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Gina Hinojosa Takes the School Fight Statewide Texas school districts are closing campuses at a pace public school advocates describe as a crisis. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, launched Team Texas Public Schools on Monday, a nonpartisan organizing program designed to mobilize parents, teachers, and administrators across party lines to fight school closures statewide. Hinojosa unveiled the program at Pease Elementary in Austin, a campus opened in 18

The Outgoing Commissioner and the Democrat Who Agrees With Him Sid Miller has never been mistaken for a political moderate. The three-term Texas agriculture commissioner built his career on MAGA loyalty, Trump endorsements, and a public persona that thrived on confrontation. His announcement that he would share a stage with Clayton Tucker, the Democratic nominee running to replace him, landed accordingly. The two are scheduled to appear together at a forum on June 11 at the M

The Man Who Saved Ken Paxton Just Endorsed the Guy Running Against Him Dan Cogdell knows Ken Paxton better than most people in Texas politics ever will. He sat across courtroom tables from prosecutors for nearly a decade, first when Paxton hired him in 2015 after his securities fraud indictment, and later when he served on Paxton's defense team in the 2023 impeachment trial that ended in acquittal. The securities fraud case ran nine years before prosecutors dropped the charge

There Is No Democracy Without Journalism Scott Pelley has been shot at. He spent nights in waterlogged foxholes in the desert, filed dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, and did all of it in service of an informed American public. When Donald Trump called him "fake news" and "the enemy of the people," Pelley did not retreat into polite hedging. Pelley joined CBS News in 1989 after years covering local Texas politics and anchored the CBS Evening News from 2011 to 201

The Gay Panic Defense Is Still on the Table In 30 states and five U.S. territories, a defendant retains the legal right to argue in court that his victim's sexual orientation provoked him into violence. The strategy is called the gay panic defense, and attorneys across most of the country are free to deploy it. Aaron McKinney raised it in 1998, after he and Russell Henderson beat a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard into a coma, tied him to a fenc

Life Lessons In many Latino households, strength is not taught through lectures, it’s modeled in silence. It lives in the mother who works double shifts, who holds a family together through uncertainty, who loves fiercely but rarely says “I’m tired.” But somewhere between survival and sacrifice, there’s a quieter lesson that often goes unspoken: strength must be intentional, not inherited. Raising strong daughters today means preparing them for a world that will test their wo

The Myth In Latin households, men who have not swept a floor since the Obama administration use the word 'mantenida' like it means something. Mantenida comes from "mantener," to maintain or to support, and it carries a social charge that the English phrase "kept woman" never quite captures. On the surface it describes an economic arrangement. Underneath, it functions as a verdict. A mantenida is not simply financially dependent, she is presumed to be exploiting that dependenc

There is a particular kind of heartbreak that does not explode loudly. It settles quietly into the walls of a marriage like cigarette smoke trapped in curtains. It lingers in routine, in silence, in the way two people continue passing each other coffee cups after trust has already been dragged bloody across the floor. This is the wife who stays. Not the naïve woman people mock from a distance. Not the weak woman strangers imagine when they ask, “Why didn’t she leave?” But the

There may be no greater prank nature has ever played on humanity than the orgasm. Think about it. Entire civilizations have been built around the pursuit of power, wealth, status, and meaning. Philosophers have spent centuries asking why we exist. Religions have wrestled with the nature of the soul. Poets have sacrificed their sanity trying to describe love. And then there is the orgasm, a fleeting event that lasts only seconds, yet somehow convinces otherwise rational adults

Paxton's DOGE Loyalty Now Has a Cost, and Texas Cattle Are Paying It Ken Paxton has spent the last year positioning himself as the Trump administration's most reliable Texas ally. That positioning now sits alongside an active screwworm outbreak spreading through South and Central Texas ranch country. USDA has confirmed six cases of New World screwworm in Texas livestock since June 3, with confirmed infections in Zavala, La Salle, Gillespie, and Edwards counties. The Texas Ani

