Red Hot Texans: A Political Blog for Young Texan Conservatives in Fort Bend & Beyond!

RHT May Mega-Update: Springtime for Nick and Germany

2010-05-02T15:16:00.015-05:00

(The front of the Admiralspalast in Berlin when I went to the debut of the the German version of The Producers last year in Berlin with my mom and grandmother)

"Winter for Poland and France..."
The Producers, 1968

Welcome to my first spring post- the warm weather is finally here to stay in Texas, the primaries are over, bluebonnets have blossomed, and it's election year! With all of the excitement, why so long since Red Hot Texans has seen an update?

This website has always been a personal as well as news blog, so let me share a few things I've been up to recently. The biggest change (and reason for not updating) has been my move away from Sugar Land and the Fort Bend County political scene in mid-February. I've been busy working as a full-time paid intern at an awesome law firm in downtown Austin, and have had few trips back home. I've also decided to re-take the LSAT on June 6th, and have been studying to get a higher score. Mixed in with everything has have been flights to political events in other states, joining a new church, and fixing up a new apartment.

But probably the biggest development was finding out that I was accepted into the TransAtlantic Master's Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Free University in Berlin. I also found out that I was lucky enough to be nominated for a first-year full scholarship by UNC for a FLAS Fellowship in order to afford the whole thing, although (as per my usual luck) the Title VI funding by the Department of Education is renewed every four years, including this one, so it's still up in the air. Nevertheless, I've decided to take the plunge and will be moving to North Carolina in August and then to Berlin from January 2011 to July 2012, learning about topics like the EU and trans-atlantic relations and working to write a master's thesis in political science about European security policy regarding Russia. I'll be studying hard to improve my German and even want to start learning Russian. I'm extremely excited about moving to new places, meeting new people, and continuing my formal education in politics and foreign affairs.

All that being said, I'll be back in Houston during the summer working deep in politics in Fort Bend and Harris counties and going to lots of events before leaving Texas for a while! I'd like to add a special thanks to all the hundreds of people who visit Red Hot Texans every month, even when I'm doing too many things at once and not updating as much as I'd like. The Red Hot Texans Facebook fan group, the best place to get notices about upcoming special events or site updates, is now at almost 100 members! If you haven't already, make sure to click the Facebook "Like" button in the top right corner of this page just below the banner to become a fan and show everyone that you support young conservatives and grass-roots politics in Texas!

Now then- I haven't gotten the "political news" or "grass-roots" parts of Red Hot Texans, and have managed to sneak attending and photographing in a few cool events over the last few months. Here's a few of my highlights:

Fort Bend GOP Lincoln-Reagan Dinner, Safai Texas, Sugar Land, 1/29/10

From my Houston Chronicle article on the event at UltimateFortBend.com

"Last Friday evening I had the pleasure of attending my first-ever Lincoln-Reagan Dinner, the Fort Bend GOP's annual fancy shindig and fund-raiser. A few short years ago this event became famous as the subject of an intra-FBGOP legal and political struggle, but happily this year the night had the opposite effect.

The banquet had an enormous turn-out, giving those campaigning for office a chance to mingle with hundreds of grass-root activists and local conservative voters. There were even a significant number of candidates from neighboring counties in attendance, such as rising young talent from Harris County like Mike Wolfe and Chris Daniel.

The attendance and cross-county interest contributed to an overall atmosphere of excitement and optimism, an attitude that was only compounded once everyone got to hear Laura Ingraham's speech.

I was prepared for a largely boring presentation featuring generalities and base-pleasing platitudes. In my experience, speeches by pundits tend to be long on predictability and short on concrete points and substantial entertainment.

Fortunately, Laura's speech proved to defy the stereotypes. Besides being thoroughly funny, it was based almost entirely on specific details and policies from what we saw and heard in the political world of 2009. She focused on two themes in particular.

Firstly, those in attendance were given a long and very pointed list of all the broken campaign promises and failed legislative initiatives surrounding President Obama after just one year in office. The result is not only a firestorm of expanded political capital, credibility, and popularity in the polls, but also the development of a love-hate relationship with his own far-left base.

Secondly, she went into depth about the failure of mainstream media to accurately predict the political future and its insatiable need to generate (and rely on) transient narratives. In the first half of last year, virtually every newspaper, magazine, and television show was flooded with the narrative that the GOP was a dying party and that conservative principles were permanently finished in mainstream America ("We Are All Socialists Now", "The Republican Death Spiral", etc.) This fed into further (and widely accepted) notions that were taken from granted in the media, such as the inevitability regarding the passage of a Democratic health care bill circa December 2009.

Now, of course, polls show that Republicans are widely more enthusiastic about the upcoming elections and that the fiscally-conservative Tea Party movement polls as the most popular political "party" in America. On top of that, the very left-wing health care "reform" bill (stuffed to the brink with special exceptions and favors for Democratic legislators, unions, and trial lawyers)is currently floating face-down along the Potomac.

Overall, the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner was extremely well organized and run. I would like to especially thank the officers and leadership of the Fort Bend GOP and Daniel Wong for providing a table for the Young Republicans. The year is certainly off to an energizing and successful start for conservatives in Fort Bend County!"

"Youth and Politics- Fort Bend Media Panel, Senator Hutchison Fund-raiser, and More", Sugar Land and Houston, February 2010

From my Houston Chronicle article on the event at UltimateFortBend.com

"It's often assumed, especially with some of the stereotypes surrounding the Republican Party, that in politics a young person isn't seen as good for much except volunteering for campaigns every few years and acting as a semi-skilled unpaid worker in legislative internships found everywhere from sea to shining sea.

With the exception of the occasional twelve year-old that can recite the Gettysburg Address backwards and delivers a legal dissertation on the 10th Amendment at some partisan national conference somewhere, the average (abnormal) young person that can stop watching Jersey Shore long enough to grow interested in politics usually finds few meaningful ways to get noticed by the local adult establishment until at least after college graduation.

At first glance, young professionals in their 30s, known and respected community members in mid-life who have raised children and developed skills during their careers, and retired party elders who were already mingling locally before we had fifty states all seem to have massive advantages over some neophyte that suddenly stumbles into the scene from the nearest high school or university.

Activists in their late 20s and older have been around longer to make connections and learn the local do's and don'ts, have access to greater financial and travel resources, tend to be more deeply ingrained in respected community organizations, can bring much more campaign and convention experience to bear, and have much more in common with each other that with some newcomer that (in their eyes) probably might as well still be wearing braces.

Millenial tyros that try to get newly involved as individual participants often face a daunting environment, even when the local party members are welcoming and friendly.

Most activists and party members in your community, many of whom are probably old enough to at least be your parents, have little time to show you the ropes because they are at the prime of their political careers and usually in the midst of their own campaigns or minor power struggles.

It's quite possible that a bright-eyed newcomer will either be largely ignored or potentially taken advantage of as the established adults look for whatever pieces and pawns they can use to achieve their local political objectives du jour.

These are just a few of the complaints I have heard from dis-encouraged people my age or have myself experienced during the last seven years of grass-roots involvement.

Although we youngins seem to have less opportunities to attain significant local roles or to become leaders in our communities, the truth is that young people in fact actually have many highly unique opportunities to not just succeed but even excel as local activists.

When applied correctly, a young person's relative obscurity, low status, and blank slate can all be turned from disadvantages into advantages, transforming obstacles into moments of exceeded expectations.

For example, when I was seventeen, I organized an internship for myself at the District Office of the 22nd Congressional District in Sugar Land. Although I was busy with high school and speech and debate, I recognized that I still had more free time in the afternoon and evenings than an adult that had to both work full-time and raise a family.

That led to Congressman DeLay's District Director passing my name on to the Junior Statesmen Foundation (JSF), which hosted a behind-the-scenes conference in New York City during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

I used the money I had saved up from delivering Chinese food to pay for the program and travel costs.
Although our RNC-sponsored JSF badges allowed us to get in and out of the tight police/Secret Service cordon, the large passes hanging from our neck were not high-level enough for us to actually enter the convention inside Madison Square Garden across from our lodgings in The New Yorker.

We were told that, unless we personally had relatives or very close friends who were delegates or high-ranking GOP officials, we would have to watch the speeches and halls of the 2004 RNC on TV just like everybody else.

Well, my family and I are first-generation immigrants, and I was the only one interested in politics, so the personal connection angle was clearly out the window.

However, I refused to come all the way to New York and miss out on the GOP events just because I was too young and too un-connected to be of any notice. I designed a plan that played to my strengths.

Every morning I got up at 5 A.M., got dressed in my high school letter jacket (studded with about 40 various GOP campaign buttons) and cowboy hat, and took a cab to the opposite side of Manhattan to the New York Hilton where I had learned the Texas Republican Delegation was staying.

Every day I would sneak to the top floor and bluff my way in to the luxury buffet, stealing the first open seat I saw and waiting until I could strike up a conversation with the delegates next to me.

After I mentioned who I was and where I was from, I would try to mention that I would OH SO love to be able to attend the Convention myself and IF ONLY someone had a spare guest pass for the day they weren't using.

Every day I was able to secure some sort of guest pass and participate in the whole convention, except for the very last one where President Bush was the keynote speaker.

With all the guest passes already dried up in the morning, I spent a good hour and a half outside the convention hall before the evening events started, holding up homemade signs begging for guest passes while evading the Secret Service people that kept nervously chasing me off as a potential teenage anarchist/party-crasher. I eventually got my pass from an elderly woman who was delighted to see a young person interested in the Republican Party.

The point of this story isn't to brag or to imply that you have to be in the Big Apple to find opportunities. Chances like this are all around you as a young person, if you're willing to get creative. Recently someone I knew was hosting Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison for a private reception at his home with a number of pastors from around Houston and Texas.

Obviously attendance was extremely limited and a layperson could not be invited. How, then, does a young activist get in to such an event to hear a sitting U.S. Senator speak and field questions from just a few feet away? Dust off that old high school restaurant apron! I spent hours rushing frantically from room to room as one of the two official waiters, re-filling ice tea and ice water, collecting plates, and helping with the set-up/clean-up.

Although this might not strike some people as the most glamorous entry into politics, or especially appealing to someone who has already worked hard to earn a college degree, but I see these kinds of moments as unique possibilities that are off-limits to activists in older age demographics.

Of course, strategically wearing ties that signify your links to the star speaker's alma mater never hurts either.

Believe it or not, you can leverage your generation's general apathy and lack of political participation in order to serve as a sort of liaison, a "youth representative" whose concerns and opinions are sought after by other factions in the local party apparatus (hey, credit card companies already know how important we are!)

When I was a senior at UT, I started my political blog for young Texans over at Red Hot Texans. That eventually led to me writing this online column for Ultimate Fort Bend, and that led me receiving an invitation from the West Fort Bend County Republican Women's Club to serve on a media panel during a huge February candidate panel as a representative of the Houston Chronicle.

At twenty-three years-old, I got the chance to grill local Fort Bend candidates running for positions as important as judge and district attorney. Not only that, but the freedom of the platform and my "angle" as a concerned young person gave me the ability to try to ask some of the direct kind of questions you so rarely see on TV or in magazines.

Of course, all of this is just what you can do as a single young person operating independently. If you work together as a unit with other friends and family your own age, you can achieve even more to try to have a say in your community and to make sure the needs of your generation are heard and addressed.

In this column I've written before about the explosive growth of the Fort Bend County Young Republicans within the last half-year. In the limited snapshot below you can see just a few of the candidates for public office and GOP elected positions that attended our early February meeting in Sugar Land.

Any time is a good time to start your community involvement and your life in Fort Bend politics. At the meeting in the picture, the FBYRs announced candidates running for the organization's officer positions.

One of our newer members, who was not a part of the organization when we started it in August/September, had been really involved in his new precinct and decided he wanted to dedicate more time to the Young Republicans.

He threw his hat into the ring for the position of Chairman of the group, after which our prior leader Armando Lopez informed everybody that he would actually like to step down since he had the heavy responsibility of raising a young child and working full-time.

Travis had only been a part of the "scene" a few months and, with a little drive, was suddenly about to step into leadership position in one of Fort Bend's most active grass-root groups.

It all just goes to show that hard work and initiative, and not age, determine how much of a say you have in local politics and how active you can be in your county!"

Young Conservatives of Texas 30th Annual State Convention, Austin, April 9-11 2010

I've always wanted to go to the annual state convention for the Young Conservatives of Texas, and was bummed last year when I was already in Germany at that time. Although this year I had to split my attention between the conference and the UT Honors Day Ceremony on the other side of campus (go lil' sis!), I really enjoyed the atmosphere and speakers that I did get to observe. The event was held at the new UT hotel on MLK street in Austin on the south side of campus, and most of the attendees were located in the hotel for their stay and probably got to enjoy a really nice environment of camaraderie (something you don't always get to enjoy as a college-aged conservative, even in Texas!)

I got to see Michelle Malkin come back to Texas (you might remember my coverage and videos of her speech to the Foundation For Life banquet in Sugar Land last November from my "Life Support" article). She gave an excellent and sometimes very personal speech about political correctness on college campuses and told us some stories of her own experiences with the unintentional racism and loaded views of the political left. One great example was her college "Asian" dorm, where she automatically got stuck in a dorm full of Asian girls because the housing organizers thought that she would naturally feel the happiest being grouped with a bunch of young, left-wing "fellow" students of Asian decent and "culture."

Michelle was very friendly and supportive of the young conservatives, and also gave some examples from her own life of what it's taken to become successful and the hard work something requires. She emphasized that she was so supportive of groups like YCT because young conservatives emphasize in their ideology and their rhetoric that hard work and individual discipline are keys to success, principles that have guided her as the second-generation descendant of Filipino immigrants.

Jame O'Keefe was also a featured speaker. I was a little wary just because of the mass amount of criticism I've seen him get from liberals online and in print, but (despite his occasional self-promotion) I did actually learn a great deal about his activities and undercover journalism work during his presentation that I'd never heard mentioned from either his supporters or his critics. I'd always been under the impression that his ACORN bust had been based just on videos from one or two locations, sites that his left-wing opponents derided as cherry-picking. However, it turned out that in his initial investigation, he got damning video footage from virtually every different stop...I think we were shown clips from six or so ACORN locations, maybe more. We also saw some incriminating pieces from his Planned Parenthood investigations. James pointed out that even media outlets that showed some support or gave him a chance to say some words rarely showed or mentioned most of his different actual videos. He also mentioned some stunts he's pulled on Republican politicians that I'd never heard about, and gave the indication that he actually sits on a lot of footage for months or years until he's ready to reveal it as an inclusive piece. Overall I left his part of the day feeling that his planning and variety of approaches were more professional as a journalist than I'd originally thought...even if his latest stunt in Louisiana did land him in legal troubles that he still couldn't talk about as of the YCT convention.

Upcoming Events

There's really only one upcoming event I want to plug to any visitors- the 2010 "Campaign Bootcamp" by the wonderful New Politics Forum.

The New Politics Forum (NPF) at The University of Texas at Austin is hosting an intensive political training program for undergraduates across Texas this spring and registration is almost full!
Only eight spots remain. Register today!
When: Friday-Sunday, June 4th-6th, 2010
Where: The University of Texas at Austin

The training schedule is completed. Political leaders and professionals have been invited and confirmed. The training focuses on the practical, and includes topics like:
Polling and Targeting
Politics Online
Fundraising Strategies and Skills
Getting your Message Heard
Participants will also have the chance to network with other young political leaders and professionals who will share the keys to their success.

To view the full schedule, visit www.newpoliticsforum.org

Conservatives Heat Up Fort Bend in 2010

2010-01-19T12:55:00.002-06:00

December was a weird time in Sugar Land...

Hello Red Hot Texans (and Houston Chronicle) readers! Long time no see. Although usually I update at least once if not several times a week, you haven't heard from RHT since November. Since then we've been subject to freakishly cold weather, the mall-mad Christmas season, trying to get home safely on New Year's Eve, and now a whole new year and various campaigns to boot. Precinct and other filings were turned in weeks ago, and today a very important special election goes down in in Massachusetts.

With steadily increasing traffick to this website, both from regular readers and from new ones constantly streaming in, why take so long to bring more news? Well, this website, despite having a long-term goal of adding several writers other than just me, always has been and always will be at least partially a portrait and record of what life as a young conservative is like in Texas. To that end, if you only want the latest local political gossip, feel free to skip down to the red news bulletin.

As for everyone else, close friends and family will know that I've had a hectic last few months. First, my role model and "American grandfather" that I wrote about here in 2008, "Daddy Joe" Reynolds, passed away. He was the only reason my family was able to come to America and stay here throughout the ordeal with our state's immigration processing buffoonery, and without him I would not be a United States citizen today. His life story and many sacrifices are what first inspired me when I was very young to learn about my adopted homeland and become interested in public service and politics. Thanks for inspiring me, and rest in peace Daddy Joe.

Second, along similiar lines, I also wanted to follow in his footsteps in becoming a lawyer some day, and to that end I have been taking intensive LSAT classes four times a week since December first. These are always scheduled during the week for the exact same days that most organizations here in Fort Bend have their meetings and events. This is also why I suddenly went from attending every single Young Republican event to attending almost none. I take the LSAT February 6th, which is in just a few weeks. I am extremely nervous and have yet to hit my target goal on any practice tests. Needless to say for the next twenty days or so, I will be focusing much more on studying and practicing than on anything else.

Third and finally, by the beginning of January I was able to send off ALL of my documents for my application for the TransAtlantic Master's degree program at UNC/the Free and Humboldt universities in Berlin, Germany. This includes me suddenly learning that on top of studying for the LSAT, I had to take the GRE last-minute in the end of December! I also applied for one accompanying fellowship at UNC and one from the city-state Parliament of Berlin. In order to make this a reality, I need to both be accepted and to get at least one of those two extremely generous fellowships. The chances are slim and nerve-wrecking, but I also wrote here on RHT a year or two ago that I never thought in a million years that I would be one of the Americans to get an IPS Fellowship...and then promptly ended up spending half of last year working at the Federal Parliament in Berlin! It just goes to show, like my uncle Marc's sword-fighting teacher in Switzerland tells his class, "Never give up until success!"

Life has also occasionally thrown some fun my way. I went with my family to one of the two Alamo Drafthouses near us in Houston (some Austin habits never die) to see the Longhorns play for the national BCS football championship. Although we were tragically cursed with the same sort of universal injustice and bad luck that hosed us via BCS nonsense on last year's chance at the Big 12 Bowl, I had a blast just going out, eating junk food, and taking a breather from everything. Special thanks to the Alamo waiter who reserved seats for me like I asked!

Now that all that's out of the way, let's take a look at what's been happening in conservative circles recently here in this little corner of Texas.

Fort Bend Politics New Year Round-Up

The Fort Bend GOP released its first e-Newsletter in December, featuring a great deal of useful information and including a little blurb about the Fort Bend Young Republicans written by yours truly.

The Spirit of Freedom Republican Women's Club also released its January 2010 newsletter recently, which includes the instillation of new officers. Tina Gibson is the new President of the Club, which is interesting because the President in 2009 was Babs Miller, and Mrs. Gibson's husband Mike Gibson is now also challenging Mrs. Miller's husband and incumbent Fort Bend GOP Chairman Rick Miller in that contest.

From my own limited experience since returning to Fort Bend last August, both men are extremely active and have been nothing but helpful to young conservatives such as myself. This means we will likely get a lively contest with great candidates in the coming months.

Spirit of Freedom is itself off to a good start. On the morning of Friday the 15th I drove to Spring Creek Barbecue (the Club's new meeting place) to see the forum/debate for District Attorney featuring incumbent John Healey and his two Republican opponents, Nina Schaefer and Richard D. Raymond. Just as with the first of these debates covered here recently in Zen T.C. Zheng's article, the fight and rhetoric were in full swing.

District Attorney Healey repeatedly touted his successful track record, new initiatives, and many years of experience with the job. He left a number of attacks from his opponents (regarding certain cases or office decisions) go answered, while the two challengers in turn did little to address the examples of success that Healey mentioned. Nina Schaefer touted her experience in several key areas of law, while Richard Raymond mentioned his own management and business experiences.

The Fort Bend Young Republicans are also lighting up the scene left and right, including open events such as a Social Mixer Super Bowl Football Pot held on the 18th at Buffalo Wild Wings near Cinco Ranch. They also recently hosted a watch party during the gubernatorial debate, turned out participants for important events hosted by conservatives in the Katy and other nearby areas, and have elections of their own coming up soon.

In my opinion one of the biggest causes of the FBYR's large turn-out and skillful west-Houston event-coordination has been the new group's rapidly growing Facebook group, which will probably hit 150 members before the end of this month.

For young students and professionals, the ability to keep track of community events and share breaking national and local political news on the groups Facebook Wall has been a real help. Feel free to join the group yourself if you wanted to be notified of regular events without having to constantly search them out yourself.

The Fort Bend County Tea Party has also been putting on activities almost non-stop. Recently they hosted Kimberly Fletcher, founder of the Abigail Adams Project, at the Sugar Creek Country Club. This past Saturday they also helped organize carpools to get people up to the Nullification Rally at the state capitol, and on Thursday January 21st they will host a "Convention 101" seminar at the Town Center La Madeleine's from 6:30 to 8:00 P.M.

The purpose of the meeting will be to discuss:

-Why attend the conventions
-Precinct convention
-Senate district convention
-Strategies
-Committees and volunteer opportunities
-Parliamentary procedure

They are asking that anyone who would like to attend please RSVP at rsvpfbctp@gmail.com as there are only a few spots left. I can say from personal experience that when I attended a FBC Tea Party event there in August we had standing-room-only.

And finally, very importanly, do not forget about the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner on January 29th! I don't know how many tickets are left, but I recommend getting yours soon.

That's all from Red Hot Texans for now. See you soon!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-30T15:52:00.001-06:00

Hopefully you had a good Turkey Day and survived Black Friday and the related madness bleeding well into today (including, for us gamers, late nights camping out in front of Fry's or checking out the sales on Steam). With how much Fort Bend's population grows every year, at this point I'm afraid to go near First Colony Mall on that weekend in anything short of zombie-killing survival gear like a face mask, a baseball bat, and body armor. Every year you read about senior citizens being trampled in a toy store because some mom went crazy trying to reach a Tickle Me Tamagotchi or whatever, and I refuse to become another statistic.

Concept art for popular games Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead 2, or actual pictures from Town Center on Black Friday weekend? You decide.

