• I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point -- race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.
• If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, "Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty." In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean. Children can be horribly logical.
• In Texas, we do not hold high expectations for the [governor's] office; it's mostly been occupied by crooks, dorks and the comatose.
• Good thing we've still got politics in Texas -- finest form of free entertainment ever invented.
• [on Texas politics] Better than the zoo. Better than the circus.
• I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.
• As a veteran of many an electoral defeat at the polls, may I remind you of the proper Texan attitude toward slaughter at the polls?
A few years before Billie Carr died this September at age 74, a friend called to ask how she was doing. "Well," she said, "They just impeached my boy up in Washington, there's not a Democrat left in statewide office in Texas, the Republicans have taken every judgeship in Harris County, and yesterday I found out I have cancer."
Pause.
"I think I'll go out and get a pregnancy test because with my luck, it'll come back positive."
• Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
Oh, it's just that your life is at stake.
• It's a low-tax, low-service state--so shoot us. The only depressing part is that, unlike Mississippi, we can afford to do better. We just don't.
• Texas' performance, or lack of it, on Medicaid is already the subject of one federal court order and is likely to attract another as we continue to lag in providing health insurance for poor kids.
• As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.
• What is a teenager in San Francisco to rebel against, for pity's sake? Their parents are all so busy trying to be non-judgmental, it's no wonder they take to dyeing their hair green.
• I know vegetarians don't like to hear this, but God made an awful lot of land that's good for nothing but grazing.
• The problem with those who choose received Authority over fact and logic is how they choose which part of Authority to obey. The Bible famously contradicts itself at many points (I have never understood why any Christian would choose the Old Testament over the New), and the Koran can be read as a wonderfully compassionate and humanistic document. Which suggests that the problem of fundamentalism lies not with authority, but with ourselves.
• The Israelis and the Palestinians are not condemned to some eternal hell where they have to kill each other forever.
• Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.
• Conservatives have been mad at the Supreme Court since it decided to desegregate the schools in 1954 and seen fit to blame the federal bench for everything that has happened since then that they don’t like.
• You want moral leadership? Try the clergy. It's their job.
