What troubles me is that Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country, yet we continue to reject Medicaid expansion even though the federal government covers 90% of eligible expansion costs.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are already helping pay for uncompensated medical care. Those costs don't simply disappear because people lack insurance.

I'm genuinely interested in understanding what financial benefit Texans receive from refusing expansion, particularly when so many working, low-income adults struggle to afford healthcare.

Sources:

https://www.kff.org/uninsured/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/

https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/sources-of-payment-for-uncompensated-care-for-the-uninsured/

South Texas voters who embraced Donald Trump two years ago have largely soured on the two-term president, and many of them are now smiling on a Tejano music star who's running for Congress as a Democrat, according to a new poll.

Matthew McConaughey is talking politics on social media—and social media users are urging him to not to.

The Texan actor took to X to post a video in which he urged voters to consider independent candidates ahead of the election.

“They’ve been telling us for years that an independent vote is a wasted vote,” McConaughey said in the October 18 video. “Well, a great question for our time is: how’s that unwasted vote been working out for you?”

The comments arrive just weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, which include several tight races across the country, including one in McConaughey’s own home state of Texas—where disgraced former attorney general Ken Paxton is running against Democratic nominee James Talarico for U.S. Senate.

McConaughey continued in the six-minute monologue, making the argument for embracing a non-Democrat or non-Republican.

“Here’s a fact: The number one political identity in America today is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is Independent. There are more of us than either party, so Independents belong in the fight. Not as a protest, not as a spoiler, but as a real and potential winner,” the Interstellar actor said.

Read more on Fast Company.

(Gift link)

Writer and University of Texas alum Forrest Wilder spent a year reporting and talking to dozens of professors, students, administrators, and staff at the school, and was struck by the degree of fear on campus and the sense that a freewheeling intellectual culture was dead or dying. Many told him about acts of self-censorship. Fears of being doxed or fired had led some faculty to avoid controversy, though few wanted to discuss it on the record.

Jeremi Suri, a professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, told Wilder that what’s happening on campus is akin to McCarthyism. “What we’re seeing is a classic chilling effect, whether intended or not. This is what happens when people become concerned that what might have been acceptable or protected yesterday won’t be protected tomorrow.”

Compared with the changes at Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and other campuses, the crackdowns at UT have been less in-your-face, the administration more sophisticated in undoing purported wokeness. The stakes are high. Texas’s rise as an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse is in many ways tethered to UT. California has a half dozen world-class public universities, but Texas has, well, only Texas.

Since resigning this spring amid scandal, former U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales has sent tens of thousands of campaign dollars to companies recently created by his wife and that don’t appear to have any physical or online presence.

Why are the Texas republicans allowed to keep doing this but I haven’t seen one democratic text spoofed yet before the elections on the 3rd?

“Texas and its construction workforce are the ground zero of Donald Trump’s latest mass deportation effort, dubbed ICE 2.0.”

- The Guardian

Something fishy is going on. The information I'm receiving is extremely high-quality, meaning it's very expensive. I don't think this stuff is funded by any pro-trans group; I think it's conservative PACs trying to scare the shit out of Memaw and Papaw.

I've even heard that they are sending to kids under the age of 18, which means they are getting names from schools somehow.

This is some shady shit, people.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6159985-hinojosa-lawsuit-abbott-musk-emails/

Lawyers for Abbott and Musk fought against the release of the documents, arguing they would reveal trade secrets, confidential legal and policymaking discussions and potentially “intimate and embarrassing” messages.

A Dallas-based federal judge had her cases stripped from her and is being investigated by a special judicial committee for abandoning her job amid an alleged mental condition that’s led to racial insults and “bizarre emails.”  

New documents released Monday by a judicial council show Judge Ada Brown in September had her cases reassigned to other judges and was temporarily barred from taking on new ones. 

These are confirmed fake. right before early voting. wonder who would have sent these....