Posts Tagged ‘Charles Holcomb’
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
The latest Democratic Party filing information shows Daniel Boone no longer running for U.S. Senator, but rather running in the U.S. 21st Congressional District against the SOPA-loving incumbent Republican Lamar Smith. I’m not sure this is a good move for Boone, since I think he was at least as likely as Paul Sadler to win the nomination. Republican Charles Holcomb has also dropped out.
Conversely, a Grady Yarbrough now appears on the list of Democratic candidates. He appears to be a personal counselor [update: apparently not the same Grady Yarbrough; see comments] and his named is spelled differently than the late Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, who helped transform the Texas Democratic Party from a majority conservative party to a minority liberal one.
I’ll update the candidate page tomorrow.
Tags:2012 Election, Charles Holcomb, Daniel Boone, Democrats, Grady Yarbrough, Lamar Smith, Republicans, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Economics, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
This Houston Chronicle piece by Joe Holley is an example of why so many people are dissatisfied with the job the legacy media is doing of reporting events.
In covering the American Jewish Committee/World Affairs Council of Houston senate candidate forum on foreign policy I mentioned previously, we have a news story that is demonstrably deficient in several areas:
You get told who wasn’t there (Craig James, Paul Sadler, and Lt. Governor Chupacabra), and even how many of each flavor were there (“six Republicans, three Democrats and one Libertarian”), but the article itself only lists five of those ten. That would be the very first “W” of the “Five Ws and an H,” assuming they still teach that at journalism school. (Maybe they’re replaced it with another class on “Reporting Social Justice.”)
However, because I’m so Old School, I actually went out and got a list of who attended the forum from the AJC: Republicans Ted Cruz, Tom Leppert, Glenn Addison, Lela Pittinger, Charles Holcomb, and Ben Gambini (yes, an actual Ben Gambini sighting!), Democrats Daniel Boone and Jason Gibson, Libertarian Jon Roland, and independent candidate Mike Champion. So it turns out that even the summary of candidate affiliations was wrong.
In an article on a foreign policy forum that runs just shy of 500 words, a grand total of 96 of them actually dealt with the candidate’s foreign policy views, and even those are essentially free of concrete information. Let’s repost those parts in their entirety:
Cruz also said that “President Obama has been the most anti-Israel president this nation has ever seen.”
[snip]
Leppert emphasized his experience as an international businessman familiar with issues of currency and international trade.
[snip]
Cruz and Leppert were the only two candidates who were able to respond with practiced ease to a series of sophisticated questions dealing with world affairs, ranging from Israel’s response to the Iranian nuclear threat to whether the United States should help bail out faltering European economies. Most of the others on the stage seemed unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues.
That’s it. That’s the extent of coverage of the candidates’ foreign policy views in a forum dedicated to that very subject. We are no wiser as to what any candidate thinks of our troops levels in Afghanistan, what our relations with Pakistan should be, whether we should help topple the Assad regime in Syria, how to counter an increasingly bold China, or whether we should use military force to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Were those topics covered? We don’t know, as Holley and the Chronicle do not deign to tell us.
Instead of giving the candidates’ actual views, Holley merely gives us his dismissive analysis of eight of the ten candidates, telling us they are “unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues” without bothering to provide a single example of this ignorance.
The rest of the piece consists of horse race analysis, noting Dewhurst’s absence, audience attendance figures, and an interview with a random forum attendee. All of which would have been fine in a longer piece.
Joe Holley and/or his editor have missed a chance to actually inform their readers. I have a hard time thinking of a blogger who couldn’t have done a better job.
Tags:2012 Election, Charles Holcomb, David Dewhurst, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Glenn Addison, Houston Chronicle, Joe Holley, Lela Pittenger, Libertarians, Media Watch, MSM, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Texas, Texas Senate Race, Tom Leppert
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 12th, 2011
Looking over the list of Republican candidates who had filed for the Senate race, I was surprised to see the name of former Court of Criminal Appeals judge Charles Holcomb of Wimberley, who was age-limited out of the office. Despite searching, I was unable to find any campaign website for Judge Holcomb.
So I called him up.
Judge Holcomb was gracious enough to talk a few minutes about why he was running:
He considers himself an “Eisenhower Republican.”
He talked over running with some friends and decided “why not?”
He has neither a campaign staff nor a website, and said he just filed the required paperwork with the FEC.
He’s running to “give people a choice.”
He realizes he has a steep uphill fight “against two millionaires.”
He promises to serve only a single term.
He supports the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.
He believes that there is too much money in politics.
BattleSwarm Blog thanks Judge Holcomb for his time.
Tags:2012 Election, Charles Holcomb, Republicans, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 3 Comments »