The weekend did bring some good news, such as the Longhorn victory bringing them 12-0 towards the national championship from which they were cheated last year. Otherwise, the end of of November has been pretty slow in terms of events online and offline. A short while ago Hannah Giles had an event with the Spirit of Freedom Women's Club here in Fort Bend, but sadly I wasn't allowed to take pictures or record any video. At least our little county in Texas is seeing a steady line of active and nationally-known conservatives visiting us and giving us their support.

One nice development was seeing my name in print in the Houston Chronicle on Thanksgiving day, on the front page of the Fort Bend insert: "Views From the Right: Fort Bend conservative Nick Wenker writes about issues facing the county. Read more at www.ultimatefortbend.com/communitybloggers"...I even got a big American flag button graphic. Pretty nice surprise.

Speaking of which, another article of mine called "Is conservatism on the rebound in Fort Bend?" is now up at Ultimate Fort Bend. I write a little about my thoughts concerning the movement of young back back to the county, and why so many of them are getting or have been active in conservative politics. We've seen a lot of success and growth with the Fort Bend County Young Republicans and had a ton of people at our social mixer last week. Right-wing politics in Fort Bend are a lot more fun when you've got an expanding circle of friends working along with you, and it'll be interesting to see where the people in our current group is ten years from now.

Without further adue, here's what's coming up in December...

As usual, please contact me if you would me to mention your organization's upcoming events!

Upcoming Grass-Roots Events and Planned RHT Coverage:

Fort Bend GOP Annual Golf Tournament

Host: Fort Bend GOP
Date: Monday, December 7th

Visit the Fort Bend GOP website for more info

Fort Bend County Young Republicans Monthly Meeting with ACT! for America

Host: Fort Bend County Young Republicans
Date: Tuesday, December 8th
Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Location: Kim Son Restaurant
Street: 12750 SW Freeway
City/Town: Stafford, TX

We'll be eating dinner together while listening to guest speakers Saul and Susan from the local chapter of ACT! for America, which fights against political correctness in the War on Terror.

Fort Bend County GOP Annual Christmas Party

Host: Fort Bend County GOP
Date: Thursday, December 10th
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Prosperity Bank in Sugar Land
Street: 14060 Southwest Fwy
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX

Fort Bend County Young Republicans Social: Movie Night!

Host: Fort Bend County Young Republicans
Date: Monday, December 14th
Time: 6pm
Location: TBD
Street: TBD
City/Town: TBD

We're going to go see The Blind Side and eat dinner together and hang out for the night.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to click the button on the top right side of the screen to join our growing Red Hot Texan Facebook group!

Change You Can Participate In: America's Future & You

2009-11-15T22:39:00.007-06:00

A whole generation got a McJob / And the light bill still ain't resolved

See the hungry mob pulse and throb / If you got a blacklist I wanna be on it

If we’re gonna attack this then we need to run it / If you see my hood man

You might call it ghetto / Politicians are puppets y’all, let's get Gepetto

…

And I may not be able to predict my demise / But you can bet it won't be on my knees

I'm rapping at the speed of the falling dollar / They got greed to make you crawl and holler

It's old school like Easy-E's impala, Ay! Ay! / You gonna lead or smoke trees and follow?

Let's fight! Let's smash! Let's win!

We’re gonna fight! We’re gonna smash!

Let us in! Let's fight! Let's smash! Let's win!

-Street Sweeper Social Club, "Fight! Smash! Win!"

2009 is a year most of us will never forget, and I'm not saying that just because I had all of my wisdom teeth taken out a few days ago or because my car got broken into this morning. I would like to take this occasion to offer unto my decedents the fall of the dollar as their cultural inheritance just as previous generations rendered unto me the Berlin Wall and the Shah of Iran as worthy sacrifices.

Of course I know I'm not the only one. Now, I've said before that I'm not a big fan of the hype that we're mysteriously sliding into a country that is somehow simultaneously run by Marxists and Nazis. I feel that this sort of stupidity distracts from the real, permanent dangers we're facing, including but not limited to the destruction of our currency, the century's emerging totalitarian superpower holding all of our vast debt, the potential elimination of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, the plummeting future living standards of Americans, and the permanent reduction of our military capacity leading directly to the end of the Pax Americana that's protected the world from China, Russia, and military juntas ranging from South America to southeast Asia. Even with massive Muslim migration, in a few short decades Europe will only represent 4% of the world, and the recent invasion of Georgia demonstrated that the EU/OSCE are useless when it comes to preventing the military expansion of regional empires like the Russian Federation. Hell, this year Russia finally updated its official foreign policy security strategy and spelled out its goals until 2020, and basically came and flat out said that it's going to wage wars to secure energy resources near its borders and in the Artic. Meanwhile China will soon be at the point where it has its first aircraft carrier out the door, Australia is chained to the People's Republic as a trade partner and raw materials provider, Japan has been suffering from economic syphilis for two decades running and still has that constitutional wall against having an actual army, South Korea can't go anywhere with the world's most militarized country on its border, and India is stuck next to the world's most populous and armed banana republic. The only thing keeping the twenty-first century from looking like World War II and the Cold War mixed together in a Margaritaville blender is nuclear weapons, and with the wild card of trans-border Islamic terrorism even that isn't a sure bet. We've got all the big countries are fighting to get the most sophisticated military satellites into orbit, Uncle Sam has been bombing the moon, and the libertarians are trying to move into floating city-states off the world's coasts (more on that some other time). It's LITERALLY like watching the people in charge around the globe play real-life Risk 2210 A.D. with the whole planet, and you and your family are just along for the ride.

And people are worried about microchips in government vaccines and whether Obama is a secret Muslim? Are you freaking kidding me?

Migration to ocean-cities, nukes hitting the moon, and global energy wars a lot more fun to see in your college apartment than in the morning paper...

So what can you, the average American, do about it all? Obviously there's not much that you personally can do to keep China from invading Taiwan. But what you CAN do, what you SHOULD do, is to involve yourself in your democracy and to become involved in civic activism. Protest and free speech are your rights as an American citizen. While there was a bit of an elitist element in our roots (rich white male landowners sure were given a lot of the power), even back then the basic IDEA and blueprint our founding fathers laid out for the future of this new country involved lots of separate, largely autonomous states and communities where people could control their own destinies at town halls and otherwise live and work freely on farms or in craftsman's shops. Since our original foundation, all three branches of our federal government have seen fit to expand their powers beyond their constitutional mandates at every possible opportunity using all sorts of creative and tricky methods, constantly trying to one-up each other, the states, and you as the American citizen. From the 1803 Marbury versus Madison decision to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin and 1973 War Powers Resolutions to Congress destroying the 10th Amendment in the 20th Century to Dick Cheney claiming in 2007 that the Vice President is not a part of the Executive Branch, our government is a flying circus that would make Monty Python blush. As I've said before, as someone who's fiercely Swiss and fiercely Texan I am particularly in favor of power to the people, but I know from first-hand experience that many in my community and in this country feel the exact same way that I do.

I don't like to take cheap "It's all them versus us" shots most of the time, but in case of the federal government as an institution it really is true. Now, I accept that in a country with hundreds of millions of people, every culture on earth, fifty states and several territories, and the biggest geo-political reach in history, there are some problems or issues so big and complex that they can only the US government can deal with them. If we'd seen a record in the last two decades of competent leadership and public service from the federal government when it enthusiastically volunteers itself to tackle these issue, MAYBE I could force myself to support expanding the power of the federal government in a limited way or approving a gigantic spending bill if it was so perfectly budgeted and implemented as to be unassailable. Maybe.

But that's not what America has seen. Clinton had an epileptic disaster of a foreign policy and tried to ram a White House health care bill down America's throat. Republicans took over Congress in the 90s and promised to demolish the oligarchy with balanced budgets, the destruction of pork barrel spending, and to impose term limits to eliminate incumbents that are in bed with special interests and almost impossible to throw out of office. Instead they looted the vaults, infuriated off friend and foe alike in the rest of the world, botched Katrina, got into (stayed in?) bed with big businesses and the health insurance industry, and went into Iraq and Afghanistan without comprehensive reconstruction plans. Since 2006 and the 2009 presidential election the Democrats in Washington have been huffing and puffing to catch up in the race to the bottom, constantly breaking their solemn promises on posting things online (and allowing debates) days before voting to pass any bills, passing a catastrophic 787 billion dollar stimulus bill where most of the money either wasn't spent in time or went directly into pork for Democrats and their pet constituencies, initiating a cash for clunkers plan that ended up tossing money out the window so Americans bought foreign cars, and moving cap-and-trade legislation that was damaging enough to hurt economic growth but so stuffed with coupons for Democratic lobbyists that all the big polluters got out free, resulting in a bill did really did nothing to fight pollution.

Now we're looking at a 1.2 trillion dollar health care bill that got snuck through on a late night and without the promised transparency, and barely got through a House the Democrats themselves control. It's so bad they can barely get it through the Democratic-controlled Senate. Keep in mind that current government-run health care programs are insolvent and a mess. Even a rich country like Switzerland, with a very stingy TIERED universal health care system, is having trouble meeting the Utopian UHC dream financially sound. Here in this country, famous for people buying themselves iPODs and athletic shoes and cars and houses they can't afford, families like mine that are fiscally conservative and save its money are expected to pay for a stranger's health care? And they can keep running up luxuries on ten credit cards? And while everyone in my family exercises and hunts for vitamins and minerals and uses self-restraint with tasty foods so we don't have everything in our body failing, we have to pay the health care bills for all those Americans who stuff their faces with fried food every day and end up in the hospital at 400 pounds raking up massive health care bills they can't pay? Whatever happened to individual responsibility in this country? The massive explosion of laziness and consumer goods in this country during the 20th century have placed us in the perfect position for American socialist dreamers to finally spring their beloved nanny state on us. This is obviously something that the self-sustaining cultur of America has always been dramatically opposed to, which is why you need moments of great crisis (the 1930s or 2009) to quickly shove through big-government changes that redefine the obligations of the tax-payer and the government.

A lot of ordinary people lived on credit for lifestyles they couldn't support, but at the end of the day, the crisis in the American economy and the resulting situation in the world are the direct result of decades of elected politicians and heads of special interests gaming the system for short-term votes and short-term profits. It all started right here in America, when those with the most power exploited the fact at everyone else's expense.

And now, if you're happy with the people in Washington spending not just your money but the future incomes of your kids and grand-kids on legislation that's so stuffed with election-focused goodies for special interests that they do nothing to solve the problems they're supposed to fix, stay home. Vote for the same big spenders we have now the next time you go to the polls. If you want to do something about it, get off your butt once or twice a week and meet other energized Americans and change things yourself. As we've seen in the last few months, local populist voices against national elitist arrogance are heard loud and clear even in Washington. And let's never forget that involvement in local and state issues translates into a lot more power to transform your own destiny than "change you can believe in" with the toss of a presidential ballot.

You don't have to like Glenn Beck in order to support or join Tea Party or similar grass-roots movements (I sure don't). You don't have to be a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or an Anything. You just have to give a damn about what's happening to your country, and want a bigger say in what D.C. does with your future.

Opportunities like this are rich right here in Fort Bend County. On Thursday I went to the La Madeline in Sugar Land Town Center to go to the special "How to Become a Precinct Chair" seminar put on by the Fort Bend County Tea Party. I thought it was great that the group was putting on presentations and getting guest speakers to 1) empower any ordinary citizens that wanted to show up and 2) empower them with something that is actually useful, important, and difficult to learn on your own quickly. We also learned about some of the other grass-root organizations springing up in Fort Bend. One woman mentioned that she was starting a chapter of a national group originally organized by a middle-aged mom, and some friends of mine are getting involved with the new One If By Land Society. The point is, it doesn't HAVE to be the Tea Party or any other group or any particular person. If any one individual or organization were the magical solution to all of our problems and then I could toss my own brain out the window, I'd already be warming up my 2012 vote for Obama. You can even start your own group. The point is to do something and to get together with someone from your community or your state to make yourself heard...to start exercising some degree of influence and leverage over the people and institutions in the capitol that are otherwise free to make all of this country's decisions FOR you.

As to the meeting- I don't know if I was more surprised by how much important information I received in such a short amount of time, or by the very refreshing and clear-headed political sentiments that all of the people at the event expressed during and after the lecture.

We had an excellent guest speaker from Harris County who walked us through the basics of what we needed to know in order to get more involved in Fort Bend County. She was very careful to keep it as non-partisan as possible, since the idea with Tea Parties and other groups is to unify people with similar civic concerns about the power and direction of the government, rather than to rally people in the community behind any particular political party or politician. You can be a liberal concerned about big-government eminent domain powers and still fit into the movement, or a libertarian concerned about federal spending, or a conservative concerned about D.C. forcing itself on the states. The people participating in the protest movements or working together on this issue as a part of the community are more than free to disagree with each other on other issues. The presenter was therefore very careful to phrase things in the right way...for example, "In my particular political party in my county, it worked like so and so..."

We talked a lot about how precinct chairs are elected and what their responsibilities are, and how they fit into the picture of the county political party. It was interesting to see how the Fort Bend GOP and Harris County GOP in many instances operated identically and in many other instances had completely different rules. It just goes to show how important it is to get to know your own county well. Some counties have lots of vacancies in one party or another and so can easily send someone to the state senate (or a higher level) of convention after electing next-round representatives from the initial precinct convention. Fort Bend is extremely active on at least the Republican side so we have a lot more competition in sending people to the increasingly tighter levels, up to the state convention. It's also interesting that the amount of delegates that you get to the state convention is dependent on the number of people who voted for the winning candidate for governor in the previous election. At least that's how it was explained, and the actual details might vary some. But still bizarre. The devil really is always in the details. On the GOP side we also had changes recently in order to get up to 15,000 people to the state convention, which would make us the largest state political convention in the country. Hey, I'm all for it. Texas should always be #1. I'm also biased because ever since I was in high school I've wanted to go to the Republican state convention in Texas as a delegate.

We also learned about issues surrounding election day in primary elections, such as instances where only one party has a precinct chair and you need volunteer poll watches from the other party to prevent shady business. Or the fact that you now can't be the overseeing election judge in your precinct if you are opposed in said primary. We also had an discussion regarding how zoning and residential properties can affect the voter demographics of your county and precinct, and how you can influence that process. Very pragmatic, concrete, real-world stuff that everyone who cares about their community should really learn sooner or later.

Speaking of which, if you want to find your precinct, you can hunt for them on these maps here. You can also find your GOP precinct chair on this link here.

The political aspect of the meeting and its participants was also really surprising because I heard so many things that I'd been waiting so long to hear and didn't expect that night. A lot of other people complained about the shrinking conservative tent and blood-letting between the different factions that should be standing together in tough times like this to combat the growth of government and top-down decision-making. It's impossible to replicate here the entire discussion we had, but essentially the many different individuals and couples who had made the time to come out that night shared their opinions and experiences on the importance of separating fiscal issues and social issues. I was surprised that our guest speaker jumped on this so enthusiastically and so early on- "social issues are divisive." Just the night before I had been chatting online with a young friend of mine from UT who launched into a huge talk about how the Republicans had been hijacked by the religious right and how those people were purging everyone else from the party because of social issues, how the GOP couldn't possibly redeem itself, and how as a result he didn't feel right identifying as a Republican anymore despite being opposed to big government, wasteful spending, and the entitlement mindset. I'd heard the same thing from many young conservatives before, and saw it again a few weeks ago at the Students for Liberty conference at UT where some speakers and organizations tried to convince the next generation of anti-government activists to become Libertarians with big-Ls and roundly denounced the excesses of the modern "conservative" movement. Others at the Tea Party evening discussed the need to reach out more to minorities and to not be afraid of going into new neighborhoods to get people involved in the conservative movement who share those values without being aware of it. The fact is, the original authentic anti-government pro-autonomy conservatism isn't going anywhere in the future without diversifying, stopping the hemorrhaging of young voters to Obama moonshine revivals and third-party splinter movements, and putting a halt to the excessive reliance on social issues as the party platform. This is the defining crux of future challenges that will determine whether or not ordinary people and their communities will be able to take back a degree of authority and power from the people in D.C. and determine their own futures.

Like the guest speaker said at the end of the evening (to paraphrase), "I'm a social conservative, but unless we start regulating divisive social issues to where it's appropriate so we can get everyone together in the call for fiscal conservatism, we're going to be argung about abortion while living under bridges."

So...

...What are YOU going to do to become a part of your country?

Life Support: Michelle Malkin/Foundation For Life, Sugar Land Town Center, 9/14/09

2009-11-09T14:30:00.021-06:00

"Getting out of the beltway was the best thing we ever did. And when we moved we
narrowed it down to two final choices- Colorado Springs or Sugar Land!"
-Michelle Malkin on moving out of D.C., 9/14/09

Although she made the wrong choice on where to re-settle, Michelle Malkin is usually exactly right...both in terms of her commentary as a pundit as well as to where she stands on the political spectrum. I've always loved her on Fox News (and believe me I don't like everyone on Fox News), and I'm very happy to see young, articulate conservatives storming the way for the future of our movement in the United States. Her success and background and the types of people in attendance at the Foundation For Life banquet on Saturday where she was the keynote speaker all led me to ponder more on what a future conservative coalition is going to look when the people in my generation are the working adults in this country (right now in this economy most of us 20-somethings are NOT-working adults...). Her parents came from a Philippino Catholic background and she stuck with her principles throughout her time at Holy Spirit Roman Catholic High School and then attendance at a far-left college. Afterwords she slowly built up a career in journalism and pushed her way up on her own merit. Now she runs two of the most if not the most successful conservative blogs, michellemalkin.com and hotair.com.

This leads me to really wonder what role Catholics of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds will play in the future of the GOP and in Texas politics. Some of the people at the table with me that night were Hispanic and told me that they expected that in the future culturally conservative Hispanics will identify much more strongly with the Republican Party and its position on a number of issues. I completely agree, and I think it just depends on how much the immigration issue overshadows things in the future. I think that once even more Hispanics are in the in the middle-class and even more grow opposed to illegal immigration in general, you will see a large re-alignment. And of course, you still have the Catholics of Asian/European/African/etc. background. Here in Houston I had a good number of friends growing up who went to Strake Jesuit or St. Agnes, and I know that there are some really active Knights of Columbus chapters. I think it will be very interesting to see in the next couple of decades where Catholics throw their political support and how much the pro-life movement has to do with any re-alignments.

Perfect case in point- while we were at the banquet, several people (including me) were nervously checking phones to see what was happening with the late-night health care bill Pelosi was trying to quickly sneak through the House. So much for the promises from the Hope Administration and House Democrats that everything would be online for days beforehand in full for the public to view before any vote, that everything would be played out patiently and carefully in D.C. in full view of C-Span, or that everything would cost 900 billion max (1.2 trillion dollar health care catastrophe incoming). The House Democrats barely pushed through Pelosi's extreme-left bill in a chamber they dominate vote-wise, squeaking through 220-215.

The only, in fact, it passed at all was because Pelosi was forced to accept a last-minute amendment to the legislation powered forward by pro-life Democrats such as Catholic politician Bart Stupak, appropriately named the Stupak Amendment:

A crucial barrier to the bill was eliminated when the House passed an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), a pro-life Democrat, by a vote of 240 to 192. Stupak's measure would prevent insurance companies from participating in the new government exchange if they also cover abortion. It would also require women enrolled in the exchange to purchase supplemental abortion insurance with private funds if they want to be covered for the service in the future.

Speaking on the House floor Saturday, Stupak called the existing House bill a "direct assault" on existing limits to federal funding for abortion, but pro-choice Democrats lined up in staunch opposition to his effort. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) called Stupak's amendment "an insult to millions of American women," while Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said, "To say that this amendment is a wolf in sheep's clothing would be the understatement of a lifetime. If enacted this will be the greatest restriction on a woman's right to choose in our careers."

Although Pelosi initially resisted the Stupak amendment, the congressman had garnered commitments from more than 40 fellow pro-life Democrats to derail the entire health reform effort without stricter abortion language in the bill. Despite Stupak's victory Saturday, opponents of his measure vowed to strip it from the final bill in the conference committee.

However, this week we're already wondering whether this piece of conscience-reassuring (or in the case of some House Dems from moderate non-Pelosi districts, political cover) piece of legislation is going to get butchered by the extreme left with more closed-door parliamentary tricks and horse-trading that's become symbolic of our current Congress. Now that the health-care bill has passed, we have some Democrats in the House coming on the record as saying they'll just strip the language in committee. And now Planned Parenthood wants to ratchet up the pressure on Pelosi and Obama too. We'll see what ends up passing in the Senate. I'm usually a pessimist, but this has the potential to be a bloodbath for Democrats in normal, middle-of-the-road districts across the country in 2010.

I'm also wondering how much Obama's appointments and tzars and associates will damage the image of the Democrats in 2010. For my twenty-third birthday in September my mom gave me a surprise copy of Michelle's new book, Culture of Corruption. With a lot of excitement I took it with me to the event, thick sharpie in tow, only to feel like a naive and childish idiot when I showed up and saw how HUGE the Foundation For Life banquet was and how many people were there. "No way I'll ever get her to sign my book", I mourned. Fortunately, Michelle is a trooper and a sweetheart and set up a table outside after the event to sign copies of the book! I thought the poor woman was going to throw out her back, constantly stooping over to sign pages and then standing up to pose for pictures and then stooping down again. And UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE, she did not charge 10 bucks to sign copies of her book, Mr.-Vice-President-of-the-CATO-Institute-who-visited-UT-a-few-weeks-ago.

I'm an even bigger fan of Michelle now, since in the middle of her hectic signing and posing and people trying to talk to her, she was willing to fulfill a special request for me when signing my birthday copy of her book:

Awesome.

The banquet itself was also extremely impressive. I didn't know much about the Foundation For Life or how large the event would be. I had no idea that there would be so many people at this event from so many different parts of Houston and the state. There were nuns, teachers, politicians, former officials, and lots of ordinary Texans who felt very strongly about pro-life issues and were willing to donate or to bid to raise money for the foundation. Throughout the night, we heard a lot of moving stories about the kind of work that the foundation does, ranging from the volunteer counselors that help women whenever they need to call in to the doctors signing off on ultrasounds to the people who work at the actual office. They help the expectant mothers with pre-natal vitamins and other forms of assistance, and try to help them find a way to survive and get work and build a future if they go through the difficult task of having and raising the baby. We heard a speech from one mother who had her mind changed and received assistance from the foundation, and it was really beautiful to see her show up with her gorgeous child and to hear that the two of them just closed on their first home together.

It also impresses me that the foundation would hold their event right here in Sugar Land in southwest Houston, at the lovely Sugar Land Marriott. When I was growing up in Fort Bend and going to middle school and high school, I never would have thought that Sugar Land/Fort Bend (which were totally considered the boonies on the edge of Houston civilization when my family and I moved here from Switzerland in 1993) would end up playing such an increasingly important role in which is becoming one of the most important cities in the country. It seems that more and more cultural and political events are happening at Town Center every time I'm back here. I think the future holds a great deal in store for Fort Bend.

