Greg Abbott is not just the Republican candidate for governor. He is also the Attorney General of Texas. He ordered state agencies, including the State Health Services Department to no longer release any information on vast amounts of dangerous chemicals corporate neighbors are storing, including explosives.

Attorney General Abbott came up with what you might call the Nosy Neighbor Principle. Residents can drive around a neighborhood, knocking on the doors of friendly business owners, and simply ask what hazardous substances, including chemicals and explosives, they store.

A Texas law requires companies to furnish information about certain hazardous substances. But there is a twist.

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The tension between economic realism and political realism resulted in a reduced economic stimulus that still succeeded in pulling the country away from a solid depression. The recession that remained was beyond painful for many Americans. Jobs were lost, homes were foreclosed.

Enough Democrats pushed for a middle path to get what economists predicted.

It was a recovery. It was a weak recovery, but it was a recovery.

The public had opinions about the stimulus. But they didn't vote based on their opinions.

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As emperors go, Hadrian is regarded by students of history as one of the best. He was quite popular among the military and the people of Rome were with him.

The Senate had a big, big problem, though. Hadrian was born in Spain, one of the many conquered lands. So he was not to be considered a real Roman. Certainly not one of those born to the upper, upper classes. This outsider should have been a slave, not a ruler.

I sometimes wonder about the stupidly selfish way the Senate dealt with the only Roman Emperor at the time who had come from the provinces. It could have been an opportunity to promote the fiction of a "dream that was Rome." Imagine Rome as an ideal in which those conquered could rise to rule. Imagine how that might have cemented the loyalty of subjects.

Parallels with patriotism in American stop when it comes to a July 4 dream.

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Whenever key evidence simply disappears from an arena of controversy, alarm bells go off. These missing emails happen to be a case in point.

We have to ask a more basic question. If that large a gap in the official record exists, how many other key pieces of evidence are missing? What other email messages have vanished?

When a public official suddenly resigns, and so much documentation turns out to be missing, is it any wonder suspicions will spread?

But there is another side. There are reasonable explanations.

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