have to be right, it just has to be close enough for government work. If they understand what you mean, it doesn't matter what you say or how you say it.
I had sort of given up on conventional journalism. I found it far too restrictive.
Truly, if you can't cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you should not be covering a presidential campaign.
One of the few things I like about Bill Clinton is that he has very good manners. If his momma were still alive, I would congratulate her.
The Kurds will not be allowed to have an independent country because Turkey wouldn't stand for it; they have their own Kurdish population.
I've always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet.
I've thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits.
In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. The word 'government,' for example, is normally pronounced 'gummint'; bureaucracy is 'bureaucacy'; fiscal comes out 'physical,' and one moves not to suspend the rules, but to 'suppend.'
And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.
It's one thing to recognize that the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing like a cancer; it's another thing to come up with useful solutions.
We should all laugh more at our elected officials - it's good for us and good for them.
All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don't think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it's all marvelous fun.
How come trying to explode myths about Texas always winds up reinforcing them?