Michelle made an excellent and very informative speech during the banquet, and I recorded almost the entirety of it spread across three Red Hot Texans YouTube videos, featured below. I really recommend watching the whole thing.

As usual, you can also see all of my photos from the event at my Facebook political albums.

Feel free to comment on anything you've seen or read in the comments section at the end of this article!

Red Hot Texans Video: Foundation For Life/Michelle Malkin at Sugar Land Town Center 11/7/09 (1/3)

Red Hot Texans Video: Foundation For Life/Michelle Malkin at Sugar Land Town Center 11/7/09 (2/3)

Red Hot Texans Video: Foundation For Life/Michelle Malkin at Sugar Land Town Center 11/7/09 (3/3)

As usual, please contact me if you would me to mention your organization's upcoming events!

Upcoming Grass-Roots Events and Planned RHT Coverage for November:

The Republican Party of Fort Bend County and Fort Bend Young Republicans Combined Meeting

Host: Fort Bend GOP/Young Republicans
Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 (today!)
Time: 6:15
Location: Safari Texas (in the back)
Street: 11627 FM 1464 Rd (just north of SF Austin High School)
City/Town: Richmond TX

Fort Bend County Tea Party "How to Become a Precinct Chair"

Host: Fort Bend County Tea Party
Date: Thursday, November 12, 2009
Time: 7:00 P.M.
Location: La Madeline at Town Center
Street: 2675 Town Center Blvd.
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX
(281) 494-4401

Spirit of Freedom Republican Women hosts Hannah Giles

Host: Spirit of Freedom Republican Women
Type: Meetings - Club/Group Meeting
Date: Saturday, November 21, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Location: Sugar Creek Country Club
Street: 420 Sugar Creek Blvd.
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX

Tickets are $45 for individuals.

I couldn't find the SFRW website so I uploaded the invitation here for anyone who wants to go.

Fort Bend County Young Republicans November Social Mixer

Host: Fort Bend County Young Republicans
Date: Monday, November 23, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 9:30pm
Location: T.G.I. Friday's
Street: 2515 Town Center Blvd
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX

Hope to see you at the events! Don't forget to click "Become a Fan of Red Hot Texans" in the top right corner of the website to become a Facebook supporter!

The Hunt for Red October: A Red Hot Texans Mega-Update

2009-11-04T14:20:00.067-06:00

"Ain't nothing gonna break my stride,
nobody gonna slow me down, oh no,
I've got to keep on moving!"
-Matthew Wilder, Break My Stride

October was a very busy month for conservatives in Texas and as well as for me personally. After several months of hard work, I sent my German Chancellor Fellowship application off to Bonn, Germany. No job was found in law or politics due to hiring freezes, and as a result I've been hitting the stores and malls of Sugar Land to try to find some way of supporting myself over the next few months...months during which I'll also be working as a volunteer driver for the Shriner Hospital for Children in Houston (I became a Shriner last month), studying for the LSAT on February 5th (signed up tody for intensive LSAT prep courses 3-4 days/week Dec-Feb , ouch), and...wait, what's this? I *also* need to take the GRE by the end of December in order to be able to apply by February for the TransAtlantic Master's Program in N.C./Berlin that I want to combine with my Chancellor Fellowship? So I'm going to be studying for two graduate entrance exams at the same time? Oh joy!

My time has also been getting vaporized with all of my drives up to Austin from Fort Bend and back every weekend- I think I've been up to Austin five of the last six weekends or something equally crazy. Being out of school, out of work, and out of spare miles on my old car, I'm sadly having to cut back and stay put in Houston for a while...which is a shame, since this weekend Austin features the Texas GOP Candidate Training seminar on Nov. 6-7.

Even better, on Nov. 14th the New Politics Forum is kicking off again with its Career in Politics seminar. I went to something similar as my first NPF event two years ago or so and it was awesome (and interestingly enough, my then-boss State Rep. Mark Strama turned out to be the sponsor who had helped the group get their room in the capital building). Since I am looking so hard for a job in a legislative office or on a campaign, it seems stupid not to go. On the other hand, my wallet is hurting from gas costs, my girlfriend recently moved out of her apartment in the city and is back in her small town (again, stupid job market!), and my little sister is still in a dorm and not an apartment of her own. Decisions, decisions. I really wish I could find an opportunity on my own already, instead of attending conference after conference. Everyone I ask tells me that my resume is just dandy, but that there's nothing they can do since all positions are taken. My time living in Berlin in the first half of this year seems to have really been when most job openings and internships got snapped up!

Oh well. At least this past weekend in Austin was a lot of fun- no politics, just living up to my annual promise to take my girlfriend to 6th Street for Halloween. Thankfully this year I didn't get hit by a crazy, pathologically lying girl in a fairy costume going 10 mph over the river on Congress. Instead I got to party it up with the entire Sesame Street crew sans Big Bird (he was probably in the VIP room).

The Republican Party in Texas and in Fort Bend also had a very busy October. Yesterday we had the big vote for amendments to the state constitution, all of which passed. I was very happy to see that #4 got voted up- I've spent a lot of time on Facebook over the last few weeks arguing in comments and threads from the Young Conservatives of Texas, since was one of the rare times where I felt that the group's position and the analysis by the (very smart) Tony McDonald and others were misguided. In any case, we'll see who was right in the next couple of years as the research funds in the state get restructured. We desperately need more Tier-1 universities and I really hope that this is enough of a push.

We also had our first post-Constitution (ours, not the state's!) meeting for the Fort Bend Young Republicans at Berry Hill's last night. It was nice to see some new faces at the meetings as well as continued visits and support from the the county GOP and other grass-roots groups in the area. But more on that some other time. Today we're having the:

Texas Politics October Round-Up

First Social Mixer of the Fort Bend Young Republicans, Kona Grill, Sugar Land, 10/5/09

The Fort Bend YRs met early in October for our first social mixer, after the success of our normal meetings. I suggested Kona Grill at Sugar Land Town Center, because their happy hour is basically all the time except a 2-hour rush period, and their pizzas, margaritas, appetizers, etc. are 50% off (and they aren't that expensive at the normal price). The food and drinks were great but sadly we had the flakiest waitress of all time (must be a Harry Reid fan) so our future socials are likely to be at other places.

I was wondering what a "social" for a cause-oriented group like ours would look like, and I was worried it would be an officer meeting lite, with planning and nothing but political talk. To my happy surprise a lot of people brought girlfriends/friends/etc., and the political talk was limited to making fun of Pelosi and events in the news. One thing I love about the new FBYRs is that we have such a mix of people in terms of age, profession, background, etc. Our first social was a huge success and we stayed a lot longer than I expected to spend out that night. I have a lot of experience founding/running/maintaining groups from high school and at the University of Texas, and I continue to be surprised by the speed of our local Young Republican chapter on every level. Not only did we start getting speakers, political training seminars, our constitution, an online presence, and so on set up right away, but we're moving very quickly towards what I consider to be the most important and difficult goal for any voluntary organization: building a sense of community. Even though I'm a political junkie, I'm starting to look forward to our various meetings more to see my new friends and to meet the new faces that are probably coming to one of our events for the first time. This ultimately gives people a more concrete reason to attend and take time out of the evening, and is going to make the elbow-grease work we'll do together during campaign season a lot more fun since we'll feel like a team.

The last thing I would add is that I continue to be surprised by the interest in the YRs from outside groups in and near Fort Bend County. Two or three times we had representatives from other organizations "swinging by" our table since they knew where we were meeting that night, including James Ives and his wife of the Fort Bend County Tea Party. I think Fort Bend presents a lot of opportunities for the people in the 18-40 YR range...not only are people who were a part of the first big wave of moves to the county in the 90's now grown and in that age range, but the last five years have brought even more young people and their families to the area. This really makes our demographic more important than it is in other places, and it's nice to see that other grass-root groups as well as the GOP itself are realizing that in the future they can't rely on a "youth vote" that is nothing more than kicking evangelical 20-somethings from the church to the booths once every two years. The outreach needs to be year-round and encompass many other kinds of young people from the gen-x and millennial age groups. I hope that this kind of approach gets copied by the GOP in Austin and around the state in the next few years. I feel that the amount of effort going into the national debate on the "real conservatives versus RINOs" talk is a huge and divise waste that should be focused on the real issue: building up the next generation of center-right voters in the country.

Fort Bend GOP Communications Committee Meeting, Sugar Land, 10/8/09

After I became the interim Communications Director for the FBYRs people from the local GOP were nice enough to invite me to the meeting for their parallel committee, which conveniently meets near where I live. I saw several familiar faces, and the meeting was exactly what I expected, which is to say simultaneously very boring and very informative. It really makes you appreciate how many people put in how many hours year-round just to prepare for something as basic as a local race (the mind boggles at the logistics of a state-wide or nation-wide race).

During the meeting I got to see a lot of discussions revolving around basic political communication issues such as newsletters, advertising fees for candidates, e-mail lists, precinct chairs, etc. What struck me almost as a paradox was that, after a lot of talk and work from the committee members specializing in different areas of the party's communication outreach, several people emphasized the fact that no county party in the state is really going to swing more than 1-2% in an election. There is really an inverse relationship with the amount of effort that a local party puts in to the result in terms of turn-out, which is frustrating in a way yet also strangely preferable to what I see in some parliamentary democracies and semi-developed democracies. At least in our situation, the vast majority of turn-out and a candidate's success in a local election or a run for Congress are in the candidate's own hands. I like this a lot more than what you see in Russia where local bosses run everything behind the scenes, or in Germany where the party basically drops candidates into regional slots, pays for all the races, and hands them 95% of what they stand for via the national platform. For me personally, it's extremely important that candidates can run as individuals and are responsible directly to the constituents rather than to local bigwigs or a national political apparatus, which is sadly the case in many if not most democracies in the world (heck, just look at Japan).

Fort Bend Young Republicans Meeting with State Representative Charlie Howard, Fuddrucker's Sugar Land, 10/13/09

My State Representative, Charlie Howard, was nice enough to come to our YR meeting to talk to us about the proposed amendments to the state constitution in the ballot in early November. I'd been getting his e-mail updates for a while while I was a student at UT-Austin and liked what I saw, so I was pretty excited to finally meet him and learn a little bit more about who represented me in the Texas House. Of course, I also wanted to know more about him because 1) I've worked in the capitol office of a state rep before and 2) as always, I wanted to hustle for a full-time legislative job. Sadly he had no openings (our government not meeting all that often is great for the state but bad for me getting a job!), but the evening talk about the amendments and the debates that the attendees got into were much, much more interesting than expected.

Charlie has been our state rep for over sixteen years and has particularly done a ton of work on bringing education to our county and improving it on a state level. He was also active on the push for a lot of the state amendments, and has been very busy the last few months on educating people about them, clearing up falsehoods that have been getting into people's e-mail boxes, and handing out materials spelling out the for and against arguments for each amendment. I liked this quite a bit, since it's exactly what I get in the mail from Switzerland- every Swiss voter gets a ballot every so often mailed to him or her, with all important issues (some from petitions) that are up for a vote summarized and with the arguments from the for/against camps as well as the government's position provided for the citizen to study. This means that almost all important decisions in the country are made directly by the voters, who can and frequently do overrule the governent after educating themselves on the issues and coming to a decision. Considering how important some of the state amendments were, and how huge of a fan I am of Switzerland's people-power system, I wish more people voted for this sort of stuff. It would be great if I could see an increase in turn-out percentage for state issues during my lifetime.

As already mentioned, all of the amendments passed, including #4- the only amendment Charlie said was really controversial, and the only one where he refused to give away his personal position. We had a nice debate about it amongst ourselves during the meeting that de-railed us for a while, something that happened to me again several times at the end of October when I talked about the amendment with other young people and students online. I'd originally planned on writing a big article for RHT just on amendment #4 and the desperate need for more tier-1 universities in Texas, but the long story short is that I think Texas is going to become the most important state in America and the national leader (as well as political bellwether) within the next decade. That kind of growth and job-creation is not sustainable without a higher education infrastructure, and more tier-1 universities (and a much improved state education system in general) are crucial to ensuring that our growth is not powered simply by low-end jobs that can easily move out of the state again. We're currently far from it, but UTD, UH, Texas Tech, etc. are going to have to improve massively in terms of education, student capacity, standards, reputation, etc. if we want Texas to permanently cement its position at the head of the pack and gain more international exposure and recognition. I don't know if this push on research funds will be enough, but it's a good start.

Fort Bend County Tea Party Call to Action Rally, Sugar Land Town Center/City Hall, 10/17/09

I finally got to go to the long-awaited Tea Party rally right here in Sugar Land. The turn-out was bigger than I expected, and there was a wide variety of ages on display. It had a family picnic atmosphere, with a lot of young couples bringing their kids along (and a couple of them carried some really great signs). There were booths set up with political materials, links to other Tea Party movements, books from the main speaker, educational pamphlets, etc. The weather was just beautiful (a trend that seems to be continuing in November), and I hope this sort of local activism becomes a permanent part of life in Fort Bend and around the country.

I didn't stick around to see Termite Watkins speak, but I did get to hear everything that Tea Party activist James Ives had to say. I recorded almost his entire speech for Red Hot Texans and uploaded it to YouTube, which you can view right below. Although I found some of the things that James had to say a little over-dramatic (a common trait with Tea Party rhetoric and events all over the country), his overall message was spot-on. It's really wonderful to see average citizens and their families take national issues into their own hands and voice opposition to the kind of "I'm an expert, I know best, let me remake the country into XYZ based on my preferences" mentality that permeates the ivory towers, liberal groups, and (although I hate to use this overdone phrase) Washington establishment of this country. When you have a country as large (in terms of geography as well as population) as the United States, you end up with a lot of think-tanks that try to address national problems from the top-down (such as issues with health care, taxation, collegiate education, and so on). Although this is sometimes a necessary evil, there are a lot of times when a small handful of people try to make decisions for the entire country just because they can and not because they should (although they themselves might think that's the case). Since these groups and individuals are located near the nexus of federal legislation (either geographically or politically or both), they can really more or less enact any kind of changes they deem fit on the behalf of everyone else. Since the Congress regularly beats the hell out of the 10th Amendment like it owes them money (national highway funds lolwut), there is really no modern alternative or opposition to this current decision-making process. The Tea Parties are really the first exception to this since maybe the civil rights movement, in that they have achieved the same difficult but crucial paradox of existing simultaneously as a local movement and a national presence. Although I don't think the Tea Parties are yet as important as they claim to be, I think they have the potential to live up to the hype if they can establish themselves as a more broad-based and permanent counter-weight of populism as a part of an equilibrium against the kind of elitist power-brokering that has run the day-to-day business for most of America since about the middle of the 19th century. We might not be an agrarian and loosely confederated country of local farmers and merchants anymore, but I'll go ahead and agree with the Tea Party people that we have moved too far in the opposite direction. Of course, as a Swiss citizen and a Texan I'm heavily biased in terms of local and state empowerment, but I think (with a few exceptions) that power is best when it is concreted as close to home as possible.

One final thought on the Tea Parties and the future of the movement: although I mentioned that the ages were pretty diverse, the rally I saw (and many on TV) were overwhelmingly Caucasian. At the end of the day, with demographics and globalization and whatnot being what they are, the tea is soon going to run out of steam if the only guy showing up to the party is Whitey McCrackerpants. Now, there's nothing wrong with white people (some of my best friends are white people!), but you can't build a national and enduring movement on just one issue or one segment of the population. If in a year or two the Tea Parties are just seen as White People Angry About Taxes, they're never going to get off the ground as much as they could. Like I said, the movement really needs to get to the core of the ideological battle here, which is about local/individual control versus group/elite decision-making. It's ultimately about power and which level of legislation occurs at what level of government (and what direction it goes in, of course). If this movement needs expands beyond the current UHC debate or taxes, it's going to fade out eventually. The Tea Parties need to expand to take in other populist issues and voter demographics across the country. I'm not sure yet exactly how I would do this if I were a leader in the movement, but I do think a good place to start would be to look at the situations where the Tea Party organizations have already intersected with the sort of struggle I've described. Take, for example, the California water struggle between enviornmentalists, politicians, and ordinary consumers and farmers. The anti-government/Tea Party movement got a chance to step in and shine on an issue that is hugely important to Hispanics in the region, and brought a lot of them out to share their voices and their signs. I think the key to success for the Tea Parties is going to be whether or not the leaders in place in local areas across the country are capable of adepting to comunity needs and regional issues that pit minorities against the government or liberal elites. For example, if I were in charge of the Houston Tea Parties, I would eventually try to expand the movement and the organization into the issue of private charter schools like the KIPP program, which are hugely succesful and popular with minorities but hated by the Democratic Party and their allies in the Teacher's Unions.

But hey, that's just me. Who cares what a twenty-three year-old has to say?

Anyway, enjoy the video!

Red Hot Texans Video: Fort Bend County Tea Party Call to Action Rally at Sugar Land Town Center 9/17/09

Fort Bend GOP Grand Old Picnic, Duhacsek Park Sugar Land, 10/18/09

The GOPicnic took place on another beautiful day in Sugar Land, as kids, giant Uncle Sams, and every politician in Texas (or so it felt) showed up at the park a little bit northwest of the regional airport. I arrived about halfway through, just late enough for them to run out of utensils for the free food and for the candy bars I stole from the children's tent to have melted into soggy extinction. Again I saw a Republican presence that was a nice mix of young families/new county arrivals with kids (who got to enjoy a lot of activities and entertainment set up for them), mid-aged professionals, and people had been in the county and the GOP for a long a time. I was amazed by the amount of people giving speeches- I had no idea how many people were running for how many positions. There were also a ton of people from outside the county whose massive districts included a PART of Fort Bend, and they all came streaming to the picnic. For a lot of those candidates we were at the very corner of the area they were running in, which only goes to show how important Fort Bend has become in recent years (our population just keeps growing). I'm very, very interested in seeing what happens to us in the re-districting effort.

Although I live just barely outside of her state senate district, I also enjoyed getting to see Joan Huffman talk. Other people also made some good comments, including one guy who said that Texas Monthly had recently predicted that Fort Bend was going to be the first big county in the state to turn blue (I haven't been able to find this online myself). Poor Charlie was still on crutches, and after the procession of long-winded sales pitches by some of the other candidates it was nice to see him keep his comments short and sweet and focused mainly on the upcoming amendments vote. I got to talk to him afterwords and he introduced me to his wife/campaign manager Jo, and she and I started up about trying to establish a sort of trial "Campaign Academy" type seminar/workshop series similar to what I've done before. I don't know yet how this is going to work or if it's going to get off the ground, but I'm happy to see that at least people are interested. The first step is going to be really growing the young conservative movement in the area, especially among the people that are college-age or moving back home after college. Jo invited me to come and be the official photographer for Charlie's big event at the aiport a few days later, and I happily signed on.

Breakfast Reception Honoring State Representative Charlie Howard, Sugar Land Regional Airport, 10/22/09

The day started off in the early morning darkness with massive amounts of rainfall battering people on the roads and as they stepped in/out of their cars, reminding me of the record pour when I went to the Hands off Texas! capitol rally (I guess the kids in the Obama song video were shimmying to a rain dance). Despite the terrible weather and my having to drive back to my house when I found out at the airport that I left my camera's battery in the wall-charger, there were a lot of people in attendance and I got to fill up with some good OJ and breakfast burritos. I'd never been inside the Sugar Land Regional Airport before, and really enjoyed getting to look around and to see the planes leaving and arriving on the tarmac past the reception area. My uncle Marc loves flying planes and we recently had one of his old teachers (who flies frequently to/from the Sugar Land airpot) and his wife at our place for dinner, so the timing seemed particularly good for me to check it out.

Apparently it's also rated the best regional airport in the country, and Charlie has had a lot to do with that. At the event he presented an award to the airport and also received an award, so between the breakfast burritos and all the honors flying about the morning atmosphere was very positive despite the rain. Friends and colleagues of Charlie's gave some short speeches about his work and personal convictions, and it really reinforced my initial impression of him as humble and hard-working above all else. I'm not very religious or evangelical myself, but with people like him you see how those kinds of convictions can affect an elected official in a pragmatic way and keep them grounded in the kind of work that they do. I think that's something that everyone in a constituency can appreciate.

Charlie had joked at our YR meeting that his wife was more popular than he'd ever be. At least, I thought he was joking until I saw the aftermath of the breakfast reception: for every one or two people trying to talk to Charlie I saw a group of four or five people wanting to talk to Jo. It's really impressive how active she is and how she's made it her business to make sure her husband's re-election campaigns run smoothly. From the amount that Charlie has done for the district and how much I saw him running around (as much as you can on crutches) trying to talk to people about the amendment, I get the impression that this lives him more free to focus on what he really cares about, which are the nuts and bolts of the legislation that moves through our state house. When I run for office someday, I hope I have the same kind of support network helping me win my campaigns!

Fort Bend Young Republicans Constitution Ratification, Sugar Land, 10/27/09

Here you see Michelle Bloom, Secretary for the Fort Bend Young Republicans, signing our brand spankin' new constitution into effect. October was completely filled with emergency officer meetings every week as we poured over the constitutions for other YR chapters in Texas to see what we wanted in our own. One thing that's been repeatedly emphasized by everyone there is that we want to see this grow into an organization that has 200-800 members or more in the county, and we therefore had to set a lot of forward-looking groundwork and account for as many conceivable future issues that we could predict. This was especially true when it came to sending delegates to the annual convention of the state YR federation, and everything was made all the more difficult by the fact that our constitution had to be finished and signed in time for the state federation's deadline at the start of November. After a lot of late nights, clueless delivery drivers, Star Trek jokes, and some phone-conferencing, we met the crazy deadline and are now officially rolling. We changed our officer positions so that there are only four main, elected positions (those that the state organization requires). There are now also a number of appointed roles to oversee specific things like fundraising, and hopefully I'll get to continue in my role as Communications Director (and hopefully that will be easier to do once our online presence is completely organized and once we get the officer -> secretary -> communications director process really smoothly in terms of our organization's announcements). All in all after the first two months or so we have a lot to be proud of, and it's going to be much easier to make things happen in Fort Bend now that we've got the groundwork set up.

You can see all of my pictures from all of the events on my Facebook album, located here.

Of course, there are several things I missed in October- The Fort Bend Conservative Club hosted KBH (I *STILL* don't have a picture with her! Gah!) and the YRs had a meeting with Claver about political strategy. I did actually take a special trip up to Austin to attend the Students for Liberty Conference and recorded a video, but I'm holding off talking about that until I can write up a separate article about the Texas and national libertarian movements. Here's what's coming up in November...

