TEXAS IS BEING S L O W L Y TAKEN OVER BY THE LEFT

Submitted by: Robert Hall

How Reliably Red Is Texas? How Red Will It Be a Decade From Now?

The locals at TXOnline, the conference put on by Americans for Prosperity in Houston this weekend, offered differing assessments of Battleground Texas, the liberal PAC founded by Barack Obama's field director Jeremy Bird that is aiming to turn Texas into a swing state.

The "Game On" cover of Texas Monthly is easily to mock, as Wendy Davis sputters and appears set to finish around the average for Democratic gubernatorial candidates in recent cycles — 40 percent. But the state's demographics are undoubtedly changing — an already-key Latino population growing larger, lots of folks from other states moving in, the baby boomers aging, and an influx of immigrants from other countries. (The third-most commonly spoken language in Houston after English and Spanish? Vietnamese, with Chinese only a little behind that. Nearly 22 percent of Houston residents were born in another country.) Republicans in Texas get about 40 percent of the Latino vote, which isn't bad, but doesn't leave much room for error.

TXOnline attendees and local activists such as the University of Texas-jersey-clad blogger Cahnman didn't seem terribly worried that Texas would turn into a purple or swing state because of Battleground Texas. But they worried that the traditional GOP advantage may erode if the Republicans running the state get too comfortable with taxation, spending, and regulation habits of lawmakers in less-prosperous states. (Ask South Carolinians how consistently conservative their heavily-Republican state legislature is.) With the state's economy booming, Texas is bringing in plenty of new tax revenue. But they're also spending a heck of a lot more than they did before; a 26 percent increase from the previous budget cycle if you include some supplemental spending bills, a 16 percent increase if you don't.

As Cory Crow, who covers Texas politics at his blog Sodacookies said, a lot of self-proclaimed conservative lawmakers don't actually vote for free-market policies.

Texas state senate candidate Steve Toth stopped by the conference; he's represented The Woodlands in the state house and is facing another state rep., Brandon Creighton, in a runoff election August 5.

We were also joined by state Rep. Scott Turner, who's running for state House speaker; local activists contend, as the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel describes, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus and his allies are "dragging their feet on budget, social, and education reforms — failing to flex powerful House and Senate GOP majorities."

Further Identifying Marks of the Organized Chaos That Is 'Tracked and Targeted'

"I hear Jay Carney is quitting as press secretary. What's he going to do now? I guess he'll write a book, but I don't know who's going to buy it. It mean, it's not like he can have the book promoted every single friggin' day in the Morning Jolt."

-- Tony Katz during Saturday's 'Tracked and Targeted' Performance.

Yesterday I briefly mentioned "Tracked and Targeted," the performance of Steven Kruiser, Tony Katz, and Kurt Schlichter, perhaps best described as one part stand-up comedy, one part conservative political rally, one part improvisational comedy, and one part public psychotic breakdown.

Their name comes from the mood of being conservative in Los Angeles — your every utterance is tracked for deviations from the liberal groupthink and you're targeted for every thought-crime against environmental consciousness, diversity appreciation, Obama adoration, and so on. Conservatives are the counter-culture these days, rebelling against the authorities in government, media, universities, and conventional wisdom. These guys are eager to bring their show to college campuses, to show that demographic that almost everything they've been told about stodgy, boring, uptight, repressed conservatives is wrong.

Kruiser is a stand-up comedian, probably best described as a hybrid of Sam Kinison, John Belushi, and Animal from the Muppet Show. Radio talk-show host Katz is best described as a mash-up of Tony Stark, Dennis Leary, and Tony Robbins, periodically interrupting his rapid-fire sarcasm to reassure every grassroots tea-party activist that their efforts are not in vain and their actions can impact the future of this country. And veteran, lawyer, columnist and author Kurt Schlichter is some mix of Dennis Miller, the acerbic and impatient Agent Rosenfeld from Twin Peaks, and if this Army colonel will forgive me for comparing him to a Marine, R. Lee Ermey.

Perhaps the best measurement of the group's off-the-charts manic energy is that Kurt is the soft-spoken one.

These guys are a wicked delight, but by no means "approved for general audiences", and may require a little refinement. The TXOnline conference crowd included our blogger "Island of Misfit Toys" folks ranging from their early 20s to their 50s . . . and then some local activists who were, shall we say, considerably older and not quite ready for a running gag about an obscure and mysterious sexual practice called "birching." Let's face it, when you use some blue material with a Texas conservative crowd, you always run the risk of stirring up a Green Hornet's nest.

Finally, as promised yesterday, some other panelists and attendees of TXOnline you may want to follow, as they're favorites of mine: Laura Fillault, Matthias at Political Math, Kat McKinley, Laura Luxenburg, Amelia Hamilton, Michelle Ray, Kira Davis -- who, I would ordinarily call the life of the party, except we have a lot of lives of the party in this crowd -- Sarah Rumpf, LADowd, Gay Patriot, Amy Miller, Matt Vespa, Michelle Lancaster, Dave in Texas (part of the Ace of Spades crew) Ben and Breanne Howe, and Chris Loesch, and a bunch of others I'm sure I'm forgetting. As Tabitha Hale once told me, who's in the audience of a conference is as important as who's speaking up on the stage.