Horns Up: Cornyn's not falling for it.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz railed against the alleged evils of the Affordable Care Act for over 21 hours. Cruz’s tactic does nothing to halt the vote, but it does risk a disastrous shutdown of the government, a move that Democrats and most Republicans oppose. “While I remain committed to defunding Obamacare, I’m also committed to avoiding a government shutdown,” said fellow Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn. We applaud Cornyn for choosing restraint, and working toward his political goals in a way that does not endanger the country’s well-being.

Horns Down: Racially-charged bake sale misses the point.

Following in the footsteps of other conservative youth organizations, Young Conservatives of Texas held a bake sale on the West Mall on Wednesday with different prices for different students. White males paid the most at $2.50 per baked good. The stated purpose of the event was to protest the alleged unfairness of affirmative action programs, but by reducing the built-in discrimination against minorities to a simple sliding scale, these budding conservative leaders missed the point of modern holistic admissions processes like the one recently challenged in the Fisher case. There are plenty of reasonable ways to question the value of affirmative action, but Young Conservatives’ childish stunt wasn’t one of them.

Horns Up: Texas (mostly) acknowledges reality.

According to a survey released Tuesday by Yale University’s Project on Climate Change Communication, 70 percent of Texans believe in global warming, and more than half believe dealing with it should be a high priority for the federal government. Unfortunately, only 44 percent concluded that the global warming has been caused by human activity, in contrast to 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies surveyed by The Guardian.