As usual, please contact me if you would me to mention your organization's upcoming events!

Upcoming Grass-Roots Events and Planned RHT Coverage:

Foundation for Life Annual Banquet featuring Michelle Malkin

Host: Foundation for Life
Date: Saturday, November 7, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Marriot Sugar Land Hotel and Conference Center
Street: 16090 City Walk, Sugar Land, TX
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX

The Republican Party of Fort Bend County Executive Committee Meeting

Host: Fort Bend GOP
Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Time: Evening
Location: Safari Texas (in the back)
Street: 11627 FM 1464 Rd (just north of SF Austin High School)
City/Town: Richmond TX

Spirit of Freedom Republican Women hosts Hannah Giles

Host: Spirit of Freedom Republican Women
Type: Meetings - Club/Group Meeting
Date: Saturday, November 21, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Location: Sugar Creek Country Club
Street: 420 Sugar Creek Blvd.
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX

Tickets are $45 for individuals.

I couldn't find the SFRW website so I uploaded the invitation here for anyone who wants to go.

Fort Bend County Young Republicans November Social Mixer

Host: Fort Bend County Young Republicans
Date: Monday, November 23, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 9:30pm
Location: T.G.I. Friday's
Street: 2515 Town Center Blvd
City/Town: Sugar Land, TX

That's it for now. Feel free to leave comments or questions about anything in this article, and be sure to check back in soon...I have a lot of cool stuff in store for visitors.

Make sure to click the Facebook "Become a Fan of Red Hot Texans" button in the top right corner!

October was awesome- let's see what the rest of 2009 brings.

Gone To Texas: A Homecoming and Politics in the Lone Star State

2009-10-06T21:57:00.053-05:00

"Take a bus, or take an ole freight train,
Thumb a ride or walk, it's all the same,
Going back where they know my face,
And I'm never gonna leave that place...
Going back to Houston, Houston, Houston..."
-Lee Hazzlewood/Dean Martin, Houston

Welcome to Red Hot Texans!

After almost a year of hiatus, RHT is back and re-launching on a brand new scale. I (Nick) came back a little over four weeks ago from living out of the country for half a year, and God does it feel good to be back in Texas. Despite my love of traveling, foreign birth, and the fact that I want to visit every country in the world before I die, I've always had this strange, certain feeling that Texas is the place where I want to live for the rest of my life. This premonition has transformed into an absolute certainty with my first experience at being a "European" again in over fifteen years, with five months of living in an apartment in Berlin and another month visiting relatives in Switzerland and southern France. Despite living a one-in-a-million dream in Germany and seeing my family and friends in Europe, I missed Texas so much my heart almost broke. I missed huge tracks of flat land as far as the eye can see in all directions under a beautiful blue sky. I missed driving home late at night and listening to R and B and Hip Hop stations from Houston while the landscape transformed from city to suburbs to country and back again before I ever hit my front door. I missed strangers working at the place where you just walked in being so friendly you feel like they're your best friends. But, most of all, I missed beef fajitas and margaritas. Desperate for some lime-green ambrosia after several dry months like a dying man begging for water, I tried twelve different margaritas in twelve different places in Europe, and each was a greater abomination than the last. One (I'm not kidding) was just a scoop of bright green ice-cream-looking goo with no tequila in it whatsoever. Sure, Europeans might have their fairy-tale castles, ancient Roger van der Weyden masterpieces, and historical revolutions in philosophy, science, and politics, but without the ability to make decent margaritas, they might as well be primitive savages living in huts and poking sticks into the ground, like malnourished zombified barbarians cobbling out a living after a nuclear apocalypse.

"Welcome to Disneyland Paris."

But back to the website- why no news since October 2008? Well, at that time I was graduating early from the University of Texas at Austin (and a year later OU still sucks!), as well as trying to smash together a 120-page honors thesis on US-European relations and generally get my then-life wrapped up. Then came a trip to D.C. for the presidential inauguration in January (more on that another time), and then moving Germany in late February. I have a LOT to say about my time there (and about 6,000 photos to prove it in my Facebook albums), but for now it's enough to say basically that YES, I *did* get the International Parliamentary Stipend fellowship I wrote about a year ago on October 25th. I was one of the ten Americans chosen by the German government for their international political program, and spent March through July living on their dime in an apartment in Berlin, working for a member of Parliament, participating in the campaigns. celebrating the country's 60th birthday at the Brandenburg Gate, visiting the different political parties, and traveling all over the country and beyond to NATO and the EU. Made short, I had the experience of a lifetime and I got to share it with my 114 now-best friends in their 20s from 27 other countries who lived, worked, and traveled with me in the IPS program.

But now all of that is over with and I am back in Texas, and I've hit the ground running. All these last couple of years working for politicians and on campaigns in Austin, Munich, and Berlin, I always loved my work but kept thinking, "MAN, this is great and all and I love helping constituents when they call in and doing campaign work, but I would enjoy this a hundred times more if I could do the same thing in my own community, with the people I know and the area I grew up in." My very first experience with politics was working several days a week after school as an unpaid intern in House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's District Office back when it was still over on Dairy Ashford, as a participant in the Fort Bend I.S.D. Gifted and Talented Mentorship Program. Although I've done some mind-blowing things and received very surprising amounts of responsibility and free reign in all of the legislator's offices where I've worked, I'll still always be surprised and influenced by the faith they placed in me when I got my first taste of public service. I basically walked in through the front door for my interview and resume follow-up at seventeen years old, and other than a brief reprimand from then-District Director Barkley Peschel for me not being "conservative" enough on the single sole issue of gay marriage (I was right at 17 and I'm still right on this today, dammit!), everything went super-smoothly and they essentially just slapped me to the desk at the very front of the office and told me that, while I was there, I was the first face and first voice of the Congressman when people walked through the door or called in. To my surprise I actually found that I absolutely loved spending my time after school talking to constituents on the phone and helping them with their problems and being involved in the community (I strongly suspect it was these sorts of things that kept me from ever being the high school prom king...).

"All of these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain."
-Roy Batty, Bladerunner

So, enough about my sobriety in Europe or the yesteryear of Sugar Land. Time to look forward towards the future of Fort Bend County, the 22nd Congressional District, and the great state of Texas! I'm finally, finally, finally home from studying international affairs in order to get my elbows deep in the business of grass-roots politics, and to quote Brad Pitt, "Cousin, bidness is a-BOOMIN!" I've come back to the Lone Star State just in time to catch the first Fort Bend County GOP Executive Meeting a few days after my plane landed (just a short hop away from my old high school over at the Safari!), just in time to get in on full-blown campaign season in Texas, and just in time to celebrate my birthday in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

23rd Birthday, Petroleum Club in Houston, 9/19/09

I really enjoyed the fort FB Republican meeting early in September, and came in not knowing anyone and having no idea what to expect. I had gone just a few days earlier to a Pete Olson campaign event to kind of scope out what political life was like these days in in the county. It was a "volunteer appreciation event", and it made me all the more bummed out that I'd missed the chance to get on board the bandwagon and help out with his campaign for the House seat when he ran. My parents called me while I still up studying in Austin and told me about a "very nice man" who showed up during the primaries block-walking door-to-door in New Territory and chatting a long time with my mom. After a good look through his website and seeing what he had to say for a while on his campaign e-mails, I jumped on-board and made sure to vote for him to get through that rough primary. Nonetheless, just gate-crashing at the volunteer event at the Sugar Land airport made me realize how much local change (I've been out of the country for a while, is it still okay to use that word?) had passed me by, including new opportunities. Now that I'm back I'm desperate to find a job in a field I love like law or politics for a year or two to support myself while studying for the LSAT and trying to get into a good law school. To that end, I basically marched right up to Pete and said, "Hi, my name is Nick, I used to work for Tom DeLay's district office, I have a lot of experience in different legislative offices, and I was wondering if you had constituent caseworker positions open?" Not surprisingly he said no, which marked the beginning of my ongoing hunt for political work in Fort Bend and Houston. Although, on an interesting side note: I found out that Ademide Adedokun, who I met at the New Politics Forum event described in my very first RHT post down at the bottom a year ago, is now working for Pete's D.C. office. Not just that, but in doing so she's working her way through school while taking courses at the same time, so hats off to her!

This meant that at the GOP meeting, which was essentially the kick-off for the year, I was really looking around to see how I could get involved as quickly as possible, ideally with something that would eventually lead to paying work. I was also curious to see what the local party was doing to get young people into the GOP and to teach them about politics and civic involvement, something that you can tell from my previous articles on RHT is a hot-button (pun not intended) topic for me. I also asked around about the Young Republicans (the 18-40 group) and started getting thoughts of re-starting it in Fort Bend after I got told it was dormant. Fortunately for me, the same night I met Armando Lopez, who had gotten on that ball a little earlier and was thankfully willing to do the work by taking the lead on that. Ditto on meeting Danielle Settles that night, who probably everybody in Fort Bend now knows and who has been busting her butt for the Young Republicans (but more on the YRs later).

Fort Bend has grown TREMENDOUSLY in just the last few years while I was at UT and in Germany, which got added to the incredible growth I witnessed from when I still lived here (hey, I remember when getting that Randalls in New Territory was a huge deal!). The county Republican Party is also experiencing a huge surge, and everything seems to be moving very quickly all across the board. I grabbed my digital camera, checked my calender ("Tuesday? Unemployed, check. Wednesday? Unemployed, check") and got to work volunteering for and documenting as many grass-root events in the county and in the state as I could!

And now, Red Hot Texans presents:

Texas Politics September Round-Up

Health Care Town Hall, Life Time Fitness, Sugar Land, 9/3/09

Mike and Tina Gibson worked very hard to privately organize a health-care town hall for the Sugar Land area, and after meeting Tina at the GOP Executive Meeting a few days earlier (and exchanging her Aggie business card for my Longhorn one!) I volunteered to come out and help the town hall event run smoothly. I arrived a couple hours early to help get the basketball court set up and stayed a good bit after the fact to make sure the place was clean, but even while moving chairs or peeling tape off the floor I felt pretty good about doing some work to get people in the community interested in the going-ons in their own country. It's one thing to talk a big game about civics and lamenting a lack of democratic participation during that high school AP government class or while writing that undergraduate thesis, and another to actually get out there and do something about it.

More importantly, the event itself was a huge success. With little preparation time and virtually no advertising, tons of people showed up, including panels of physicians and health insurers. We had TV cameras, police security, and Congressman Olson come by and it got much more exposure than expected. Contrary to what you might see on The Daily Show or other places on TV, there were no petulant outbursts or angry nutters (despite snide comments I overheard from a few of the younger people working at the place about "getting to see old people go crazy.") In fact, MANY of the people walking by the door I stationed myself at, including other Life Time Fitness employees of all ages, were really interested in the town hall as they walked by and said they regretted having other appointments at the same time, and that they would have loved to have attended if they'd known in advance. Maybe we can have another town hall on this topic half a year from now, or leading up to the mid-term elections.

The actual commentary on the health care bill during the event was a mixed bag, and light on details or actual substance on what the health care bill would entail. On one hand, this was very disappointing to me, since I've been working hard for months to inform myself on every piece of info on the legislation even since from before I came back to the states. On the other hand, as was pointed out at the beginning of the event, there IS no single "bill"....even a month later as I now write this, the Senate Finance Committee, other Senate committees, the House, the White House, etc. all have their own ideas of what the health care bill should look like, with MAJOR differences between the various camps.

Here are a just few of the highlights from the event, carefully taken down on yours truly in chicken-scratch hand-writing on notecards in-between taking pictures:

-Insurance dude: medicare and medicaid not paying fair rates. Federal government is squeezing doctors and not paying competitive rates.
-Philly and Pennsylvania show that government mandates and regulations kill competition by driving out insurance companies...in those states a healthy 25 year/old pays 200/month, in government-manhandled New Jersey it's 1000/month.
-In 1992 Congress went from paying standard fees to a federal standard, and doubling the time that doctors need to care for a patient with extra paperwork.
-In 1998 we switched to a worse system because people were living longer.
-GOP doesn't want public option competition because government can print unlimited money and subsidies to cover people (note: interesting to see now how Obama lives up to his subsequent budget-neutral promise from his Address). GOP wants to start taming current system with competition across state lines and tort reform (which the Democrats have publicly admitted they refuse to tackle because it would run into opposition to their lawyer lobby buddies who pay them wads of campaign cash).
-A lady from the insurance company said that competition across state lines wouldn't reduce costs, health care is expensive and get used to it, removing mandates would help. She and Pete Olson went back and forth just disagreeing with each other and re-stating their positions and ended up seeming like two trains passing in the night.
-Doctors: our rates have gone down for 20 years straight. How can physicians keep going with visits worth less than expenses, with 30-90 day waiting periods before something is rejected on a card, with fighting paperwork, with doctors working harder and longer and getting paid less. And the whole while insurance companies are posting higher bonuses.

To see some of the slides from Congressman Olson's presentation, you can view them at the RHT album here.

I really want to leave the discussion of health care reform for another article on another day, because it's such a complex issue (politically as well as legislatively). One point I would like to add: it was really disappointing to me in Europe when I saw Republicans in Congress swear up and down for months that they would offer a completely different, fleshed-out, alternative bill to whatever the Democrats come up with, only to go "WELP ACTUALLY WE DIDN'T FEEL LIKE MAKING A BILL AFTER ALL" I'd like to see something from the GOP to address reform that is really sorely needed, a fact that reflects that the Republican Party was already asleep at the wheel and/or in bed with the insurance industry during their chance to do something 2000-2006. I've even heard that those stacks of paper Congressional Republicans waved around during Obama's speech were just stacks of blank paper.

I've been just as disappointed with the lack of Republican clarity on what our alternate vision is as of NOW. Sure, the Democrats are incompetent and incoherent at explaining what they are trying to do with reform, but we're equally bad at promoting our message. With health care reform as with many other current political issues, I as a young conservative am very worried that the Republican Party is very quickly becoming the Party of No, criticizing or hacking at any little move that Obama makes without a positive, substantiated alternate direction championed by clear and competent national leadership. If I've learned anything from all my studies of politics and history, it's that ideologies need to stand FOR something instead of simply AGAINST something else if they really want to gain traction. Sure we can say we're "for FREEDOM!", but that phrase (and similar ones) have been so over-used and diluted in the political sphere just within my own lifetime that it's been reduced to a bumper-stick-slogan mentality and is now a frequent card for mockery by liberals. This is in great contrast to, say, the FDP party in Germany, whose "Freiheit" (freedom) calling card actually means something and is attached to a very narrow, specific, agenda and pieces of legislation.

I mean, I found more information on Republican ideas for health care reform on the Fort Bend County GOP website than I did from months of watching all sorts of TV channels and shows, reading newspaper and magazine articles and editorials, and even from scanning various right-wing sounding-board places like the National Review. What does that say about our PR management, or even our current coherency as a national political party?

Hands Off Texas! Rally at the state capitol, Austin, 9/12/09

On a more positive note, I drove up to Austin just a little bit later for the Hands Off Texas! rally at the state capital building. On contrast to the muddled health care issue, when it comes to the state of the state of Texas, I feel that the truth is very clear: Texas has done absolutely amazing under Republican leadership and Republican principles, and since the Republicans really took firm control for the first time at the start of the decade, Texas has become "hands-down" the most successful state in the country. Not surprisingly, Governor Perry is emphasizing this as much as he can in his current campaign against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison:

"In these tough economic times for our nation, it is important to acknowledge that ideas still matter. It is not arbitrary that Texas has an unemployment rate nearly 2% below the national rate, or that California's unemployment rate is roughly 4% higher than it is in Texas. Our state didn't create more jobs in 2008 than the other 49 states combined by accident. It is no fluke that Texas is the #1 exporting state in the nation for several years running.
Indeed, Texas proves that limited government, low taxes, a fair and predictable regulatory climate, tort reform, and accountability in education are more than slogans, they are the conservative successes that Governor Perry has cultivated in Texas." -Perry Campaign Website

I've been predicting this sort of future for Texas ever since my family and I moved here from Switzerland in 1993. Houston is probably going to probably become the 3rd-largest city in the United States next year, and I wouldn't be surprised if we had the Olympics sometime in the 2030s or 2040s. Growing up here and seeing how my family and I were treated, how international or diverse a lot of the schools and universities are, and simply how many people were willing to extend us friendships or the opportunities to work, it became very clear to me that someday Texas was going to topple the old geo-political power centers in this country from their pedestals. If you compare the cultural and business atmosphere of a growing place like Houston to places like New York City, Hawaii, the West Coast, etc., where the elite and their power circles have long been established and a great resistance to outsiders, it's really no surprise that we're going to be more dynamic and that people from across the world and the country have "Gone to Texas", to mimic the UT summer camp slogan. Add lots of flat, cheap land, good utility prices, a diverse industry, an overall history of great success with cultural integration, and so on, and the other states currently don't stand much of a chance of competing with our growth and the results of our conservative governmental policies for the state.

I was already getting pretty excited about this topic while I was in Berlin...a short bit before I came back, The Economist (my favorite magazine) made the ascendancy of Texas its cover story, entitled "Lone Star Rising". It's an absolutely excellent article and series, and I highly recommend everyone visiting this site going and reading it. On the right side you'll notice that there are actually five more (also excellent) accompanying articles, addressing the generalities in the introductory piece in greater detail. Those include the areas in which Texas performs poorly, namely in education and health care coverage. Granted, if the Democrats (on the state and national level) didn't sit on their asses doing nothing about illegal immigration and crooning from time to time about amnesty since both factors rocket up their voter numbers over time, our state's statistics would probably be a lot better. Nonetheless, we do clearly have work left to do and some things we aren't proud about. My ideal Texas government would have Republicans in state-wide offices and with majorities in the legislature, with a Democratic minority strong enough to push for reform and improvements in areas where the GOP would otherwise gloss over. Of course, this doesn't mean that they are necessarily always right even on those areas (follow the link from above to read more about liberal opposition to successful chart-school programs), but I think it would lead to best overall crafting of policy for Texas. The absolute WORST that could happen is that demographic changes allow Democrats to take over the state despite the success of conservatism, and they end up ruining it and running it into the ground with left-wing policies and taxation just like they did California.

For more on the rise of Texas, I recommend the articles from other sources here, here, here, and here.

As for the rally itself, it seemed very well organized and had some neat free swag and political paraphernalia centered around the protest, free of charge to pick up at the front booth (I paid a couple of bucks for the souvenir red hand pictured above). The speakers I saw were passionate and articulate and made solid points, and the numbers and enthusiasm in the crowd were very surprising considering that the rain coming down right on top of our rally was worse than I've ever seen it in Austin (and turned out it was a record). I took a 10-minute clip from from the main speakers, which you can see here. The audio and my filming are not as good as the ones from the Rick Perry series down below, but still worth a look if you are interested in seeing how these kinds of protests are organized and handled.

Red Hot Texans Video: Hands Off Texas! Rally at TX State Capital 9/12/09

Young Conservatives of Texas State Board Meeting inside the capital building, Austin, 9/12/09

After getting soaked down to my socks and chilled to the bone outside for an hour or so, I went inside to the kick-off state-wide meeting of the Young Conservatives of Texas, which is a group for people like me that is very active at universities and graduate schools across the state. Besides getting organized and hearing reports from representatives from almost all the campuses in Texas, they issue the oldest state-wide ratings/scores for legislators. Some of the most telling pieces of legislation from the last session are assembled (picked also for variety), and people's votes are recorded and in the end scores are compiled ranking the YCT approval for the various members of the state legislature. As you might imagine, this gets very complex with amendments, things getting moved around on the calender, people using tricky parliamentary procedure, etc. Luckily for YCT, the excellent Tony McDonald (on the far right in above picture) sat through many, many hours of our illustrious legislature taking notes, and many more at home getting the materials ready for us to argue through. Although most pieces of legislation got approved to be used without much controversy, there were a few interesting items that revealed some of the splits between young libertarians/pragmatists/evangelicals/etc. It was very interesting for me to see both how some of these conservative factions are still present among my generation, as well as to see how they differ from their parallels in the generations currently running the Party and at times the country.

I was very impressed by the enthusiasm and professionalism with which a lot of the young people there approached the organization and their campuses. David White apparently did a great job running the whole show state-wide for the last couple of years, and the start-off meeting I attended saw the torch getting passed to the equally-energetic Elizabeth Young. Spending a couple of hours in that YCT meeting made me really regret not having been more involved with the organization while I was a student at UT. I loved being President of the German Club and doing my internships and volunteer work, but I also feel like I missed out on the chance to enjoy some really good friendships during my time in college. Elizabeth is busy at work organizing the annual YCT state convention in the spring, which looks to be a pretty great party on a the top floor of a hotel with a view of the capital and, as always, featuring the most important people in the state Republican Party as speakers throughout the days of the event. I am really excited about this, and I'll be keeping my eyes and ears on YCT in the future to see on what the young leaders there are cooking up. You can visit the YCT website at: http://www.yct.org/

Special note: the first person that I met at the YCT meeting was a girl named Brianna Becker, who you can see second from the left above. I sat next to her for most of the meeting and cracked jokes with her, and was really looking forward to getting to know her better and catch up on lost time by making some good personal friendships with like-minded people in YCT. Less than a week later, I found out on Facebook that Brianna had tragically lost her life in a car accident near her home. She was one of the most important and active people in the organization, and it broke my heart to see her Facebook wall lined with things like professors saying how much they had looked forward to giving her that letter of recommendation for law school she had asked for. I'm still inexplicably angry about this happening even though I only got to know her for one day, and I can only sympathize with those in YCT who were her best friends. The state of Texas lost a great future conservative leader, and I think all the rest of us can do is work hard and live up to her example. Rest in peace. (Edit: the downfalls of writing until late in the morning, all in one go...big typo found in that last part, thanks readers!)

First meeting to launch the new Fort Bend Young Republicans, Fuddruckers, Sugar Land, 9/22/09

I went on Tuesday the 22nd to Fuddruckers to help kick off (notice the theme here in Fort Bend) the revival/rise of the Fort Bend County Young Republicans. To my surprise, there were actually a large number of people there...not only new as well as old members, but also a lot of grass-roots people from the county and around Houston. We had people there from the Tea Party movement, Leonard Cash from the local Rick Perry campaign, Claver Kamau-Imani from RagingElephants.org (glad to hear you recovered from stumping too hard in Austin, Claver!), Precinct Chairs, and all sorts of other local activists and figures. The amount of people interested in our 18-to-40 Young Republican group are a very nice change from my previous experiences as a young person with the Republican Party in general, and even from the first Executive Meeting people like County Chairman Rick Miller were already indicating that they were very supportive of us and in helping us grow. Likewise, we had people representing several different local groups just happening to "stop by" our FBYR social mixer earlier this week at Kona Grill (more about that some other time). We'll see if I can eventually make everyone rise up to the challenge for all the enthusiasm they're claiming by organizing a big youth-centric event in the area similar to the Campaign Academy I've written about before on this website, or maybe even using their connections and personal help to get a local RHT-based event up and running.

