Politics

Next week, Capital Metro in Austin, TX will begin service on their new light rail system. The trains will run north to south, from Leander, past UT and then right into downtown Austin. A few years back they introduced a new network of toll roads, all of which has done much to increase traffic...

The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a report describing Internet usage amongst Latinos in the US. Overall, the report was very encouraging. From 2006 to 2008, the percentage of adult Latinos who used the Internet grew by 10 percentage points from 54 to 64 percent. The percentage of adult whites who used the internet...

Since April I have been driving nearly every workday from my home in San Antonio to my current work location in Austin, via IH-35. This portion of IH-35 is very full of traffic, and there is an almost continuous ribbon of cities and businesses all along the corridor. The San Antonio-Austin corridor has the...

The Democratic party’s chances of gaining any seats in the Congress this November, or of winning the presidency in 2008, are pretty much nil, in my opinion. Democrats have failed to come up with any sort of cohesive message that will appeal to voters, and we can’t discount the Karl Rove effect, the fact...

With Karl Rove in charge of running the federal government’s relief effort in Louisiana and Mississippi, we can expect to see the looting of the American treasury and infrastructure continue unabated. Look for multi-billion dollar contracts to be handed out to Bush family cronies, with no oversight or accountability. Look for the press and...

Oh my God. Bush puts Karl Rove in charge of the reconstruction effort in Louisiana and Mississippi. Read Josh Marshall’s take on this. This is worse than when he tried to name Kissinger to head the 9/11 commission.

In light of the bankruptcy announcements from Delta and Northwest, it makes sense that I am stuck at the airport right now, waiting for my American Eagle flight out of Memphis which has been delayed for over 2 hours. It all just illustrates what a complete mess our air transportation system is. So let’s...

Today, Sidney Blumenthal writes on Salon.com on the topic of Bush’s now-ruined presidency. He ends his article with the following: The rest of the Bush presidency will consist of his strained efforts to cobble his myth together again while others cope with the consequences of his damage. The hurricane has tossed and turned the...

Some of the anger directed at the Bush administration for the big mess in New Orleans has focused on the fact that most of the people who were stranded in the aftermath of Katrina were black. Many black entertainers and politicians have come out in protest of how these poor people were treated, with...

On Tim Burke’s excellent blog, “Easily Distracted”, he makes the point that conservatives should at least have some motivation to follow through on their beliefs by holding Bush accountable for what has transpired in New Orleans and elsewhere near the gulf coast. I see this as a lost cause. As Adam Gruen has said,...