Columns/Opinions

Bosque County UT alumni begin chapter

Local Report

Meridian Tribune

West Shore to host blood drive

Local Report

The Clifton Record

Carter BloodCare is offering blood donors the chance to unwind and watch a Texas Rangers baseball game. In June, those who give blood with Carter BloodCare will receive a special, online-only ticket offer for fifty percent off select seating sections from the Texas Rangers. Donors will also be entered to win suite tickets.

By Brett Voss

Publisher

In the year 1984, Americans lived a relative utopian existence, citizens in a "prouder, stronger and better" country as Ronald Reagan began his second term as president of the United States of America. We lived in a world where individual freedom and privacy remained respected and cherished, in a world free from self-absorbing instruments like cell phones and the internet.

Ironically, the very tools we once thought drew the entire world closer together may end up being the very things to plunge us into total isolation. But first, the personal devices we create our own little worlds in will be used to take our individual privacy away as we collectively become wards of the state.

Now, fast forward to the present.

While Washington’s warfare over the budget called a ceasefire for the Easter holiday, the country braced for the next battle over gun control to take center stage as Congress returned this week. So after thawing out in March, Capitol Hill will play host to a springtime clash over gun rights, as lawmakers prepare to take up significant gun control legislation for the first time in years. April will shower us with rhetoric as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid brings a gun-regulation bill to the Senate floor that includes a universal background check.

Nesting season is upon us. I’m hoping the blue birds will move into the boxes we’ve provided. Barn swallows love the front porch real estate ops here, atop the columns that support the roof. When my children were small, we called them “mud birds” for the composition of their nests. The tenacious little homemakers even build inside the cow tunnel below the road.

The cover of the Mar. 25, 1957 issue of Sports Illustrated featured a former chicken farmer, the magazine’s choice for “driver of the year” for the second year in a row. Nowadays most people associate Carroll Shelby with the classic “muscle cars” he created or the chili concoction that bears his name. But half a century ago he was the American race-car king who had the audacity to win Europe’s most grueling road race.

AUSTIN — March 18 was day 70, midpoint of the 140-day regular session of the 83rd Texas Legislature. On March 22, the Senate approved its version of the state budget, a plan to spend $95 billion in general state revenue in 2014 and 2015. The Senate version would spend $7 billion in general revenue more than the current 2012-2013 budget. The full budget is close to $195 billion, counting dedicated funds and federal dollars.

AUSTIN — Continuing to inch closer to the Legislature’s most important act — the making of a state budget for the next fiscal biennium — the Senate Finance Committee approved CSSB 1 on March 13. Some 865 pages in length, the budget tops out at $195 billion, the sum of $94 billion in general appropriations plus federal and dedicated funds. The bill will be debated on the Senate floor this week, and if passed, the document’s next stop will be the House Committee on Appropriations.

A 97-year old ex-slave told a newspaper reporter on Mar. 13, 1938 that his “proudest possession” was the memory of his famous former master, Sam Houston. Jeff Hamilton was born into bondage in 1840 on a plantation in Kentucky. Three years later, his owner moved lock, stock and chattel, which included the little boy, his mother and older siblings, to the Republic of Texas. When Jeff’s original master met an untimely end, his widow replaced him with a real-life Simon Legree.

Breaking their night-owl habit of working strictly at night, a bandit band of brothers robbed the bank at New Braunfels in broad daylight on Mar. 9, 1922. If Willis Newton can be believed, and that is a big “if,” the Newton Boys were the most successful bank and train robbers of all-time stealing “more money than the Dalton Gang, Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch and the James-Younger Gang combined.” That was the total take from 87 banks and six trains in a five-year crime spree.