The event was a ton of fun and I enjoyed getting to ruin my diet by munching on some old-fashioned fries and burgers. Armando and Danielle and others did a great job getting the meeting organized and in figuring out a direction forward when we all met privately after the public portion. I'm also very happy that Michelle Bloom, who seems to know a lot about what the organization used to be up to and who to contact, is taking the charge on a couple of important matters like re-writing the Constitution, all as the new (well, currently "interim") FBYR Secretary.

On a similar note, I am now the new Communications Director for the Fort Bend Young Republicans! It's not the paid job in politics I've been ruthlessly hunting, but the work is stuff I love to do, with a virtually new organization that I'm super excited about and with people I'm growing to like very quickly...it's amazing how nice it is to socialize with young conservative my age after having been so outnumbered at UT all these last few years! I'm now responsible for the Facebook group, the twitter page, e-mail announcements, press releases, our website, group videos, etc. The position is still temporary until we approve our constitution later this month, and there's still some confusion about things like the website and e-mails and who does what since right now we are pulling together to get started fast, but I'm really looking forward to taking over that kind of work for the group on a weekly basis once we get rolling into the season.

My final thought on the first YR meeting: I was also surprised to see what kind of membership we're getting. I was sure it would be a bunch of 18 year-old white dudes. Instead we are getting a good spread of people already even as we're just starting off, mostly in the mid-20's and early 30's, in a variety of professions and backgrounds. I'm also not normally a persons to praise diversity for diversity's sake, but I do think it's very telling for the future of the Party when you look at what kind of young conservatives turned up for our first meeting. In the picture above you can see four of our five officers: a woman, an immigrant from Europe, a black woman, and a Hispanic. Claver made a speech during our meeting where he made the completely correct point that if the GOP wants to survive as a political party in the first, it has to be more inclusive and do a better job of bringing minorities into the fold. It reminded me of a great book I read during high school from a black conservative (I wish I could remember the title) who described, in great detail, how the Democratic Party is winning the war on that front with misinformation. A huge amount of black Americans have very conservative views on topics like national security, abortion, and on and on. But when the same people are asked in polls, "Which party takes a tougher line on those issues?", they still answer "The Democrats." It's like a much-bigger, much more important version of those isolated white people out in the boonies across Texas but still vote for the Democrats every time despite being ultra-conservative, simply because they don't know the platforms one bit. 95% of black Americans voted for Obama, but if you went to every household and went through a list of every issue with those voters, 95% would NOT be liberal. As the black middle class (and even upper class) keeps growing and growing in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future the majority of black Americans were technically conservative. Although I don't suppose anti-gay-marriage amendments, just the fact that the huge minority mobilization during the campaign helped to put the nail in the coffin against gay marriage in California (minorities have very conservative views on that) proves my point. Now, I've seen Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com attack this theory, but the general idea still stands: there is a huge conservative voting block waiting to be tapped in America's minorities. The current gay-marriage racial divide in D.C. proves that.

Although I don't want it to necessarily be at the expense of gay Americans, in a more positive and broader sense, I am extremely stoked about what I'm going to see in my lifetime with both political parties in the US becoming more accurately representative and diverse in what kind of people they attract.

Volunteering at the Fort Bend County GOP booth at the Fort Bend County Fair, Rosenberg, 9/27/09

I have less to say about this event, although I did have fun. I'd never been to the Fort Bend County Fair before, but what I saw over a couple of hours made me appreciate how many different events and things to do went on at these things. There's a lot of local businesses, entrepreneurs, political candidates, contest participants, etc. from the area that show up and interact, which I find to be a wonderful thing. I'm not normally a real cowboy-country kind of guy, but I did really appreciate the down-to-earth, rural influences of a county fair. You certainly don't get this sort of thing in Berlin.

Anyway, I volunteered with the GOP to man the booth at the Fair for a few hours. I had fun looking over all of the campaign propaganda from people running for local office, and I had a great time chatting with some of the people that came by. It also opened my eyes more to the intensity of the Perry-Hutchison divide among the grass-roots. Depending on who you ask, Kay is either a far-left baby-eating D.C. insider, or she's a pragmatic and successful provider for the state that we desperately need if we're going to keep the state in Republican hands and fight off the Democrats as the political spectrum moves ever-faster to the middle. Personally I like Kay a lot, but I confess that I don't know a lot about her (good or bad) other than the basics. I've also been surprised by how much I've found myself liking Perry recently (which admittedly I find hard to separate from my love of how Texas is doing and how much we kick everyone else's butts).

Through the people that came to man the booth after me, someone in the local Kay Bailey campaign got in touch with me on my cell phone and invited me to come meet her this month. Sadly, this person never e-mailed me like they said and I don't know how to reach them, so I'm worried I'll miss the chance. I'm already angry at myself for stupidly missing the Greg Abbot event (a guy that my role model "Daddy Joe" from previous articles praises highly) by getting the date mixed up. Hopefully I can still go see Hutchison and get her to pose for a "Hook 'Em Horns!" with me for RHT.

And speaking of important candidates willing to take a picture with a little old nobody like me..

Rick Perry Campaign Rally, Willie G's Seafood Restaurant, Houston, 9/30/09

Leonard Cash and Casey Christman were nice enough to invite me to Rick Perry's campaign event at a restaurant in Houston so that I could take pictures and videos for Red Hot Texans. It worked out great for me since just a short bit before that earlier in the day I was over at the Arabia Shriner center in the area becoming a Shriner, which I'm very excited about (I'm planning on doing volunteer work with the Shriner Children's Hospital in the medical center, which I'll talk about some other time).

Other than the lack of food I was hoping would greet me, the event was wonderful. I spent a lot of time talking to Eddie Gallegos, and talked with him at length about the Soviet Union and current US-Russian relations (one of my many favorite topics). I didn't know many other people there so it was a little boring at times before the Governor showed up, but hopefully that'll fix itself as I get to know more people in the grass-roots in the area.

It was very exciting when Rick himself showed up at the door, took of his jacket, and started greeting people on the way up to the front. Now, I've read before that he actually puts his blazer on before he goes to an event just so he can take it off as soon as he comes in and look more "folksy". I don't know if this is true or not (I find it funny either way), but regardless the folksy thing worked. He sure had a lot more charisma being in that room than I've ever gotten from him on TV or just in still pictures (photographs where his hair emanates 80% of the star power anyway). In fact, I noticed a very striking similarity between his accent and way of talking to W, except minus the whole butchering of English grammar thing. I wonder if this was developed intentionally, is a thing from birth and background, or just rubbed off from the old boss.

Anyway, I found a lot of the Governor's comments very appealing. They talked directly about specific statistics, companies, laws, etc. that affect the state of Texas. I was also surprised with how much time the Governor spent at the event, even if he did only answer a few questions afterwords (I'd like to see more succinct answers so more, and tougher, questions can be asked...I'd also like to see shorter questions/speeches from the people in the audience!). I also found it interesting that he talked for well over half an hour, and never mentioned the Senator except for once at the very end. At first I approved of the way he seemed to be running a very positive, very fact-based and individual campaign in this race (and then I remembered that his campaign squads are the exact same people running things like http://www.washingtonkay.com/, obeying the old political survival tactic of not getting your own hands dirty if possible...hey, it's smart.) And it's not like Kay isn't on the offense. But I did think his tactics during his speech were interesting...he seems to want to give off a front-runner, home-court-advantage aura, and in that case it's good to ignore the other candidate as much as possible and play up your good points instead.

I was approached near the end by a young woman who works for the Governor up in Austin, and enjoyed asking her about what the organization and management of the events looked like on a state-wide level. Sadly I didn't get her name or card, but she was nice enough to convince the Governor to take a picture with me even after he was probably exhausted from getting mobbed by all the other people there. Perry gets big bonus points with me for making that extra effort.

But you don't have to take it from me: I recorded Governor Perry's entire stump speech, including the Q&A afterwords, for RHT! In this series the audio is quite good, and I sexed the Governor up with special effects every minute or so to keep the camera shot from getting too monotonous (hope he doesn't mind). It starts off a little dark, but later on I scootch on past behind Perry and film from the window side, where the lighting is much stronger. Surprisingly for political speeches, it's actually worth listening to if you're interested in where Texas is going and in the race for the (now slightly toasted) governor's mansion.

Red Hot Texans: Rick Perry Willie G's Seafood Houston 9/30/09 (1/4)

Red Hot Texans: Rick Perry Willie G's Seafood Houston 9/30/09 (2/4)

Red Hot Texans: Rick Perry Willie G's Seafood Houston 9/30/09 (3/4)

Red Hot Texans: Rick Perry Willie G's Seafood Houston 9/30/09 (4/4)

(You can view all of my photographs from the RHT coverage of September's grass-roots events on my September Facebook album here. Reminder: all pictures are copyright 2009 Red Hot Texans, Wentek LLC, and Nick Wenker).

Upcoming Grass-Roots Events and Planned RHT Coverage:

October looks like a very busy month for RHT and me for personally. From now on, my articles and updates will be broken up into smaller bits that get put up once every few days or after every event, not all at once like this RHT re-launch bonanza. It's too much for some people to read all at once, it's way too much work for me to put UP all at once, and I want people to check into the site once a day or once every few days.

Speaking of updates, if you don't want to hop in every day to see if your favorite local grass-roots blog is updated, please feel free to join the Red Hot Texans Facebook page and become a fan. I know from personal experience running a large university student organization (and being a member of others) how many notifications are too many, and I'll only send subscribers messages on Facebook when there is a website update (not including purely personal ones!) or an important local event coming up that merits an exceptional shout-out. I don't use twitter much, but if things really get busy I'll start posting some of my update notices (and messages from the campaign trail!) from my twitter page at www.twitter.com/nickericandream, if people want to follow me/Red Hot Texans on Twitter instead of on Facebook.

I'm also looking for guest writers, contributing authors, events to write about, local activists and young conservatives to interview, and so on. I want this website and its community to grow far bigger than just me. If you would like to be on the website or have your grass-roots event promoted, please feel free to either shoot me a personal message or to leave a comment after an article.

With that, here are some upcoming events in Fort Bend County and throughout Texas:

(Lifted from the FB Young Republicans news feed)

FBYR Meeting
Tuesday, October 13th
6:45pm Social/Dinner, 7:30pm Meeting
Fuddruckers, Stafford, TX
11445 Fountain Lake Dr, (281) 240-9414
November 3rd is an important election because 11 new amendments to the Texas State Constitution were proposed and YOUR vote counts. A state representative will talk to us about them, what they mean and answer our questions. Don't miss it because it is sure to be teemed with information everyone needs to know! Bring a friend, invite a co-worker or neighbor, find someone that is ready to get involved!
More information:
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/voter/2009novballotlang.shtml
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/08/texas-constitutional-amendment.html

Fort Bend County Tea Party Society Rally!
Saturday, October 17th 3-5pm
Sugar Land Town Square
Join us to learn the latest news on Cap and Trade and Healthcare Reform issues and how the proposed bills will impact you. We will also hear from Termite Watkins a motivational speaker who went to Baghdad and helped a group of untrained Iraqis reach their Olympic dreams. You can learn more about Termite at www.termitewatkins.com. For more information, to volunteer or donate items for the auction, please contact fortbendcountyteapartysociety@gmail.com

The RPFBC Grand Old Picnic
Sunday, October 18th 1–4pm
Duhacsek Park, 17034 Old Richmond Road (in Sugar Land at the intersection of Voss and Old Richmond Road)
This event is family oriented with many activities including music, games, a live auction, barbecue, ice cream and lots of good old fashioned political grandstanding. It is a great place to enjoy family fun while getting to meet those that currently represent you and those that wish to.

Foundation for Life Banquet and Auction
Saturday, November 7th
Sugar Land Town Square Marriott Hotel
Keynote speaker: Michelle Malkin
More info: http://lifeadvocates.org/banquet_2009.htm
Tickets: $100

Also got this in the e-mail inbox:
Array

Leadership Training

On the weekend of Nov 6-7, the RPT not only inaugurates our brand new HQ in Austin. We're also hosting training sessions for county chairmen and candidates.

An RPT County Chairman Primary Training will be held on Friday, Nov 6. Registration is at 8 am and the training is from 9 am to 5 pm. Training will include Precinct Development, Primary Finance, Primary Administration, Election Day Processes, Ballot Security, Conventions, and more. There is no fee for the county chairman training. Current RPT County Chairmen may RSVP for this training to Jenny Sykes at jsykes@texasgop.org or 512-879-4052.

On Saturday, Nov 7, we will be conducting training for candidates planning to run in the 2010 Republican Primary Election, 7 am to 5 pm. Training topics will be taught by National and State Republican Leaders and include: Fundraising, Voter Targeting, Technology, Media, Election Law, GOTV, Issues and effective messaging etc. This There is a $25 fee for the training. Each candidate will have the opportunity to record a TV commercial and radio ad for an additional fee. Candidates may RSVP for this training to Jamie Mathis at jmathis@texasgop.org or 512-879-4049.

Finally, I got this last night from the New Politics Forum, the group whose event in Houston last summer inspired me to start Red Hot Texans! What a funny coincidence they they re-launched their website just as I re-started mine...

I'm delighted to welcome you to the revamped New Politics Forum Newsletter. NPF is up and running for 2009-2010 and there are several special events planned this year. Of course, NPF will still offer its hallmark nonpartisan campaign training for young adults, but you can also look forward to alumni mixers, programs geared to the 2010 election, and the launch of our new website and social media kit!

Because you're an NFP supporter, we invite you to take a sneak peak at our new and improved website and help us share the news with others.

That's all for now!

Thanks for visiting and reading. Feel free to leave comments or get in touch with me.

It's time again for a grass-roots revolution!

Life is Crazy

2008-10-25T12:47:00.003-05:00

So....

I got in late last night from my whirlwind trip to LA for my all-important interview at the German Consulate, which I'd been planning to write a long report about as my next post here on RHT (along with an article on politics in computer-game MMOs). I certainly wasn't planning on posting today, as in an hour I'm supposed to be at the UT football game, where we're ranked #1 in the country and hitting an undefeated team today...

And then a friend of mine from high school, whose party I am supposed to go to tonight, suddenly points out something to me that I'd missed in the last 3 days of zipping around on planes and in taxis. That injured girl on the front page of Drudge? Who said that an Obama supporter attacked her and carved a B in her face? And now it turns out she made it up, and she's all over CNN and the national news?

Actually a good friend of mine from high school speech and debate. I forgot that she'd said her work was taking her to the northeast, so between the battered photo and the story being from far out of Texas and me being on the move I didn't even realize it was her at first. We talk regularly on AIM, and I was actually supposed to interview her for this very site a few weeks back when she was telling me how excited she was to now be working for the McCain campaign...

I'm totally flipping out right now. I hope she's okay in jail and that she gets through this safely. Anyone reading this should know she's a very good, fun, and kind person that sincerely cares about politics and her country, and I hope that she gets some space soon (even if this news story is her fault). It's extremely odd for me to go to the forums and websites I always visit and have people ripping into someone I've known since I was a freshman or sophomore in high school, whose house I have visited...

I guess the world of politics and the internet is smaller than I thought...

Texas-Politics Roundup

2008-09-12T20:02:00.037-05:00

It's been a while since I got the chance to start kicking RHT into gear again. So much to talk about- school has started, the election season is fully underway (now with wannabe Vice-Presidents in tow), and the world has generally gone mad. As I write, my parents are in the living room of my apartment, watching with a mix of horror and sheer disbelief as the projected path of Hurricane Ike is literally traced through the two houses we own. Of alllllll the coastal areas it could land in Texas, it smashes DIRECTLY through Galveston where we have a house, and then does and S-wobble underneath Houston hundreds of miles inland to smash DIRECTLY through Sugar Land, where my family lives. Empty pizza boxes and two dogs testify that my place here in Austin is currently the world's smallest refugee center.

Seems like a good a time as any for me to sit back and recount the crazy storm of Texas political activity that has swept through this state and stayed here ever since the end of the spring semester at the University, where celebrities and Presidential candidates drove into town to lasso up some votes (I'm being naughty, I know). I was going to post on all of these amazing events I went to individually, but that time has come and gone. It's more interesting to see everything in a flash, anyway.

So join me as I recount my political adventures in order from past to the present day...

February 21st 2008: Democratic Primary Debate at the University of Texas Recreational Sports Center

So, this year Texas went from being completely unimportant and late in the game to potentially being the kingmaker in the Democratic Primary slugfest between Obama and Clinton. The student groups and campaigns and volunteers were out in force. Streets were shut down, familiar buildings were draped or plastered with campaign materials, national news vans were parking where I used to park, and everything generally went insane- you see, the televised national debate between the two candidates was going to be held in a small little building at UT! Obama had come to Austin a year earlier and made a big splash here, but Hillary had long roots in Texas, as she had come here to do political work as a college student. It was game time!

Click here to see my full album from the event!

February 21st 2008: Democratic Party of Texas Democratic Debate Watch Party at the Austin Hyatt Regency

Because the place where the debate was being held was so small (idiotic- we have such huge facilities to host it in), tens of thousands of student fought over the 300 or so seats normal UT students actually got in a random raffle. What were the rest of us to do? Well, there was the Democratic Watch Party in a fancy downtown hotel! Since I have my fingers in all the e-mails lists around town I found out about it fast and bought a ticket, not knowing what to expect. What greeted me was very impressive, to say the least. I had to stand in line for like an hour just to get to the table to get my badge. I got some Obama buttons just for kicks to go with all the memorabilia I collected at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The watch party was very interesting, especially as the debate got nastier. Being in enemy territory in a room full of Democrats and hearing more than half of them boo Hillary Clinton was something I couldn't even have imagined in the late 90's, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Mark Strama was there, my (often not around!) boss that I interned for at the TX state capital in the fall of 2007. He was one of the first people in the country to support Obama and, because he's such an excellent and charismatic public speaker himself, often introduced him at the rallies starting way back. Mark got to talk more times at the Watch Party than even the Party Chairman of Texas, which bodes well for his career. He was nice enough to sign my guest pass. Fun times!

And that really was one thing that "got" to me. I am an unknown student no donor or any politician gives a damn about that just loves politics and hopes to be in office some day, but despite my absolute and all-encompassing insignificance I was able to drop 50 bucks on the internet and attend this event and see both Barack and Hillary from maybe 20 feet away. I searched for a John McCain event and he only swung through Texas once and you had to spend thousands of bucks to go to a VIP event in downtown Austin. Guess which Party made me feel more welcome and incorporated as a young person? Let's get in on the game, GOP.

Click here to see my full album from the event! (1/2)
Click here to see my full album from the event! (2/2)

February 23rd 2008: Ron Paul Rally at the University of Texas Tower

Oh boy. What to say about this one? My facebook profile used to officially say "Libertarian", and I am pretty much from the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party (sans the opposition to intelligence gathering and a big military), but that difference combined with the general...I don't even have a word for it...general SOMETHING about Ron Paul, his fans, and a pure-Libertarian platform is just a little too overdone, even for a grouchy leave-me-alone-give-me-privacy-don't-tax-me kind of guy like me. Here is a great example: I walked to the event and I saw a friend of mine from my Phi Alpha Delta pre-law group manning a Ron Paul table. And then I watched from there as they rolled in A GIGANTIC RON PAUL LIBERTY BELL onto the street right at the base of the tower. If this isn't ammunition for detractors and all the love-to-hate-libertarians, CATO-Institute-is-the-devil Democrats, I don't know what is. I think when your ideology already has the root of the word "liberty" in it, the line between promoting a strong ideology and becoming a carciture of yourself is really a thin one.

And if only that were the worst part. I think my photo album says the rest. Between all the dogs with RON PAUL gear on them to the crazy home-made signs and t-shirts to the giant REVOLUTION blimp bouncing around the crowd to the RON PAUL PLANE CIRCLING THE UT TOWER to the people wearing TYRANNY RESPONSE TEAM t-shirts, I got a little dizzy. Everyone was there to show solidarity with their anxious brothers and sisters, and acted like black helicopters were going to show up at any moment to whisk them off at any point into secret foreign prisons where cyborg rat brains were going to be installed in their bodies. And yet, for all this nervousness filling me before Ron Paul even arrived, when he DID arrive he gave an awesome speech with lots of good points. To be honest, the whole thing reminded me of the Onion article "Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years." The single biggest obstacles to the Ron Paul R[evol]ution are some of the extremist attitudes IN his revolution. They just don't know when they have enough of a good thing and insist on going ALL OR NOTHING with the libertarian ideology, despite a great platform in many parts.

Like I told my friend manning the table, "I for one am so relieved that Ron Paul is finally here to deliver us from all of these oppressive unconstitutional tyrannies like UNICEF and the Department of Education." I think the limited-government, individual-freedoms part of the GOP is its most American, most competitive, and most appealing plank. It's a shame there is such a "Burn the House Down in Order to Save It" attitude among some of its fans this year...

Click here to see my full album from the event!

February 23rd 2008: Obama Rally in front of the Texas Capital Building

Obama knew an affluent hippy liberal university and town like UT/Austin was going to be as receptive of an audience as he'd ever get, and so he decided to go big or go home in taking the fight to Hillary's "home court" in Texas. It took a long time to get in through all the lines, and I couldn't get as close to Obama as I wanted. The speech itself was kind of long-winded and filled with stump material ("Blah Bush blah Hope blah get out of Iraq blah I will save the everyman"), but it was still nice to hear him orate in front of a huge political rally. The excitement in the air and the general illuminated beauty of the night left a strong impression on me. I'm also in love with some of the great pictures I managed to snag while on the move- they're going to stay with me as memories of some of my earliest political events for a very long time. The notion of some day holding rallies of my own on even a one-millionth scale seems both extremely alluring as well as completely impossible after a massive event like this. Seeing the capital where I'd work at a semester earlier framed in such a way from a campaign I'd only seen on T.V. was a very thought-provoking reminder of the concrete realness of events we often only see transpiring through an electronic box...

Click here to see my full album from the event!

