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Henry Cuellar has never been shy with the D.C. Capitol press. The ten-term congressman from Laredo is known to be a great source to reporters, both on the record and off. That is, until he was indicted last week on fourteen charges alleging political corruption involving the Azerbaijani government and a bank in Mexico. Cuellar skipped votes at the Capitol on Monday, returning Tuesday, when he slipped past the TV news crews waiting for him in and around the U.S. House of Representatives. The glad-handing centrist Democrat typically walks to votes alone, often holding court or taking phone calls in the Speaker’s Lobby just loud enough for reporters to hear. Not anymore. On Wednesday, Cuellar walked to the Capitol from his office in the Rayburn House…

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It’s Ken Paxton versus Catholics, round two. Back in February, the Texas attorney general targeted the migrant shelter Annunciation House, in El Paso, on his stated suspicions of “alien harboring” and “operating a stash house.” He cited no evidence for the latter claim, but demanded that Annunciation House turn over a host of records, including its clients’ names and medical records. Annunciation House, which receives migrants from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies and feeds and houses them, refused to turn over all the documents. It argued that Paxton was violating several constitutional protections, including the Catholic organization’s right to free exercise of religion. Instead of waiting for a final ruling on the document request, the attorney general filed for…

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It’s harder to be a moderate in Washington, D.C., than ever before. Nobody knows that better than the veteran centrist Democrat Henry Cuellar, who faces prosecution from the federal government for his work on one of the few remaining bipartisan causes in Texas politics: the glorious nation of Azerbaijan. On Friday, the Department of Justice indicted Congressman Cuellar, who represents Laredo, on fourteen counts, including bribery, conspiracy, failure to register as a foreign agent, and money laundering. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, are alleged to have used a network of shell companies to hide $600,000 in payoffs from a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani oil company. For those payments, the feds allege, Cuellar offered concrete deliverables, the “quid” for the “quo.” Cuellar is supposed to have…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

“No more than ten minutes!” I yelled after my eleven-year-old daughter as she darted out the back door. It was late on an August evening, and the temperature in Houston continued to hover over 100 degrees, refusing to offer even a brief reprieve. Last summer was less of a breaking point and more of a languishing, as persistent triple digits kept our family of four increasingly confined to our home. The sun was so relentless that I often drew the curtains by noon. Right outside our door was a huge yard with a tree swing, a neighborhood park, and miles of bayou trails. Inside was a lethargic mom trying to console two kids with more screen time that none of us wanted.During my own adolescence…

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Early in Ethan Hawke’s new film, Wildcat, a young Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke, Hawke’s daughter) tells a skeptical editor that she’s “amenable to criticism—but only within the sphere of what [she’s] trying to do.” That editor doesn’t end up publishing the work in question, perhaps illustrating that the gulf between what a piece of art attempts and what it achieves can be hard to bridge, no matter the affection the artist might have for the material.As O’Connor once admitted herself, a biopic about the author is a tall order. An epigraph of one biography quotes her: “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” Indeed, she spent…

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