Over on the home page, I take a look at retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez – campaigning as “Ric” Sanchez — in Texas’ Senate race. Despite a lot of optimistic headlines when he debuted in the race, he’s been rather quiet since then:

Despite all the fanfare, Sanchez has stumbled coming out of the gate, and the quiet debut doesn’t offer many signs that he’ll be the man to turn around Texas Democrats’ fortunes. His fundraising is pretty weak, considering the costs of running in Texas; in his first quarter as candidate, he raised about $160,000. (In the 2008 cycle, incumbent Republican senator John Cornyn raised $19.3 million and spent $18.9 million.) By contrast, on the Republican side, former state solicitor general Ted Cruz raised about $800,000 in his first quarter and former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert is putting more than $2 million of his own money into his campaign coffers. In Sanchez’s first quarterly report with the FEC, $9,000 of the $11,657 he spent in the quarter was to Integrity, a St. Louis tech company, for “website” expenses.

So far, Sanchez’s online effort is a nonentity, at least compared to those of his Republican rivals: 576 people like Sanchez’s Facebook page; for Ted Cruz, the total is 61,739. Sanchez has a Twitter account with one tweet, from June 7, and 46 followers. The Cruz campaign account has sent out 915 messages and has 14,203 followers. Sanchez’s campaign YouTube account has no videos posted yet. As of July 25, the last “news item” on hiscampaign website is dated June 8.

Needless to say, when I see the headline “Sanchez Debut Fizzles” I cringe, but that’s just my instincts as a Jets fan.