February 27th 2007: Bill Clinton (Hillary Clinton) Rally at the University of Texas Tower

The Clintons hadn't really planned anything much here in Austin, but they couldn't leave the OBAMA MEGA MONSTER TRUCK KOOL AID DRINKERS RALLY unopposed, so they scrambled to send Bill Clinton to "hip out" with the UT college students. People got one day's notice with flies frantically shoved at students all across campus, and then in the evening the next day the great dog and pony show began. The whole thing was, in short, VERY VERY Clintonesque, so it succeeded in that regard. It was late, chaotic, contradictory, vulgar, and immensely entertaining. No one seemed to know at rally time what was supposed to be going on, and big metal fences were keeping people out of the area right in front of the tower. Hillary Clinton volunteers were walking around with little notes promising to support and vote for Hillary that you had to sign your soul away on before they would even let you. When that finally happened like an hour later, this check in attempt was quickly abandoned as students flooded in through gate cracks left and right. Then we got to wait some more, and two student government schmucks pranced out on stage and hyped themselves up and talked about how happy they were there to HOST THIS NON PARTISAN NON-POLITICAL EVENT NOT ENDORSING ANY CANDIDATE GOD BLESS STUDENT GOVERNMENT and such. They spent maybe 5 to 10 minutes jabbering about UT student government and kept saying over and over and over how SG was only hosting and endorsing this event because it was a WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY to hear a former President talk and everyone should remember that it is A NON POLITICAL EVENT NOT ENDORSING ANY CANDIDATE.

After that, they walked off and the parade of people telling the audience to vote for Hillary and nobody else immediately replaced them. The crowd was overwhelmingly full of young Obama fans (and hopefully some other Republicans?? Anyone? Hello?), and the lack of cheering when the politicians and hobbits (yes really) and YOUNG EXCITED LIKE UT FOR HILLARY STUDENTS LIKE GIRL PRESIDENTS and assembled rabble-rousers asked the crowd rhetorical questions was hilarious. It was like someone asked a Magic 8-Ball if his S.O. loved him back and the Ball came back with a blank white triangle. At some point they trotted out a Hispanic frat to do a terrible step routine in a wonderful display of pandering. I think at this point I blacked out. I came to a little later and they trotted out some Indian guy with Sorority-chick sunglasses and slick gelled-back hair to come rouse up the college crowd yeah buddy. He also couldn't get anyone to cheer for him: "Are we gonna show everyone that Obama doesn't have a monopoly on the youth vote?!" "...." "Who's excited about Hillary?!" "....". The end result was that he started throwing Hillary t-shirts into the crowd- but, hilariously (Hillariously?), the second shirt he threw into the audience already got immediately thrown BACK at him! I was crying with laughter. I would say he threw out about 50-100 shirts, and maybe 1 out 6 got thrown back at him. Watching him sheepishly and quickly try to dump them to the people at his feet so no one would notice was great.

After he left everyone was left waiting for maybe another 40 minutes as Bubba schmoozed inside the tower with Important People. He finally came out and talked for a very long time. As soon as he walked out everyone in the crowd started grinning and making blowjob jokes. It didn't help that maybe 3 minutes into his speech he VERY CLEARLY said, "...and it is high time that we take America into a new ERECTION!" I have since confirmed this unscripted moment of joy with others, and it made Bill being 3 hours late almost worth it. Almost.

Click here to see my full album from the event!

June-July 2008: State Representative Mark Strama's "Campaign Academy" at the Travis County Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign Headquarters

This is what I had hinted at before when I'd said I was going to write about some amazing Texas political events and talk about the political future of Texas. It's very difficult to get even the week and a half of Campaign Academy I experienced into a few short paragraphs. Basically, Mark Strama is a Democratic state rep from the area just above Austin who won a very tight election in a pretty Republican area in 2004. He and his family are both well-connected in Democratic circles, and he has a history of involvement with Texas politicians and with the national Democratic politic scene as a whole. He was also a tech guy, and was director of MTV's Rock the Vote in the 90's (there is a picture of him circa this time period floating around that is absolute gold).

To make a long story short, he is a warm, young, and charismatic Dem house rep here in Texas, and he organized a very brilliant program for his own campaign needs and for the Travis County Democrats called Campaign Academy. It's open to all young people, ranging from elementary school to high school to college kids, and sometimes it even has some very earnest adults in it. Primarily, however, it is a great program to get young people active in politics and to give them an introduction to campaigning. We learned how to phone bank, block walk, how campaigns are structured, what all different types of elected officials do, and much, much more. The idea is that for 4 weeks straight, students show up and volunteer their free time from 10 AM to 6 PM. They have a lunch provided, and usually they have 2-3 hours of guest speakers per day and the rest they do the manual labor of the campaign(s). The clincher is that 2-3 guest speakers of the variety and range provided for this group of 30-50 students is an absolutely amazing experience. Via Mark's connections, we got everyone ranging from Ann Richard's former campaign manager to some of the best-known "opposition researchers" and political activists in Texas to political documentary makers from UT to city officials to PAC political/campaign trainers to other house reps to state senators to the founders of Moveon.org to Howard Dean himself. Absolutely priceless experience...we have an hour (or several) with a small room full of us and some of the hardest "gets" in Texas and in the States as far as Democratic circles are concerned. Many of these people charge ungodly amounts by the hour and will barely even give members of the state house the time of day, but they are willing to spend hours talking to and answering the questions of a bunch of young, sincere, and eager kids and students interested in politics. In return, the Travis County Dems get a huge, young labor force for massive blockwalking, material mailing, or phonebanking. A perfect crew for those long blockwalks in the hundred degree Texan summers.

Like I said, we got training and lectures from top PAC tutors and campaign consultants. What was really amazing were all the predictions that by 2010, demographic changes because of immigration and other factors, combined with the number of current contestable Republican state and national seats, would open up Texas to be challenged for House/Senate seats and the electoral college in 2012. In addition, Texas' growing size means that in 2010 we are set to gain a large number of seats in the House. Put it all together, and, if the optimistic experts on the blue side are to be believed, "By 2010 Texas could be the biggest battleground state in the country." There's a lot more to be said on this topic and what all I heard and saw, but to do justify to the sheer inside look I got via this Campaign Academy is pretty difficult when it was already some months ago. All I can do is recommend that people check out the details of the daily speakers and of the academy here. We did everything from introducing Mark to and building his support via Facebook to making the videotape that convinced Howard Dean to come talk to us. I highly, highly suggest everyone dig through the blog that catalogued the Academy here. I also got put on TV by local reporter Elise Hu (her great blog Political Junkie is linked on the side bar) who did a story on campaign academy, and interviewed and filmed me while I was block-walking. She could have followed a lot of people, but I guess asking me about why I was the only Republican there and I was handing out Democratic pamphlets in East Austin was too good to pass up. I talked in-depth about my experiences coming to America as an immigrant and why I was so interested in the political process and experiencing all sides of it...of course, none of that made it on the air! Oh well! You can see a youtube recording of it here. I really need to change how I talk in recordings so my voice doesn't come off as so squeaky...

I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I think I'm going to have to save myself the trouble and just boil it down to this: the GOP and the local Republican officials and Parties in Austin and Houston, or even in Texas, have nothing like Campaign Academy at all. I was there only Republican in the program. I loved hearing new voices and seeing how things looked from the other side, but at the end of the day block-walking for the Democratic Party of Texas still sucked. Where is the Republican Campaign Academy? Where are our 50 high school and college kids blockwalking and making phone calls? Where is our central organization? When are nationally-famous GOP party figures and local stars going to come give us the time of day? When are we going to be given catered food, shown documentaries, and given hours of free campaign training by the best advisors and grizzled GOP veterans in the state? When are we going to give GOP members of the house training and education in new social networking tools like Facebook and blogs? When are we going to be treated like royalty by up and coming members of the State House? Where's the Republican Revolution for our generation?

There are individual Republicans across the country and scattered through certain organizations in Texas that are on top of the tech wave, the internet, the youth vote, and the changing trends. However, it is nowhere near the scale and quality and organization that the mainstream Democratic Party now has. What's needed here is a foundemental Republican Revolution in Party philosophy from the ground up. If the GOP wants to survive the next 10-15 years plus it can't be the party of rich-donor VIP lunches and mail-pamphlet voter pushes anymore. When ActBlue starts out-raising and out-spending the GOP and when Facebook lets a local Democratic candidate get 200 people out to a political rally at a moment's notice, the Republican Party and the stucture and mentality with which it's always been run is going to get a VERY rude awakening. Not to mention the hemmoraging of an entire generation of voters to the Dems because of Hollywood, music, web presence, and groupthink. The Republican Party needs to start paying the same kind of respect and attention to young people that it pays to rich elderly donors ASAP, and it needs to do it in a way that is well-organized, educational, and integrated into the GOP cultural and political appratus in Texas and all across America.

Click here to see my full album from the event!

July 27th 2008: Stramarama Democratic Fundraiser at Threadgill's Restaurant

Stramarama is the big fundraiser/rally for Mark (and by extension the local Democratic Party) organized almost completely by the students in Campaign Academy, the culmination and end note of the program. It's very Austiny, with live music, a hosting Austin Originals restaurant, and lots of bumper stickers and lawn chairs in the hot afternoon Texas sun. It really was a festive party and did a great job putting Mark's name out there and getting more support for him out in his district. And everyone got to see what a nice (and clever) guy he was with all these kids supporting him and working for him. Everyone who'd been a part of Campaign Academy got to go up on stage and introduce themselves to the crowd and say a few words about their future career goals. Again, the level of local organization, cohension, and smart planning incorporating young activists and partisans (and even independents) and turning them into concrete political and financial results is simply astounding. I saw Michael Moore on Larry King recently talking about how the Republicans are "always up at the crack of dawn" and how organized they are, and while that disicipline and organizational superiority might be true on a national level (the Democratic Primary, the state systems, the DNC Rules Committee, etc. were all fiascos), I can't help but feel like on the local level here we are getting seriously out-hustled in some ways...

Click here to see my full album from the event!

September 9th 2008: Travis County GOP Fundraiser at a private home in northwest Austin

Speaking of the local level- last week I attended the first College Republicans meeting of the year. I tried to get involved my freshmen year but didn't really have the time, nor did I see the movement in place for me to get involved on more than an individual level. This is my last semester at UT since I am graduating early, and that, combined with the massive surge in members and interest in the UT CRs this year due to the presidential election year, has led me to jump right in this fall. I signed up right away to go volunteer at a fundraiser in northwest Austin- I REALLY don't have the time for this kind of stuff this semester of all semesters, but I'll be damned if I'm going to graduate from college having worked all this time with the local Democrats without having gotten involved with the people I actually care about and the issues I actually want to fight for. The fundraiser was extremely eye-opening, to say the least. I fought traffic for an hour during the evening Austin rush to get from my poor student housing area on the southeast side to the ritzy-rich part of Austin in the northwest, and I was not disappointed. I pulled up to a villa that I initially thought was a country club. It was very surreal having always privately stood up for the GOP as a high school and then a college student at debate tournaments, online, and in university classrooms, and then suddenly getting dumped smack-dab in the middle of an active, strong Republican scene. I've been fighting on my own so much because of where I've been at in life (surrounded by liberals online, in speech and debate, in Austin...) that I often felt like I was the only Republican on the planet. Just seeing a passionate and well-founded local GOP community give me a very odd sort of feeling of immense gratification. It's been a very long time since I was 17 and working a desk in Tom Delay's district office in Sugar Land, and seeing actual Republicans, actual elected GOP officials, and politically-interested people that were on MY side for once was totally bizarre. The home was everything I could have wanted from a storybook (if wincingly stereotypical) Republican welcome-home: big house, huge gun collection, everyone in suits and fancy dresses but warm and inviting to the core. I stood out like a sore thumb there because of my age...not to mention very obviously not being a) a big donor or b) an elected official, which are two things that generally make people very uninterested in spending time with you at these sorts of networking events. Nonetheless, a number of local Party officials and just Republicans in general came up to me to and introduced themselves and grew very interested in my background and in what I was up to in politics. All this despite the fact that I was intentionally trying to stay out of everyone's way and away from the crowd (I did a good bit of standing to the side and observing as I had volunteered to be the free help at an event where I ended up being needed). I also got to see several amazing GOP speakers and local and state officials and officeholders. Overall, a wonderful introduction and experience for me. I like this feeling of being in a room full of politically minded people who are in my corner instead of my debate opponents. I kind've like this feeling! Now, where's my GOP Campaign Academy?

Click here to see my full album from the event!

...

I have a lot more to say about recent news events and things going on in my own life, but blogspot sucks and it takes me like over an hour and a half just to get these pictures into the post in the right format and without messing up all my paragraphs and text. Lots of wasted time. Oh well. Hope you enjoyed my short run-through and my photo albums.

Summer may be running down, but since the spring Texas has been heating up and it looks like the political situation here will only get hotter as election day draws near. Not to mention what 2010 could look like.

Welcome to politics, deep in the heart of Texas...

Babylon Lost

2008-07-27T11:04:00.028-05:00

Well, I'm finally back from Europe. Three weeks without internet or being able to post here about political news almost killed me. A vacation is nice (especially to exotic locales!), but I've been dying to get started on all the blog posts I have backed up and all the people I want to interview for RHT. What gave me a pleasant surprise when I came back were my page hit numbers- I had a nice number of unique visitors every day on a website barely publicized or linked anywhere that wasn't updated for over half a month. That bodes well, since I am planning on much more regular, concrete, political content in the future, which should attract even more people here.

I was on a cruise to the "Old World", which meant Venice (I, II), Athens (I), Croatia (I), Istanbul (I, II), Myrkonos (I, II), Santorini (I, II), Ephesus (I), and Olympia. I also had a day stop over in Paris on an unrelated note. Point being, this was an extremely thought-provoking trip for me...not just because of the significance those sights held historically, but also because of what they meant for me in terms of the future.

Visiting city after city with thousands of years of history and standing amidst the ruins and the faded glory of many different great civilizations and empires was not only humbling on a personal level; it was also jarring for a modern citizen of the most powerful nation in human history. The last eighteen months have been sobering- by coincidence, the only book I took with me on this trip (besides LSAT prep materials!) was Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. At the start of the summer when I was looking for more materials for my thesis, I saw the Zakaria's summary/excerpt article up on Newsweek (a highly recommended read). Zakaria has long been my favorite journalist/foreign-policy analyst, so the article left an impression on me. As I continued my tour, flanked by both the relics of once-unstoppable empires and by the constant reminders of the Euro-dollar struggle that America was losing more with every passing week, I couldn't help but wonder when and if America will come face to face with the same titans of geoclimate change and newfound threats that toppled all these ancient powers of antiquity into dust.

Three cities in particular gave me pause...

Atlantis

"Transient guests are we."
-Dracula, Vampire Hunter D, Hideyuki Kikuchi

The Republic of Venezia lasted for over one-thousand years, ruling at its height as one of the strongest seats of power to Europe and dominating the Mediterranean. This gold-plated juggernaut held off countless foreign enemies while simultaneously lining the waterways with soaring cathedrals and decedent lagoon palaces. Imposing fleets kept the many islands composing Venice safe, and brought the Republic's influence to lands both local and exotic. The city-state of the winged lion was responsible for everything from Marco Polo to the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and ultimately the fall of the Byzantine Empire...not to mention greatly damaging the Athenian Acropolics during the 1687 siege of the Morean War, which to me serves as an ironic reminder as to the fluidity of power...the first of my trio of fallen cities is responsible for much of the clipped descent of the other two. No one can claim that Napolean and the Austrians did anything other than what Venetia brought upon others with its past of rulers and ships.

When I visited Venice, those doges and great galleys have long since existed only in history books. Venice is now nothing more than another city in a country in turmoil. Although still vibrantly alive with tourists, residents, and more recent additions such as Hemingway's favorite bar, it now seems despite its numerous visitors to be somewhat of a ghost town. Walking across the city is like being stuck inside a rapidly fading memory...all the beautiful buildings and statues from across the various time periods of Europe are slowly sinking into the ocean. Churches once built to display the wealth and permanent footprint of the Republic are now slowly being reclaimed by the water. The main church in the main square in Venice, St. mark's in St. Mark's Square, had its entrance completely flooded on the first day I visited, despite its distance from the water. The next day, it was completely dry. This bizarro-world repeated itself in many different places- in my albums, you can find places that are dry in some pictures and soaked in others. Many side-canals had doors already in the water, and submerged steps that were once taken down to boats are now almost entirely visible only inside the murky depths. The entire city, even all these years later, is still steeped in old wealth and prestige...and yet the environment is slowly pushing all that aside. In a political campaign where both Obama and McCain are talking about climate change, the ability of nature to take back what man has carved out is more than a little frightening.

Constantinople

f

Doesn’t matter if you’re skinny
Doesn’t matter if you’re fat
You can dress up like a sultan in your onion-head hat
We are building a religion
We are making a brand
We are the only ones to turn to when your castles turn to sand
-Cake, Comfort Eagle

Visiting Istanbul was both exciting as well as depressing. The history of Constantinople is very rich and impressive; Rome continuing on almost a thousand years after the actual fall of Rome. The center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the center of a diverse empire, the center of the eastern half of Europe....and that entire civilization and all those peoples were extinguished. There are no more Byzantines. Many outposts that have hundreds or thousands of years of history and association with the Greeks and Romans are now under the control of a foreign religion and the lasting legacy of the Ottomans who rode in from the East. I've been really interested in Turkey for a very long time, partially because of its (relative to most other Muslim countries) modernity and progress, and partially because of my status as a German major and Turkey's immigration relationship with Germany. However, despite all that, finding out that Troy and Ephesus belonged to Turkey was depressing. Seeing the mighty cities of the Ionian League, the Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire now belonging to lands controlled by foreign culture that emerged much later was definitely a sobering reminder of that someday all castles fall.

At the same time, seeing the Blue Mosque was beautiful, and the exotic palaces from the long Ottoman time period lining the Bosphorus were great to see. Perhaps the best expression of culture that I saw was the Hagia Sophia. While it was awkward to see one of the oldest and biggest Christian churches in the world forcibly converted into a Mosque, both the Byzantine Christian as well as the Ottoman Muslim elements contribute to the beauty of the building. Furthermore, the tolerance shown by the Sultans was notable as several Christian mosaics in covering up rather than destroying several mosaics is heart-warming. Although not exactly inclusive, this attitude is still a lot better than that shown by the Venetians and Crusader who sacked the building and destroyed much of the art and many of the mosaics. Seeing the mosaic of Virgin and Child in the main apse of the building, right alongside Muslim imagery, is very beautiful and maybe gives some inspiration for the future of the various cultures that exist here on Earth.

The Acropolis

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…”

One of the most fun parts of my trip was getting to walk on top of the Acropolis and, afterwards, along the dirty paths and gorgeous trees where the principle city of Classic Athens used to be located. Standing in the ruins of the old Senate Building, pausing on top of the old Speaker's Place, posing in front of a statue of the Emperor Hadrian...what kind of a political fanatic doesn't live vicariously through the past in spots like these? Seeing the Parthenon at the top or the old statues of the Iliad and the Odyssey down below really does a lot to remind a person of all the culture, history, and many individuals that came before him. Walking in the same spots as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and emperors of all time periods was a humbling experience.

At the same time, the Athens of old is far-gone, with the halcyon days of Ancient Greece reduced to broken statues and memorial placards. The fragile and priceless building atop the Although the countryside around Athens and the view from atop the Acropolis was probably for a long time one of the most elysian sights in the world, a visitor now atop the same place will see nothing but 360 degrees of ugly, polluting, packed urban sprawl spreading far in all directions. Athens as it stands now is a bloated capital, with almost four million people in mostly low-story buildings stuffed into one primary valley and harbor. Greece itself has suffered mishap after mishap in the last several hundred years, and the scars from Ottoman rule and conflict are still alive and hotly political in the continuing drama of a divided Cyprus. It is another sobering reminder of the slippery nature of power and influence, not to mention the constant themes of environmental friction and the threat of foreign armies and new superpowers on the horizon. And yet, Athens and Greece are trying to rebuild themselves as a part of the EU and as a nation that finally managed to discipline itself enough shortly before the 2004 Olympics to steal startling success from the mouth of disaster. Like much of Europe, places like Athens are constantly tilting between progress and chaos on top of the precipice of history.

Makes you wonder where America will fit in in a post-American world, and what parts we have to play in that decision...

Today Was a Good Day

2008-07-05T16:50:00.011-05:00

"Then we played bones, and I'm yelling domino

And now I am yelling dominoes

Plus nobody I know got killed in South Central L.A.

Today was a good day."

-Ice Cube, It Was a Good Day

This summer has been pretty epic and hectic. I keep coming up with articles and ideas, putting aside newspaper articles and links, and putting together lists of people I want to interview. No rest for the wicked. I've been dying to write this entry over the last few days, and guess what- I have to be succinct, because in forty minutes I leave America for two weeks. I'm going to visit Paris, Athens, Venice, Skopje, and Istanbul. Every time I see a piece of history and the geography of civilizations, I feel a concrete forward momentum towards the right place in my life and an ascension in my perspective. I've been traveling since I was born, but I still want to see everything in the world- every temple, every mountain, every rain forest, every capital, every culture. I'm not happy unless I'm blazing through life.

As far as I know, I'm still the youngest member at Holland Lodge #1. It's rather atypical, since most people join a serious organization like the Masons much later in life. For me as a student, though, being a part of a group that doesn't just emphasize character, but also has an intrinsic and historical focus on education, science, the arts, etc. means a lot to me."Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Theologie!" and all that.

I still haven't had time to write the massive, interesting post about what I've seen and done in Texas politics in the last two weeks. It features famous campaigns managers, block-walking, and me on the news. But more on that later- here's some tidbits I've been meaning to pass along for a while. The AP, if you didn't hear, is working on blogging guidelines! There's also this funny little snippet floating around the web from our dear House of Reps. Finally, here is a link to an amazing special conference by C-Span on the web and politics (scroll down to "Campaign 2008 and Technology"). I nerded out while in Florida a few weeks back and watched some of it instead of heading to the beach. I'll post my thoughts after I have time to watch it in full. I also plan on getting back in full to all three of the people who took the time to respond to my last post in the comments section and in their own blogs. If I have to, I'll roll it into another article eventually. Thanks for reading and for taking me seriously.

But like I said, lots of stuff going on. Last week I sent in my massive application to the German government's IPS program- long story short, I plan on graduating from U.T. at Christmas, studying for the LSAT for 5-6 weeks and taking it February 1st, and, if I get accepted, going to this program March 1st. On the slim, slim chance that I am 1/10 Americans age 21-30 and one of the 120 people worldwide chosen for the 2009 IPS program, the German government would fly me to Berlin, house me for five months, give me 450 Euros a month, and give me an internship with a German congressman in their national parliament (Bundestag). After that, I'd apply for JET or some other program to teach English in Japan, and, somehow, apply and get into a top law school at some point.

