The regular session of the Texas Legislature has ended and several of you have asked for my thoughts on it, for whatever they are worth at this point. Based solely on what was actually accomplished in the 140-day regular session I would score it at about a C. But the Governor has already called for […]
Bad Bills and Missed Opportunity
Did you enjoy the 2020 election process? How about making the 2020 elections a permanent fixture in our democracy? Well, that’s what Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants and more, and she has a big head start in the design work in H. R. 1 and its Senate companion S. 1, called “For the People Act of […]
The Texas Freeze
After spending quite a bit of time reading everything I could get my hands or Zoom on about the failure of the Texas energy grid, I learned a lot but also decided that I know what I don’t know, which is a lot more, and the jury is still out on the myriad of questions […]
Biden’s First Ten Days
Since election day last November, when Joe Biden eked out a narrow victory over Donald Trump, one without a significant mandate for much of anything except to lower the temperature on both sides in this seriously divided nation, the principal question has been how will Biden seek to govern–with the moderate instincts that have been […]
Civilization in the Balance
Whatever we might have learned about the messages conveyed by the heinous and despicable murder of George Floyd by a rogue white cop on the streets of Minneapolis last week has now been overwhelmed by the subsequent riots in cities across America and the weak response to them to the point of abdication of duty […]
Thoughts From the Coronavirus War Zone
A couple of months into this crisis and we are understandably and inevitably still on the battlefield, feeling our way along, learning more about the enemy and how to deal with it, but at least finally moving in small steps around the country to determine where we go from here in terms of our postwar […]
A Major Transformational Event
At this point in this worldwide Coronavirus crisis, I think it goes without saying that we are living in the middle of a significant transformational event, maybe the most significant in my lifetime, including World War II and 9/11. Hyperbole is pretty cheap right now in the public square and I don’t want to overdo […]
Year End Potpourri
I don’t normally publish in December, but the rush of events and the fact that I missed a few opportunities during my flood displacement this fall encouraged me to break with custom and briefly comment on a few items. **In early November we passed the 100th anniversary of the final takeover by the Bolsheviks of […]
The Forbes Education Challenge
In a very interesting and ambitious project, last year Forbes magazine challenged experts in business and education philanthropy to single out five big ideas over the next 20 years that could make American students the most highly achieving in the world and had research and modeling specialists with no stake in the outcome analyze the […]