Opinion

I have been voting by mail for the last 12 years. It has always been a simple process. But this year's experience with vote-bymail is far more difficult than it used to be. In some counties, half of the applications are being rejected because of identity problems that don't appear to be the fault of the applicants as much as the fault of inadequate or inaccurate databases available to election clerks and confusing application forms.

Neither of the top candidates for governor of Texas wants to keep jailing people for possession of marijuana. Reefer madness has been replaced by reefer indifference.

Trump Supporters, Antifa, Left Wing, Radicals, Racists, Democrats, Republicans. You don't have to look very hard to find these and other labels used as a shorthand way to describe complex ideas, positions and beliefs.

The number of people on the other side of the state’s border with Mexico is on the mind of every politician seeking state office this year. If that’s surprising to you, you must be new here.

Build Back Better, the centerpiece of President Biden’s ambitious domestic legislative agenda, has become Build Back Later…maybe.

2021 was the second year of the pandemic. The Texas Legislature met in regular session, as usual, but then followed that session with three special sessions on issues that had to be done (redistricting) and on issues lawmakers didn’t address during that 140-day regular session. The issue of drawing new political maps came late, because the pandemic delayed the 2020 census. Others — new voting and election laws, and restrictions on what can be taught in public schools, for instance — were priority issues for Republicans at the legislative and at the statewide level, and could be the subject of debate in 2022’s election cycle.

Yes, it’s that time again when I reminisce about the important events that have transpired over the past 12 months, like how in the world I grew so much ear hair in one year.

Texas Republicans are going to start the 2022 election cycle with an IQ test, asking voters whether they really know anything about their candidates for governor.

For the past year, I have puzzled over the expressions against socialism that I have seen in commentary, on signs displayed around town, and in gatherings of supporters of our most recent former president. Being against socialism in the United States is akin to opposing smallpox. In my 77 years, I have never met anyone who is in favor of either.

Abortion & Responsibility

Children all over the United States are currently wringing their iPhone-calloused hands over the possibility that Santa Claus might not make it this year because he’s trapped in a delayed shipping container somewhere off the coast of California.

Texas has a problem that’s bigger than the stories in the books at the school library.