Hey, a guy can dream right? Yesterday was the Fourth of July...many years ago, I never could have dreamed that I'd one day be an American citizen- but I am one now. Many years ago, I never could have dreamed that I'd become a Freemason- but I got raised to Master Mason Wednesday. Many years ago, I never could have dreamed that I'd be able to look in the eye the man who took a young boy through his house and showed him a wall full of the greatest accomplishments you could accrue in a lifetime- but now I can (a little!) I'm no hero and I've never saved anyone or defended my country, but after moving here fifteen years ago and starting school without speaking any English, I still feel proud of what I've managed to do by this point. I still have a long way to go before I can still stand shoulder to shoulder with my role models- I learned yesterday that the great man and family friend you see pictured below had a Texas State Senate Resolution passed in his honor just a few months before I started my own, somewhat less glamorous and unpaid internship at the same state capitol. I am nothing if not encouraged, though- when you grow up with a dad who basically didn't have parents and worked his way up from nothing with no money and no support, you have a lot of appreciation and enthusiasm for beginning at the very bottom. I'm grateful for every internship I've been given, every class I've been able to take, and- most of all- the opportunity to live in this wonderful country and the chance to work my own my way up to be something one day.

I've had a lot of good days.

Myths: Not Just for Greeks Anymore

2008-06-29T14:35:00.010-05:00

Atlas must have been a Republican- the top 25% of income earners (103k+/yr) carry this country on their backs, paying 86% of income taxes in the US. The top 50% of income earners (31k+/yr) pays almost 100% of income taxes in this country, meaning you could split everyone in America into 2 teams have one group piggyback the other half. By the way, the top 1% of income earners in America pay 2 out of every 5 dollars collected in income tax. The next time you see someone on the left bitching about "the rich", ask him how he feels about those people paying out of their pockets for 1 out of every 3 hospitals, roads, police stations, soldiers, welfare recipients, medicaid recipients, etc. in this country.

I actually hadn't planned on making this post at all. I want to run a blog that is more about the positive than the negative, more thought-provoking than partisan-provoking, more educational than right-wing echo chamber. I have a HUGE post planned that I have been working on that has some surprising, original, cutting-edge content about bi-partisanship, grass-roots campaigning, how campaigns work, the status of Texas, and the future electoral map of the country. It's going to be huge, and it's about stuff that no one realizes yet but is going to hit American politics like a ton of bricks. I am excited about this. Expect tons of photos. Everyone who reads this blog, liberal or conservative, American or not, is going to dig into this.

In addition, I have a smaller article that might go up even before that, one I have been working on since Florida. There are a LOT of interesting developments going on right now concerning the internet and politics, and I've been meaning to post those videos, links, and Texas-based conferences since a while. That will probably go up in the next few days.

In the meantime, as much as I like to talk about general issues, humor, and pop-culture, I'm making this post simply because the previous one about Obama has generated so much discussion, both here and elsewhere. I somewhat regret my last post- not because anything I said was wrong or because it wasn't important to talk about, but because I am still finding my voice here on Red Hot Texans and thus didn't phrase the post in the way I wanted.

To make things clear: I brought up the point of dissonance between Obama as a campaign-manufactured product and Obama as a reality and a politician. The point was not to convince people that Obama is wrong on the issues or that they shouldn't vote for him- the point was more focused on the people who support Obama without seeing past to the man behind the curtain. It was not to convince people that McCain was a saint, or to talk about campaign finance reform. I have lots of articles that I am working on right on all those topics- but they weren't the subject of my The Candidate of Changing His Mind post.

(Speaking of last Friday's post: guess who called it?)

This article is a transition article between that last discussion and all of the more original, more youth- and Texas-centric topics that I have been working on for all you guys. I promised a response to the commentators to the last post and so I wrote one up. I noticed how long it was getting just responding to the first person, so I decided to include my overview on the front page.

By the way- 30 minutes left in the Euro Cup. Let's go Deutschland! I'd like to be rooting for the underdog Spain, but I have some important personal/political developments currently ongoing concerning the German government. I'm also going to post about what's going on in my personal life soon- so much to talk about! I'm very sad I missed the Turkey-Germany game, considering the politic ramifications of that match.

But I'm no Oracle of Delphi- enough talk about the future! It's time for some myths!

RHT Presents: Popular Political Myths

Myth #1: "First, Obama is not a liberal candidate. He's far from liberal."

This is dead-wrong. Obama was the most liberal person in the Senate last year. http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/ . His entire career as a public servant has been completely lacking in political courage. He rose up in the hotbed far-left south side Chicago political machine, and has run far-left with a far-left constituency. He’s planned his meteoric rise in politics since Harvard Law with meticulous canniness, and abstained any on hard, tough, or controversial votes during his time in Illinois and later also in the Senate. He let other politicians actually do their work as legislators and go on the record with tough votes instead. He’s the darling of the far-left now, and groups like Moveon and the Daily Kos loved him and not Hillary during the primary. His Presidential platform is one of the most partisan, least original, and farthest left of any party nominee in recent memory. The ironic thing about Obamamania is that the liberal equivalent of Pat Robertson is running as a candidate of “change”, cooperation, and bi-partisanship versus the most famous and risk-taking bi-partisan politician in the country, and everyone is too ignorant or too informed to realize the tragedy of the situation.

Myth #2: "Our “most liberal” candidate is on par with the most conservative candidates elsewhere in the developed world. I know the scope of your statement was American politics, but it's important to remember America is calibrated pretty far right…"

I am from Europe. I study European politics as my major. I have worked for a politician in Europe. There is no reason to inform me as to a European comparison.

There is this myth that American liberals aren’t really “liberals”. Europeans also have this totally uninformed notion that the GOP and the Democrats are very close on all the issues, even though you can go look up the party platforms on the websites and see a 100% opposite position and policy proposal on virtually every single political issue you can think of. Yes, Europe is largely more socialist, for a variety of cultural and historical reasons. However, this idea that European politicans or parties are way further left than democrats is a joke. The truth is that many European countries have a multi-party system, and as a result the fringe nuts on the left and on the right are in separate political parties like Communists and Fascists. The big mainstream parties are thus much closer to the center. In fact, they often don’t have large enough majorities to form governments on their own, and have to make alliances with political opposites. In Germany the SPD are the democrats and the CSU/CDU the republicans, but they have been running a joint government for a few shaky years now. There is often way more compromise and governing from the center in a lot of European countries than in our solo executive branch position with just 2 parties.

Myth #3: "I think McCain may have had the opportunity to become the "unity President," but he threw that opportunity away in order to appeal to the evangelical base", ie: McCain is a Bush 3rd term/in bed with the far right/etc. He was amazing in 2000, but now he’s suddenly a completely different person and his 30-year record no longer matters.

First of all, you can take any one of the dozens of famous dives McCain has taken in the name of unity and moderation and they would be braver, more original, and party-defying than everything in Obama’s career added up. Even though he’s mended his fences with some figures of the religious right, being a Republican senator and calling Falwell an “agent of intolerance” is one of the most gutsy and honest things any politician in this country has said in a very long time. And it’s not like he’s exactly changing his rhetoric or his associations to remold himself as a religious right guy. There’s a reason Huckabee and Romney trounced McCain among the religious right voters.

McCain has also done a bunch of stuff that you don’t see mainstream Republicans having the courage to do, like telling workers in Michigan that some of those jobs aren’t coming back or being frank about globalization in other states. He’s gone to poor black and other minority areas across the country very hostile to the GOP to talk to those communities, even though any political advisor would have described that sort of across-the-aisle effort as a waste of time and money on people that won’t vote for you. He’s even apologized for some of his earlier voting to these communities, which is way more humility and frankness than you’ll get from most major politicians in this country at any point in time. He does a lot of things along these lines- no one could have envisioned the GOP nomine for Prez being a frequent Daily Show guest or going on the Ellen D. show.

People who are uninformed about McCain try to make it out like he’s a totally different guy now than he was in 2000, and that his time as a bi-partisan, public-serving, brave politician died then. They don’t know their facts. Here is some factual McCain post-2000:

-McCain loudly and publically fought with Bush (and the other primary opponents) over American torture and over water-boarding. He pushed this loudly in the primary debates and even said he would abolish gitmo (as opposed to “I’ll make it even bigger” Romney).
-McCain slammed Rumsfeld and the Bush strategy in Iraq and helped push for the surge has that has made such a huge 180 in Iraq in the last year.
-McCain bucked the GOP and the White House by leading a bunch of centrist Dems and Repubs in the Senate in the “Gang of 14”, preventing the senate from getting ground down without doing work for the American people and preventing a potential constitutional crisis from Repubs wanting to use the “nuclear option”.
-Despite his Party controlling the Congress and then later also the White House at the same time, McCain has been slamming the government and politicians for pork-barrel spending and earmarks, and was one of the few people to support a one-year ban on earmarks altogether.
-McCain just recently held a huge conference on the important of the environment and was headlined across the country as bucking the White House on this issue and on being highly critical of Bush in the statements he made at this press conference.
-McCain voted against the federal gay-marriage ban amendment, which was a huge litmus test for Republicans.
-McCain supports stem cell research despite the Bush administration’s 8 years of fighting against it.
-McCain was behind the huge “Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act” in 2002, which the head of the RNC has come out and pretty much admitted was a huge kick in the balls for Republicans and a crippling blow to their long-held prior advantage in campaigns money-wise. A lot of Republicans REALLY hate him because of this.
-McCain was a part of the huge bi-partisan push in 2006 to pass immigration reform legislation, which a lot of the far-right still hates him for.
-As for the rest of his voting, here's wikipedia: The Almanac of American Politics, edited by Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen, rates votes as liberal or conservative, with 100 as the highest rating, in three policy areas: Economic, Social, and Foreign. For 2006, McCain's ratings are: Economic = 64 percent conservative, 35 percent liberal (2005: 52 percent conservative, 47 percent liberal);[5] Social = 46 percent conservative, 53 percent liberal (2005: 64 percent conservative, 23 percent liberal);[5] Foreign = 58 percent conservative, 40 percent liberal (2005: 54 percent conservative, 45 percent liberal)[5]

How’s that taste? Most Obama fans and/or liberals couldn't list any of these in the bi-partisan discussion, much less all of them, even though every single one of them is a huge deal (especially compared to a super-partisan opponent like Obama). They dig through his positions and barely manage to come up with two things that the GOP presidential CANDIDATE has moved to the right on (Bush tax cuts and drilling in ANWAR), neither of which are as big a deal as most any of the issues McCain has taken a risk or bucked Bush on.

Update: This is a really flattering article about McCain's private life and personal choices. You want to hear about an ACTUAL non-typical kind of politician? Read this short editorial. Lots of stuff hear most people don't know about McCain.

Well, in any case, I'm still waiting on the general election to really kick off. We'll see how matters come to bear in the fall. False conceptions have been prevelent on both sides, with some conservatives thinking Obama is a muslim and some liberals thinking McCain is in any way an establishment or "typical" Republican. Of course, the big difference is that Obama has been pushing hard on his opponent's myth at rallies and on live TV, but nevermind that.

I just can't believe how small of a role actual policies have played in the election so far!

This is madness!

(Oh yeah, I went there. I promise I'll make up for it with better posts soon!)

Barack Obama: The Candidate of Changing His Mind

2008-06-20T15:44:00.015-05:00

(Image stolen from a AuthenticGOP shirt)

Maybe that title and this picture aren't the best way of starting off this article. It's not a very good picture of Obama (especially compared to the other t-shirt design the site offers), and the title lets people know right away that what I'm going to say is critical of Obama. You might not think that this matters on a conservative website, but I've always been against strictly preaching to the choir. I also believe strongly in bi-partisanship, open discussion of differing beliefs, and the market-place of ideas (speaking of bi-partisanship, do yourself a favor and check this great article about Joe Biden and Richard Luger by David S. Broder).

Disclaimer: I like Obama a lot, even though he's running on one of the most partisan and extremist platforms in modern times. I like his speaking style, his rhetoric towards our allies, and, when he chooses to exercise it, his honesty (I liked his debate answer on his greatest weakness). I'm not supporting him for President because a) again, his extremist and generally terrible platform b) his rhetoric and pretense at cooperation and bi-partisanship are 95% opposed to all his years as a legislator and c) John McCain has the potential to be one of the most fair and best Presidents in US history, even if most liberals AND most conservatives don't realize it. But again, I like Obama a lot and admire him in some ways, so if you're an Obamaphile, keep reading.

Today I'm not talking to the conservatives or even the rational, analytical liberals out there. I'm talking to the majority of the Obama supporters, the true-Obamaphiles, the ones who think he's "not a typical politician", who think he is consistent, who close their eyes at the total contrast of Obama's voting record and is rhetoric, who think he is a knight in shining armor, who think he really is changing politics as we know it and who think his idealistic image isn't largely high-quality product produced by a top-notch advertising and image campaign.

So what's all the fuss about that has Obamaphiles hopping mad to rationalize their hero's actions? As you might know, Obama just opted out of public financing. The smart democrats are saying, "This is largely against his message and his previous commitments, but it will help him bury McCain under a mountain of fundraising money and win the election. Good for him." Those that are still naive or uninformed about Obama but love him anywhere are meanwhile busy with a chorus of screams; "He never promised he would opt out!", "He WANTED to go for public financing, but the McCain camp wouldn't offer a fair agreement!", "This is not at all against his message and theme!", "Obama says the system is broken- no wonder he's opting out!", and so on.

To all the Obama fans for whom the above sounds plausible and familiar: for the first and maybe left time ever, rather than try to persuade you myself, I'm going to instead beseech you to visit these links to two short articles over at the New York Times. Normally I lay everything out and construct it myself, but I found these articles very telling, and found it interesting that even the NYT and the media are (for once, briefly) being very hard on Obama for a decision. Do yourself a favor and read the whole articles, and not just my excerpts.

The first is the official headline and article on the subject, entitled, "Obama, in Shift, Says He'll Reject Public Financing". I've gone ahead and quoted/highlighted some of the most important parts here:

Citing the specter of attacks from independent groups on the right, Senator Barack Obama announced Thursday that he would opt out of the public financing system for the general election.
His decision to break an earlier pledge to take public money will quite likely transform the landscape of presidential campaigns, injecting hundreds of millions of additional dollars into the race and raising doubts about the future of public financing for national races.
In becoming the first major party candidate to reject public financing and its attendant spending limits, Mr. Obama contended that the public financing apparatus was broken and that his Republican opponents were masters at “gaming” the system and would spend “millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations” smearing him.
But it is not at all clear at this point in the evolving campaign season that Republicans will have the advantage when it comes to support from independent groups. In fact, the Democrats appear much better poised to benefit from such efforts.
Republican activists have been fretting about the absence so far of any major independent effort, comparable to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which helped undermine Senator John Kerry’s campaign in 2004, to boost Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, who has badly trailed Mr. Obama in raising money.
...
According to aides, Mr. Obama reached his decision knowing he might tarnish his desired reformist image — he pledged last year to accept public financing if his opponent did as well — but strategists for the campaign made the calculation that it was worth it, in part, because of the potential for the Republican National Committee to seriously out-raise its Democratic counterpart.
...
Early last year, before he became a money-raising phenomenon, Mr. Obama floated in a filing with the Federal Election Commission the possibility of working out an agreement with the other party’s nominee to accept public financing if both sides agreed.
Later, when asked in a questionnaire whether he would participate in the system if his opponent did the same, Mr. Obama wrote, “yes,” adding, “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.”
Although Mr. Obama pledged more recently to discuss a deal with the McCain campaign, Mr. McCain’s aides said that there were never any real negotiations.

Here is an op-ed article from the NYT by David Brooks called "The Two Obamas". It's even less generous. Again, emphasis and excerpting are mine:

…as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side,there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
…
And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.
But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.
And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.
…
All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Ouch. This won't bother most smart and perceptive supporters of Obama, who know is IS a typical politician, just one with a few good changes up his sleeve and a very, very left platform. I bet though, at least some of those supporters will be disappointed by this. They'll be miles apart from the ranting hordes of newly-interested or overly-interested political participants who are nuts over Obama, who are going to move heaven and hell trying to reconcile reality with campaign propaganda.

On a side-note: I think this new design of the Presidential seal is kind of cool and spiffy, and I understand why it's being used. On the other hand, I think it's a sign of how much Obama's campaign for President is being run on his brand instead of on the issues when you have the American flag/the shield of the Republic being replaced by a politician's personal symbol and initial. I can't imagine Hillary, McCain, etc. having the nerve to pull that sort of move and it bothers me a little to see. It's not that big a deal, but the fact that it would be done so casually only bothers me more. As always, comments are welcome.

RHT Professionals Series #1: Ryan Murphy

2008-06-18T01:14:00.006-05:00

RHT Professionals Interview Series

#1: Ryan Murphy, State Chair of the College Republicans of Texans
Format: Question list via E-Mail
Date: June 17th, 2008

Q1: Thanks for taking the time to be interviewed by RHT. First, could you please introduce yourself and to tell us what you do?

A1: My name is Ryan Patrick Murphy, I'm a Taurus, I enjoy long walks on the beach... Seriously, I'm the State Chairman of the Texas Federation of College Republicans, which is an official auxiliary organization of the Republican Party of Texas. Basically, we're the arm of the party that spreads the party's message on college campuses and involves college students in the political process.

Q2: What kind of educational and/or professional background do you have? Were those experiences directly applicable or necessary to your becoming the Chair of the Texas CRs? How did you become the head of this organization?

A2: Right now I'm studying Political Philosophy at Collin College, where I've been the Chapter Chairman since 2006. I've been a professional salesman since graduating high school in 2004, mostly in high-end retail, such as Steinway Pianos. I wouldn't say my education or professional experience was necessary to become the State Chairman, but it certainly didn't hurt.

Q3: How did you start getting involved with politics and the Republican Party?

A3: It's always been an interest, but I didn't get involved until I met Brianna Flavill, who I later took over for as the Chapter Chairman at Collin. She tapped me as a volunteer for a Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner and introduced me to some great people in county politics, which propelled me to become an active grassroots volunteer across our state and even in others. Mostly because of my County Chairwoman, I recently worked for the RNC as a Field Marshal in Kentucky. It's all sort of built on itself, from the time I got started up until now.

Q4: What are some of the unique challenges you face as being President of the CRs, as opposed to heading up an organization for older activists?

A4: The transitive nature of most college students is a bit challenging. With older organizations there's incredible stability from year to year, even decade to decade, where as with our organization the faces and situations can drastically shift between semesters. Because of the "shifting sands" nature, it's hard to develop and maintain even a solid core of members, however we've got a great Executive Board this year that has made my life much easier. They're a great group of people.

Q5: Are there any changes you’ve seen this Presidential year in College Republicans in Texas, either in terms of individuals or in terms of organization?

A5: There's much more interest this year. We've seen phenomenal growth at every level, which is great. Most chapters increased their membership last semester and should expect exponential growth as we get closer to November 4th. The TFCR is also growing, with five schools re-starting chapters and four more that are in the process of becoming recognized by their respective schools. Actually, last night I was talking with a student at Angelo State University who just restarted their chapter and wants to get involved with the TFCR. That makes for a 10 chapter increase so far.

Q6: I know that you went to the State Convention in Houston this past weekend. What was the mood like? How do people treat you as a representative of Republicans in their late teens and 20’s?

A6: It was an interesting mood, I can say that much. There still seems to be an air of resentment towards John McCain, but I don't believe it's anything that will hamper Republicans on the ballot in November. Of course, that's just my impression. As for my reception, it's always good, everyone at that level is always very excited to see a youth presence in the party. They know that we're going to have to take the party over eventually, so I suppose it eases their conscience to see us starting to get involved at a young age.

Q7: There has been a lot of talk recently about the lead the Left has both on the web and among the web-savvy up-and-coming generation of Millenials. This conflict is thrown even more into the limelight this election year, as there is a real contrast age-wise between John McCain and Barack Obama. As the Chair of an organization directly involved with Millenials, how do you think the GOP should keep or win over young people to the brand?

A7: Fundamentals and a return to the basics. I'm not the first to say that Republicans in Washington have stopped being Republicans, so this isn't something ground breaking. There's a popular sentiment among college students, of either political persuasion, that the government should be a facilitator of personal freedom, rather than an entity that will control the course of your progression in life. When the Republican Party returns to it's message of limited and responsible government, and means it, we'll see a resurgence among young voters. An inspirational leader that personifies that principle would be helpful, as well.

Q8: I read an article recently about how the platform passed by the Texas GOP is even further to the right than the national platform. At the same time, I’m getting e-mails from the Democratic Party of Texas about successes and growth where Boyd L. Richie is saying, “…there is no such thing as a safe Republican seat in Texas anymore.” In a time of such political upheaval nationally, do you foresee a future where the Texas GOP will have to fight for the center more or change the tone of its rhetoric as new generations of Texans become the voting blocs?

A8: We'll have to undergo significant change if we're going to survive in American politics, it's as simple as that. A prime example is gay marriage. In 2004, a significant majority of Americans were opposed to the idea. Just recently, polls have shown that opposition has declined to 48%. There's a choice for our party on this issue, and it's simple. We can adhere strictly to principle, lose a governing majority, and watch gay marriage become completely legal. Or, we can shift our position to favor civil unions and maintain popular support among voters, which will allow the party to maintain it's control of our government.

That's just an example, it's applicable to nearly every issue across the board. The American people are changing and we can change with them and still maintain our principles of limited and responsible government, or we can stubbornly resist and watch our party suffer defeat across the board. Republicans don't really want to hear that, but that's the reality of the situation, pure and simple.

Q9: As an immigrant to American and to Texas, I’ve been particularly drawn to the conservative message of hard work, opportunity, and patriotism. Our family’s Suburban has a bumper sticker that says, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could!” What is it in particular about conservative values that you think can and does apply to young people?

A9: It's all about personal freedom. We can have a government run by Republicans, which believes in our citizens ability to control and determine the course of our lives without fear of government reprisal. Or, we have a government run by Democrats, which believes that they know what's best for you and will force you to live you life according to their judgment. Young people have their whole lives ahead of them, so the freedom to determine their future is very appealing.

Q10: Is there anything else you want to add?

A10: You can find out more about the Texas Federation of College Republicans at our website, www.myTFCR.org, and anyone with questions or comments is welcome to contact me personally via email, ryan@myTFCR.org, or via cell phone, 214-364-7730.

