There is a battle going on in the Texas 32ND Congressional District. There is a run-off race between a life-long Democrat who got 33% of the votes running against a life-long REPUBLICAN who is playing the OPPORTUNIST with REPUBLICAN CORPORATE TRIAL LAWYER MONEY and the endorsement of THE REPUBLICAN Dallas Morning News who got 45%.

I'm a life-long Democrat running in the Democratic primary against one opponent who has voted Republican in every election from 1996 to 2006 and another who has never voted in a Democratic primary in the district. They are both trial lawyers who have hit the jackpot.

AN ADDITION TO
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL LEXICON

Ging-grinch (ging-grinch) [From Newt Gingrich, politician, and The Grinch That Stole Christmas, Dr. Seuss.]

Back in 1993 the neocons, having taken over the GOP, took over the Congress with a promise to never engage in compromise. It was their way or the highway. Anyone counseling bipartisan cooperation was deemed a squishy and drummed out of the leadership if not out of the party. And G.W. Bush was happy to go along. Happy to see Bill Clinton squirming under attack by these moral extremists.

The recent concern about spinach E-coli contamination is a case of two pillars of the so-called conservative agenda meeting: (1) deregulation of industry ("We can trust businesses to monitor themselves because there are market disincentives to do otherwise.") and (2) tort reform ("It dampens economic activity if we allow businesses to be punished through the courts if they harm their customers

Nicholas Kristof's suggestion in recent NY Times op-ed that voting for Hillary Clinton is a vote for a political dynasty is about as silly an idea as I have ever heard. Dynasties result from inheriting offices not being elected to them...something that has not happened in our history.

Paul Krugman's recent op-ed, Divided over Trade in the NY Times is worth reading. Our trade agreements have hurt American wages, however, returning to pre-NAFTA days might make things worse not better.

If one of the pillars of peace in Iraq is oil revenue sharing we might be in for a long, long war. Except for a few empty phrases like ownership without power, Bush's plan calls for the Iraqis to trade 100% of the oil revenues and total control of the oil fields for 12.5% of the revenues and zero control of the oil fields.

Bush looks into his tea leaves and sees the insurgents putting down their weapons and just waiting for us to leave, if we say when that will be. Those same tea leaves do not show that, if we do not set a date to leave, the Iraqi army will put down their weapons and wait for us to win the war against the insurgents.

The insurance game is a balancing act involving premiums, benefits and enrollees. It works (makes a profit) only when the insurer can control two out of the three elements.

The Congressional resolution the President signed on October 16, 2002 was designed to be a weapon in the GOP propaganda arsenal to make the President look good and Democrats to look bad by either co-opting their support of a to-be-announced-later war, if it went badly; or by painting them as “soft on national defense” if they voted against it and the war went well.

Bush keeps telling us that he is listening to the generals and the Democrats are trying to micromanage the war. This would be a winning point for the President if he did not very selectively appoint the generals he supposedly listens to. The fact is that the flag leadership of this war has been changed by Mr. Bush to reflect his policies not established military doctrine.

One of the interesting things we have learned from the decoding of our DNA is that we have genes specifically assigned to kill us. The very same genetic structures that have enabled us to rise above the primordial slime also numbers our days.

Secretary of Defense Gates wants the Iraqi Parliament to not take a two-month recess this summer if it doesn't pass reconciliatory legislation before July.

I know all the stats related to the right to own guns issue and have been for the limiting of the kinds of guns available for purchase and who can own them, etc. [You don't run for Congress in Texas and not know the ups and downs of the Second Amendment.] I know that drill.