The Most Republican Democrat in Congress Faces the Most Democratic Republican in Texas Tano Tijerina spent a decade winning Webb County elections as a Democrat. He won in 2014, 2018, and 2022, each time under the same party banner, each time in a county that had been blue so long that the color felt geological. Then Trump carried Webb County in November 2024, and Tijerina announced on Fox & Friends that he had always been a conservative and that the Democratic Party lost him

What Happens When the Powerful Stop Playing by the Rules A quote often attributed to Bob Marley warns: “You’ll never find justice in a world where criminals make the laws.” For many Americans, that sentence no longer sounds dramatic. It sounds familiar. Across the country, people are living through a growing distrust of institutions that once carried unquestioned authority. In communities large and small, people have always understood that justice often moves differently for

Starr County's Arroyos Have Been Flooding Residential Streets for Over Thirty Years On the evening of September 6, 1993, Yolanda Teran D. Martinez was driving through Roma, Texas, when Arroyo Roma swallowed her car. A thunderstorm had dropped nearly five inches of rain in ninety minutes. The arroyo, dry most of the year, became a current strong enough to carry a Ford LTD off the road and into the water in minutes. Three of her passengers survived because neighbors ran outside

Abbott's Closed Primary Push Would Redraw Who Gets a Voice in Texas Greg Abbott stood before thousands of delegates at the 2026 Texas Republican Party Convention in Houston on Friday and announced what the party's grassroots wing has wanted for decades. Close the Republican primary to non-Republicans. Only registered party members vote. Everyone else sits out. The statement marks a first for Abbott, who had largely avoided the fight until now. The Texas GOP sued his own Secre

Jon Ossoff Is Betting the Democratic Party Can Actually Mean It This Time Six days after a company backed by Trump's sons Eric and Don Jr. took a 20 percent stake in an American mining group, that group's parent company received $1.6 billion in federal financing for the world's largest known undeveloped tungsten deposit in Kazakhstan. Jon Ossoff put that timeline at the center of his reelection kickoff speech in Atlanta, built a rally around it, and watched the clips go viral

Samuel García's Family Law Firm Has a Lot of Explaining to Do Samuel García spent five years building a political identity around being the governor who doesn't govern like a politician. The motorsports appearances, the social media presence, the cultivated image of a young technocrat above the machinery of Mexican state corruption. On June 12, the Anti-Corruption Commission of the Nuevo León legislature voted six to one to open impeachment proceedings against him for the all

Roma Remembers the Schools No One Remembers Anymore On a rainy Saturday morning in Roma, Texas, a dozen guests crowded together at the Roma Birding Center and became students again. Dora Perez Villarreal hosted "School Years Out in the Ranch," a traveling exhibition covering sixty years of Starr County educational history that exists in no archive, no curriculum, and no official record. Sponsored by the City of Roma, the event drew residents into a conversation about ranch sc

What Children Learn About Love Before Anyone Teaches Them No parenting syllabus gets handed out at the hospital. Parents leave with a baby, some pamphlets about car seat installation, and absolutely zero warning that the most important relationship curriculum their child will ever receive is already playing out live, in the kitchen, on a Tuesday night, over a disagreement about whose turn it was to call the plumber. Fathers set the original template. Small moments accumulate

He Passed as a Man in Falls City Until the Local Newspaper Printed His Name Brandon Teena moved to Falls City, Nebraska, in November 1993 with check forgery warrants trailing him out of Lincoln, and no one in Richardson County knowing his name. He was transgender and passing. Five weeks later, he was dead, killed by two men who learned his biological sex from a newspaper crime report the local sheriff's office handed to the press after his arrest. He passed easily as a man, b

Why Cities Stay Blue and What Republicans Are Doing About It Republicans have spent decades insisting that Democratic governance destroys cities. But no one can prove their point. As of March 2026, 67 of the 100 largest cities in the United States have Democratic mayors. That number has held steady since at least 2016, fluctuating by only a handful of seats in either direction regardless of national political conditions. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia,