Texas

The Willow Bend Deal

The Arena and the Legacy of Bad Public Financing Deals Plano ISD just locked up to $250 million of future school-tax growth for a Dallas Stars arena without a public vote. Plano ISD just agreed to hand over up to $250 million of future school-tax growth to help build a new arena for the Dallas Stars at the site of the dying Willow Bend Mall on the city's west side. . The board approved the deal. The city council signed off. No public vote was required. On paper the arrangement looks tidy. In practice it locks away money the schools could…

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Talarico’s Skin Suit Campaign Ad

Fisking Talarico's Latest Ad A skin suit is what the spot is selling. It is not a senator. Thirty seconds. A Texas flag. A Monday Night Football audience. James Talarico in a suit, telling the state he will put Texas before any party, that he called out Joe Biden, that he worked with Republicans to pass the largest property tax cut in Texas history, that he will fight for oil and gas jobs, that Ken Paxton will be a lapdog, and that he will bring checks and balances back. #TexasSenate AdImapct: James Talarico releases new ad touting his bipartisan credentials and…

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Where’s Jimmy?

Where is James Talarico? Twelve days. An empty calendar. Campaigns abhor a vacuum. Ken Paxton put the question to a San Antonio crowd with the president in the building. Where is Talarico? Twelve days. The chant did not need a speechwriter. It needed an empty calendar, and the calendar was empty. A Senate nominee does not get to vanish for two weeks in October and have the silence treated as neutral. Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics abhors one faster. The space fills. It fills with theories, with old footage dressed as news, with a spokesman’s sentence that answers less than it…

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Deductible Jesus

Talarico's Campaign Theology The clip is the house theology with a punch line. N.B. March 4: Why Talarico Won’t Win Texas. September 15: Losin’ Texas. Same file. The church is no longer backdrop. It is the source code. Andrew Breitbart was right. Politics is downstream from culture. James Talarico’s culture has a street address. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin raised him. Jim Rigby baptized him, married his parents, and has been his pastor since he was two. Talarico has said so himself. That pulpit taught him what to do with Jesus. The Senate race is the delivery system. The deductible…

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Losin’ Texas

The Preacher Texas Will Not Hire He’s losin’ Texas, I can tell. Gen X already knows the face. Isaac. Black hat. The child preacher whose sermon did not belong to the town. James Talarico gives off the same vibe. Soft voice. Still smile. Holy language in a room that is not holy. That flinch is not a movie joke. It is how a lot of people get to the real word before they get to the tape. Inauthentic. Texas has hired preacher candidates. It has not hired this one and thought ours. I wrote in March that he would not win…

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What Flock Actually Sells

The Pole Is Not the Product Flock did not sell Texas a camera. It leased cities a searchable graph of other people's cars. People keep arguing about a black box on a pole. Police chiefs hold up recovered trucks and missing children. Opponents hold up 1984. City managers hold up a vendor invoice and a transparency portal. All three groups talk about a camera because a camera photographs well and fits on a council agenda. Here is the thing the agenda never quite names. Flock Safety did not become a national fixture by selling poles. It sold a searchable graph of…

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Federal Judge Strikes Down Voter Citizenship Checks

Privacy Protections or Roadblock to Election Integrity? On Monday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked key federal tools meant to help states verify whether people on the voter rolls are actually U.S. citizens. The ruling in League of Women Voters v. Department of Homeland Security vacates the 2025 updates to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, better known as SAVE. For those of us who’ve spent years watching how government systems either protect or undermine self-government, this isn’t just another administrative-law skirmish. It strikes at the heart of federalism, election integrity, and whether outdated privacy statutes from the Watergate era…

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Why Ken Paxton Crushed Cornyn

Washington Turned John Cornyn Into an Establishment Figure Ben Domenech, who once worked for John Cornyn, cut straight through the spin on Laura Ingraham’s show just prior to polls closing in the Texas GOP Senate runoff: “Washington sucks it all out of you. He’s more establishment now. I wish he was still more conservative.” That one line is the perfect epitaph for Cornyn’s long political career in the upper chamber. On Tuesday, Ken Paxton didn’t just beat him: he destroyed him. Paxton cruised to a decisive 64-36 victory in the runoff after Cornyn had barely edged him out in the March…

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The Battle of San Jacinto, 190 Years On

18 Minutes That Changed History Imagine the muggy afternoon of April 21, 1836, along the banks of the San Jacinto River. Tall grass swayed in the breeze as nearly 900 Texian soldiers, many still raw volunteers, silently prepared for battle. Across a short stretch of prairie, Santa Anna’s army of about 1,400 rested in camp, confident that the fleeing Texans posed no immediate threat. Then, at 4:30 p.m., the order came: “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” In just 18 furious minutes, the Texas Revolution would be won. This is the story of San Jacinto, the stunning victory that secured Texas independence…

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The $38 Million Red Flag

How Foreign Money Triggered a Full Compliance Meltdown When ActBlue’s own board chair, Kimberly Peeler-Allen, told the New York Times in early April 2026 that “less than 1 percent” of the platform’s 2024-cycle contributions showed “signs” of foreign origin, the math should have stopped everyone cold. ActBlue processed billions in small-dollar donations that cycle. One percent of that haul is $38 million, money that carried internal red flags for potential illegal foreign-national contributions under federal law. That isn’t a rounding error. That is real political oxygen: enough to bankroll ad blitzes, field offices, and turnout operations in multiple tight races. Yet…

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