Thanks again to Ryan for giving this website a shot and for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions. I am surprised and impressed with the honesty and valuable information I got out of 10 questions, and I foresee things going very well for RHT in the future if the interviews continue to be like this. I learned a lot I didn't know, which to me just goes to show that there is a definite niche space on the web for a hub that connects young Texas conservatives and provides them with pertinent and interesting information.

If you are interested in being interviewed for this website or otherwise getting in touch with me, please don't hesitate to contact me at nickwenker@mail.utexas.edu

Katamari Democracy

2008-06-14T00:32:00.015-05:00

"I was stylin', profilin', down payment on my Scion.

His name is Brian, he's in Fallujah freedom fightin'!

So don't ask me who's your daddy- I'm someone else's mommy.

You can buy me all my drinks, but you don't get no punani."

It's so scary they're all married, this party just got gnarley,

Matahari just got sorry, gotta roll like Katamari!!!

-MC Chris, Check the Ring Yo

Katamari Damacy is an insanely popular video game from Japan based entirely on the principle of taking a tiny ball and rolling it over everything in your path and glomping it on to yourself to grow larger, eventually expanding to the point of rolling over houses, towns, and the planet itself (eat THAT Al Gore!).

American democracy is much the same way. Small movements with the best of intentions snowball into gigantic rolling titans that absorb lesser factions and force them to go along for the ride, partially crushing dissent and effectively shooting them in the head*. Most Americans (and the writers on The Simpsons) mock and lament our two-party Katamari Democracy, not realizing that the multi-party systems found in our Western siblings occasionally face completely harmless and wacky road-bumps like the total collapse of the government.

But as much as I love talking about Europe, I'm going to focus today on the real world, by which I mean AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. Over here in civilization, we have we have only two functioning bases, both of which have absorbed and whipped smaller constituencies into obedience.

Or at least that's the theory. A funny thing has happened to the Republican Party and the drift towards the religious part of the base that has won election after election since Reagan formed the 1980 coalition. This effectively also killed off the New England Republicans, made Log Cabin Republicans feel unwelcome, and caused rifts with libertarian and centrist Republicans.

This was not an issue before, because the gigantic inhuman balls of US democracy made sure that all was well with the natural order and that our country only had two balls, as God intended: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. If I put Libertarian in my Facebook profile, those in the know meant that I was simply a neglected Republican who believed in individual responsibility and limited government.

At least, that's how it used to be. Enter the most volatile political election in recent history. Ron Paul and the Libertarian movement suddenly came on the map last year. Besides providing comic relief at the debates as the Dennis Kucinich of the right, he landed a large number of burns, pointing out inconsistencies in Republican rhetoric and letting them know that even though it was decentralized by nature, the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party ("authentic Republicans) DID existed, and it was pissed. A loose alliance of teens, prostitutes, gun-lovers, independents, etc., banded together and spammed the post-debate polls with text votes and showed up at rallies with loud banners and Tyranny Response Force t-shirts.

I resisted the dirty but tempting urge to throw myself into the Ron Paul R*EVOL*UTION. I thought the guy was (believe it or not) a great and intelligent speaker a few good points. However, this was the same guy who wanted to abolish UNICEF. Sorry Congressman- I like you and your message enough, but I am not voting against the orange coin-box they made me carry around for Halloween in middle school. Ron Paul always struck me like the mad scientist from Aqua Teen Hunger Force: passionate and entertaining, but he doesn't know when enough is enough with an idea (or an ideology).

And so Ron Paul ran as a (version of) the Libertarian wing of the Party. And kept running. And kept running. Even after "I majored in miracles" Huckabee conceded, Ron Paul kept running FOR GREAT JUSTICE, McCain and his fancy delegates be damned. Who needs delegates anyway***?

And then he dropped out to focus on his House seat a little ways south of where my family lives, down by the lake near the Gulf. But stayed on the ballot. But stayed in the race. Until he got back in the race. Not a big deal- except, as someone from my favorite forum put it, Ron Paul decided to bring the mountain to Muhammad. He booked his own political convention just days before McCain is going to accept the Republican nomination. But wait- what's this? There's something happening at the GOP Convention in Houston that I can't go to? Wait, what? He's back out of the race a second time? But wait, even though he's in the Republican Party (again), he's talking about newly declared Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Bob Barr as "speaking our language?" So which Party do people like Ron Paul (and people that are just right of center or don't wear religion on a political sleeve) belong to?

This is a fascinating topic right now for several reasons that are grounded in the founding of Red Hot Texans. At the New Politics Forum that prompted the first post on this blog, panelist Michael Turk, internet advisor to Fred Thompson and director of RightRoots PAC (link on right), made some very interesting points. He observed that recently, Huckabee came out and said, "Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism..."

With Obama getting such appeal among conservatives and the millenial generation, it seems like, after years of bickering, the American political anchor is moving left, or at the very least more towards the center. How will a traditional far-right religious-based Party and platform survive in those conditions? Michael Turk predicted that the Religious Right as an organized, agenda-controlling instutition will get left behind and be replaced by a Party tempered more by a libertarian platform (and assumingly vice-versa). If this is true, it would be a titanic shift in the definition of the GOP.

It would also provide the perfect counter-attack in the area where the Right is weak: the internet. The laws of eMath currently state that Democrats >>>>> Republicans. Before I ever even visited Obama's website way back when, I knew it was probably spiffy as heck and designed by a talented gay web-designing goru from San Fransico. As soon as I saw the cutting-edge and gorgeous homepage, my worst fears were confimed: the site was obviously made by a guy with a Bachelor's of Photoshop and a Master's in Fabulous.

But, as Michael Turk pointed out, "The libertarians are the best people in the world at using the internet." The very first commenter on this blog, dataphilic, said the exact same thing in response to my founding post, "The libertarians are the best in the world at connecting using the Internet." It was weird hearing the same exact sentiment twice in three days.

So the new eMath is Libertarians >>>>> Democrats >>>>> Old GOP? And Libertarians have the same type of ability at bringing out the crazy, passionate young voters and independents like Obama does?

Now that's a Republican Party that can come back from the dead and sucker-punch the Democrats from out of nowhere.

Let's pray that the GOP rolls like Katamari and absorbs the Libertarian Party back into the fold, eliminating the vices of each but combing their strengths.

Basically I want the Republican Party to be like Voltron. You need all the parts to form the hero...

"They be like he the man when I'm really a Thundercat

Come on you know the tics connect like Voltron"

-Nelly, Shake Ya Tail Feathers

*Political factions are like zombies- you have to shoot them in the head or they keep stumbling onward, intent on consuming your living flesh and turning you into one of them: a shambling, muttering, grizzled horror show with awkward arm gestures**. Once again MC Chris provides expert testimony on just such a subject. (Not safe for work or the faint of heart).

**This was not a dig at John McCain. Wait- oops.

***Hillary Clinton.

Is there even a support group for this?

2008-06-10T15:24:00.011-05:00

A couple of years ago there was a portable system called the Game Boy Advance. It was a decent console until the release of a little game called Advance Wars. AW was a turn-based tactical game with anime characters and cute (if beautiful) animations. The game (and its sequels) featured wars on imaginary, colorful continents, where the stories featured wars waged between comical characters. It was war, but everything was bright, shiny, light-hearted, and sunny, and everyone acted like no one died- the story was always dumb and goofy, and when you beat your fictional opponent, it was in a Scooby-Doo "I'll get you darn kids!" sort of way. Nevertheless, beneath the kiddy facade, the game had a level of depth and tactical thought that was basically chess on crack and would have made a West Point graduate blush. Advance Wars was famously addictive, even with the kiddy-gloves, lack of a real plot, and general lack of that many unit types. I always thought, "Man, if they made a nitty-gritty version of this game that actually had a serious characters, way more units, a tragic plot about war, and even better graphics, I don't know what I would do with myself."

Enter Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The introductory prologue features meteors raining from the sky and destroying most of human civilization. Um, yeah. This is not the Advance Wars they marketed to twelve-year olds. What's this? Way more unit types? More complicated battlefield features? Mobile base construction? A world where children get infected and die from a plant virus and Online playability via the Nintendo DS? I was up until 3 A.M. this morning despite having a list of things I needed to accomplish today.

I would still not be so concerned if I weren't also a chronic addict of Risk 2210 AD, BabasChess, Warhammer 40,000, and Landgrab. I think I have a problem. I am a strategy addict.

(The Seventh Seal, 1957)

I love politics for the same reasons, and I'm sure I'm not alone by a long shot on being addicted to all of these manifestations of the same pleasure. I've always loved The Fugees and The Score is one of my favorite albums. Lauryn Hill's line always stuck with me; "I play my enemies like a game of chess."

Strategy is going to be a main focus for me with running this website. Here are some features I plan on adding over the coming weeks and months:

The RHT Manifesto Ver. 1.0

1) Cross-fire style podcasts and debates between people I know with progressive blogs and myself.

2) The comments feature on this blog will be used heavily. I'll try to respond to all comments people are nice enough to make, but for the most part I will use feedback or observations for visitors, liberal or conservatives, to spin off on new posts of my own. I hope that this encourages interaction, encourages people to check in here regularly, and helps builds a sense of community and a virtual marketplace of ideas for those that are interested in the same topics as me.

3) An interview series called Red Hot Texans. I'm going to look for young conservatives in Texas that are active or interested in politics (and hopefully they will come looking for this blog as well). The segment will feature a bio picture and a mini-bio with some background information, and then a medium-length interview. The idea is to figure out how and why young people got interested in politics and in being a conservative, and what issues and changes are important to them insofar as the future of the GOP. Once I have enough interviews I will start compiling them in an interview archive linked to from the blog, and conservative activists can find and contact one another, either for strategic purposes or just to confirm that they aren't alone in our generation. Ideally, eventually there would be enough activists spread out over the state that local campaigns and GOP operatives would contact the young conservatives in their areas for campaign help or other reasons.

4) Interviews and profiles with politicians and candidates for public office. The focus with obviously be with GOP elected officials. It wouldn't be all softball- I want to grill candidates, old and young, about what efforts they are making to involve young people in their campaigns, and if they have any ideas for changes in the GOP platform or approach that will help keep more millenials from going over to the Democratic Party and the Obama machine.

5) I also want to make an outreach program to Democratic politicians. I think fighting for the center and showing signs of effective bi-partisanship where appropriate are going to be key to the survival of Republicans in the future political landscape. I have a long list of questions that I want to ask from Democrats in local or state positions about how they see the GOP, what they think effective bi-partisanship is, and so on. Speaking from five years of competing in speech and debate, getting the other side's point of view is an essential act for anyone with any sincerity of approaching complex questions.

6) I would love to interview GOP officials and Party operatives who work with the web on a national or a state-wide scale. I'd like to know more about Republican blogs, eStrategy heads, outreach efforts, and so on. I'm sure that in the back allies of the Party there are a lot of people already working hard on trying to set up the Right to fight on equal footing with the Left for the internet and the culture wars of the future. There is an undiscovered country here that I want to present to young conservatives that might read this blog; people in our generation should have assistance from the Party in finding internship or niche opportunities, or just in being inspired to get involved in our own ways.

7) I've always thought that it would be wonderful to put together a compilation of youth-centric political organizations. I've participated with a number of these, including the NYLC, the JSF, and more. I know there are other programs out there like Boys States and Girls State. In January I will be going to the Inaugural Scholar's Conference for the Presidential inauguration, for example. I'm going to start collecting links to these sorts of groups here on the blog, but I also want to do reports on the various organizations out there (purpose, programs, costs, etc.), and even do interviews with their representatives. That's an exciting prospect for me.

Finally, on a frustrating and sad note, the GOP State Convention is this week. Why frustrating and sad? Well, let's see. I just started a blog about exactly this sort of thing. It's an election year and this sort of convention isn't going to happen for another four years. It's in Houston this year, and I am currently living for the summer in Houston with my family. I love political conventions and haven't gotten to go to one since I went to the Republican National Convention in 2004. It would be a perfect chance for me to get to introduce myself, get some meaningful Party content for the blog, and meet and interview people.

And I CAN'T GO! The convention is the exact same time that I live for my week in Florida, on a trip with my girlfriend, my little sister, and her friend that was planned a year ago. Hotel and plan tickets were booked way, way back. The timing on this is so, so stupid. It's very disappointing.

You know you're a strategy addict when...you would rather spend 3 days packed into a convention center with a bunch of politicians and activists that don't care who you are and are much older than you than spend a week on the sands of Palm Beach. I guess ultimately the only real difference between a bunch of politicians getting together and the beach is that the beach has less sharks.

Oh well- I am more than excited enough with all the ideas I have for features for this blog.

I could never give up thinking about my next move on the board even if I wanted to.

"A game of chess, is like a swordfight...you must think first, before you move." -Wu-Tang Clan, Da Mystery of Chessboxin'

(GZA from Wu-Tang Clan, Maxim Magazine, Feb. 08)

Earth, Fire, WIND, Water, Heart!

2008-06-09T12:32:00.008-05:00

So I got this in my inbox today from Senator Cornyn, know by some somewhat sarcastically as Senator Boxturtle:

In addition to producing more domestic oil and natural gas to meet our energy needs, we need to be exploring every possible source of alternative energy for the future. I recently invited Under Secretary of Energy Bud Albright to Austin to host a roundtable on local and federal efforts to promote solar energy, and to name Austin a designated “Solar America City.” I hope to continue this dialogue with communities across the state on solar and other types of alternative energy, including wind, biodiesel and nuclear.

Despite the terrible road system, the hobos, hippies disguised as hobos, the lack of parking, etc. in Austin, I do love some of the things they do in the city, a smoking ban being a clear #1. If Austin starts to do some fancy stuff with renewable energy and the existing tech infrastructure in the city, I think people on the left and on the right would be delighted.

Speaking of saving the environment- when they are finally going to abolish more houses and historic such-and-such tree clearings and finally open up a major alternative to I-35? I am so, so sick of those damn NAFTA trucks killing traffic on Austins most important route. I only live like 15 minutes or less from the UT campus, but it often takes 50 minutes to get there because the street I live on to MLK is the most congested block of road in Austin! In the most congested medium-size city in the country (well according to A&M, and the Aggies might be right for once). Good job me.

Speaking of Marxists

2008-06-09T01:41:00.003-05:00

I actually had not had any intention of posting twice on my first day*, especially after spending so long on the NPF post, but has anyone else seen this? I totally missed it today.

I've been following FARC and its happenings ever since high school, when they became a favorite topic of mine in Foreign Extemporaneous Speaking competitions in debate. I can't believe that Chavez is doing an about-face now that Sureshot died. I really wonder what he has to gain here. Maybe he wants a political hat trick from the Marxists similar to his own and the one that just occurred in Nepal.

*Well I guess technically it's Monday now. I really will need to fix my night-owl lifestyle someday when I get a "real job" with a big law firm. Of course, that's such a pipedream still that I might as well repeat my nightly prayers for acceptance into Harvard Law, a pony, a bank safe to fall bizarrely on Hillary Clinton from out of the sky, and a backpack with wheels that the people at UT won't make fun of me for.

Reflections: NPF Forum at Rice in Houston June 7th

2008-06-08T21:47:00.015-05:00

So yesterday, in-between my little sister's high school graduation ceremony Friday and her big bash at my parent's house in Sugar Land the next night, I went from 9 to 5 on Saturday to Rice University in Houston. I didn't look up directions until about 3 AM that day, but luckily I knew how to get there pretty easily because it was right next to Montrose, where my Masonic lodge is located. I know that website is pretty old, but come on- it was made in 1835.

Anyway, Rice was beautiful as usual. I guess you can put lots of fountains and green fields everywhere when your college can fit inside UT's business school. I was annoyed at the lack of street signs and big labels on buildings, but driving around Rice was so much better than putting up with the tsunami of car-ignoring hippy UT students walking across the street testing my wrath.

I'd always wanted to see the Baker Institute, and the Baker building was very nice. None of us at the NPF conference could decide which of the two rooms we liked more, and we kept shuffling between them all day.

The most important part of the event, the food, was excellent. I am an orange juice addict and drank enough to make up for an entire 16th-century Galleon's suffering of scurvy. The only way the refreshments could have been better would have been with a margarita* machine (I got the impression that one of the panelists from the day would've agreed).

I was happy to see some different, and less, people at this event than the one I went to in the fall of '07 at the capital, back when I was still interning at Mark Strama's capital/district office. I had such a great time at that conference that I was very excited about going to anther NPF event at with a new topic, and a better student-speaker ratio for me to exploit.

Nevertheless I was expecting the topics to be interesting but not super amazing- I am a huge nerd and practically grew up on the internet and with computers. Thus, I was greatly surprised when every single panel was AMAZING. We had some huge-name speakers, and, better yet, the non-national-figure panelists were the best of all. I didn't pay any attention to local Austin blogs in the time that I've had my nose buried in books at UT, other than the Burnt Orange Report. I was super happy, then to be introduced to Charles Kuffner and Eileen Smith. Charles really was a very down-to-earth community activist kind of guy and it was good to see his level of candor on what exactly his motivation was on running a blog. They run very effective bully pulpits for their views and ideology over at Off the Kuff and In the Pink Texas.

You can see a complete schedule and description of the NPF conference and its speakers here.

I was delighted by some of the people I had never heard of before- Phil Noble was a hoot. Just like I wish that MySpace would go die in a fire, I'm not a big fan of podcasts, either, but I would give my little sister's graduation money to be able to listen to this guy every day in podcasts. I knew he would be one of the best speakers when I saw he was the one who made the least effort to look super-formal. As soon as I spotted the pink Lacoste shirt I knew he was going to go Internet-Einstein on our butts; what I hadn't predicted was the beautiful accent and the delightful enthusiasm for Obama that reminded me of a high school freshman gushing about Justin Timberlake. His short presentation was very basic but also very jarring and thought-provoking.

Hearing Garret Graff's EXCELLENT and cutting-edge lecture at the start really made me wish I went to Georgetown so that I could attend his lectures. His answers to my questions were very, very informative and I wish I had been able to write down all the book titles he gave me.

Project Vote Smart sounds like a good website and I'll be adding it to my links. Joe Green's talk about facebook and his points about new behavior due to social networking sites were funny and very valid. Micah Sifry was a very in-the-know guy about the web and politics and has his hands on a number of projects, including being an editor over at Tech President. Micah ran through a number of awesome websites that I wanted to write down, but I'd missed the notepads by the entrance. If anyone has a list of the links he showed us, can you send them to me? I'll add them to the links on the right.

I don't want to go on forever about the conference, but I have to say that I was really looking forward to the two GOP speakers and that I wasn't disappointed. They were getting shit all day from the army of left-wing academics, film makers, bloggers, etc.

Michael Turk was great, and I had to wince in sympathy as he told us about his experiences in the Fred Thompson campaign. He seemed to be struggling not to roll his eyes sometimes as he described the way our Party is dropping the ball on some of the technological and cultural changes that have been sweeping the country in recent years, and it's hard to do anything but sum up everything he went over other than to say that I got the impression that this guy just "gets it". I'm happy to see in the NPF brochure that is the director of this RightRoots PAC, and I'm very keen to see how that newish project is going to grow and be a player in right-wing circles and (hopefully) victories in the next few years.

I probably had the most personal stake in Mindy Finn's comments. I'd been watching the to-be-panelists sitting in the audience as other people were speaking earlier in the day; I do these sorts of paranoid things instinctively. While during some panels one person would react very visibly or even participate verbally or via facial expressions in another person's comments, Mindy was very hard to read, so I had no idea what she was going to say or what direction she was going to go when she presented. Maybe she plays poker. Trying to predict how she was going to respond to some of the topics that had been left for her by other panelists earlier in the day was harder than trying to understand Homero Gil de Zuniga's accent. Which reminds me- like Homero told me, the Euro Cup has started! My family and I are going to be sitting around the Tivo the next few weeks. The Cup is even in Switzerland (and Austria, boo) this year!

But back to Mindy- the personal story she told was very informative and intriguing. I was very impressed that she just went to DC and started knocking on doors looking for work. That definitely reminded me of many of my Dad's experiences growing up as he worked his way up from absolutely nothing (my Dad's life story(ies) could easily form an epic book). It even reminded me a little bit of my own (less epic but still entertaining) experiences at 17 at the Republican National Convention in New York City. I still have Vietnam-like flashbacks to getting up at 5 AM every day to grab a taxi so that I could get out of the militaristically cordoned-off zone around Madison Square Garden and get to the other side of Manhattan early enough that I could completely crash the Texas Republican Delegation's catered VIP breakfast at the top of the New York Hilton and hustle random people for spare guests passes to get into the convention that night. But I digress. Again.

I *really* cringed when I heard Mindy's description of how she was treated at the Romney campaign. From her own comments and from what I see in the NPF brochure, it sounds like she did some very clever and innovative things online over there- I actually would like to go back and study some of the things mentioned in the brochure, since I never went to Romney's site during the primary. Before she talked I was very reassured to see that there WAS at least A PERSON working for the GOP that was under 40. She also got extra street cred with me because she's originally from H-Town as us kids call it these days. When she described the lack of respect or attention she got as a young-ish person working on web-related issues, it reminded me painfully (again) of a past experience of mine. I still remember being a junior in high school and going to Tom DeLay's campaign-office parties (I interned at the district office and rarely at the campaign), and being almost invisible to the vast majority of people there because of my age. When I was already standing out so much from all of my demographic and even from my politically interested friends in Speech and Debate by being a Republican at that age, it felt somewhat like a burn to feel like I didn't really have a spot or a niche at official GOP how-to-dos. To be fair, Tom's daughter Dani made the effort to get to know me well and was a total sweetheart, and Mrs. Delay was so affectionate that moments after she met me for the first time at a party she told me how she had "heard all about me" and immediately embraced me in a huge hug. But despite all that, I know that my feelings or situation weren't in a vacuum because Mindy very acutely listed and pointed out that a number of factors were keeping the GOP behind in the current fight for the internet and the millenial generation- most of them not directly related to the internet at all. As a "millenial" myself (if you can't tell by now, I hate buzzwords**), I have no intention of going quietly into the night on this.

Which is basically the huge big reason I finally caved and made my own blog. I have no idea where this is going to go, if anywhere at all, but I'm sick and tired of waiting for a GOP boom in my generation and our representation to happen all by themselves.

Reagan's Revolution doesn't have to be the last one...

(Edited from original art stolen from owner DOMX)

*How the hell does blogspot spellcheck not recognize margarita as a word? What kind of a yuppy yankee website software is this?!

**I went to a seminar once where the guy kept telling us every third sentence day after day about how much he wanted to "touch base" with us. I wanted to touch him with a rusty fork in the eye.