These past several months John Montford has been travelling the state, trying to circumvent the Texas legislature on the issue of gambling expansion.

Texans keep stubbornly (and smartly) electing anti-gambling officials.

Enter Montford, paid by gambling providers to paint a pretty picture for gambling expansion. He’s operating as a lobbyist here, though he’d probably rather be thought of as a statesman based on his time as a state senator.

The Texas Ethics Commission lists Montford as a lobbyist for PM Texas LLC, which is affiliated with Penn National Gaming – a horse racing company and casino operator with interests in 25 tracks and casinos in 16 states and Canada.

Can Montford’s get-rich-quick pitch get the grassroots to violate their common sense about whether or not slot machines are a good idea for Texas? It’s not likely.

AgendaWise has reported before on Montford and his push for gambling expansion
in Texas here and here. Contrary to what paid lobbyists like Montford says, the numbers for gambling just don’t add up. Economies that foster gambling spend or lose $3 for every $1 they collect from gambling revenue.

It turns out, our parents were right. Get rich quick schemes are for fools.

The gambling expanders are using a mix of glitz, glamour, and gambling revenue mythology to sweet-talk Texans into a bad decision.

Luckily, we live in a state full of people that don’t need to be told that their common sense is a better guide than a paid gambling lobbyist.

The conservative movement in Texas is alive and well.

Sadly, 46 states are languishing in Obama’s America, with a loss of hope that can only be described as un-American.

Hope has been maintained in three out of fifty states. All three – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Kansas – are infused with hope due to healthy conservative movements accomplishing things like card check. These states know what it looks like for the ruling class to lose, and, as a result, have hope.

Texas is the fourth state that hasn’t descended fully into Obama’s America. Texas defunded Planned Parenthood last session, giving Texans a reason to feel good about ourselves. Texans preserved an honest witness in the legislature by rejecting the “we were conservative” chant lead by Speaker Straus.

This set the stage for a dramatic improvement in the makeup of the House during the primaries. Many powerful crony moderates lost in favor of conservative statesmen.

The speaker’s race is a principle manifestation of what makes Texas the fourth state not relegated to Obama’s America. For many reasons, the speaker race is stronger, and more necessary, than it was last session.

For one thing, Speaker Straus said long ago he wanted to be speaker for only three sessions. The next one would be his third. This means that he would spend zero political capital if he became so unpopular that he can’t be re-elected speaker next time. He has “yep, my three sessions are up” to fall back on. This will make him bold.

In short, a third Straus term would have the same dynamic as Obama’s scary second term, because Straus doesn’t have to be political anymore. Conservatives beware.

Next, Straus has removed cover for conservatives to vote for him. Remember the last speaker race? He danced his heart out to the fiscal and social conservative tune. Now Straus has turned the music off.

Straus is opposing the Governor and Lt. Governor on the issue of the Texas Budget Compact. Straus campaigned for new revenues without lifting a finger to find efficiency or waste in government. He’s gone public as a fiscal moderate.

Straus is also rumored to be telling social conservatives to save ink by not submitting any bills to make Texas less dangerous for its unborn. According to the Texas Tribune, Straus strongly implied this session’s important abortion legislation – the fetal pain bill – isn’t a priority. He’s gone public as a social moderate.

These things make a Straus vote even less defensible in-district. He has raised the price for House conservatives to vote for him.

But, as a matter of fact, the House isn’t the same as last time. It is better. Straus dynamics aside, the House has many more conviction conservatives. This makes the speaker race stronger this time.

Finally, if transparency and accountability are good things, running a speaker race, regardless of the outcome, is excellent for the state of Texas.

This is because normal order in politics is to have a small band of unapologetic bad guys in the legislature, a small band of unapologetic good guys in the legislature, and a huge ambiguous middle who are relatively unsorted.

The speaker’s race changes all of that. It basically provides Texans rankings for the entire House. Who has guts, and did they have it early, middle, or late?

And anyway, the original conservative movement took 30 years to win on the national level.

The reinvigorated Texas conservative movement will take nowhere near as long, but must possess the patience and resolve the original movement had, if it is to provide strength to America.

This typre of resolve creates an Oi-Wan Konobe effect. A battle loss is a win, because it serves to inform average citizens of what kind of reinforcements are needed. Losses become movement accounting and team-building.

Without bold, consistent moves like these, the movement operates in the dark.

Tired and cowardly conservatives who are out talking down the speaker’s race know not the forces they are playing with.

If they were to crush the speaker race, as they have already failed at doing, they would sink Texas squarely into Obama’s hopeless America with 46 other states. It would be left to three states, and none of them mighty Texas, to reignite hope for Americans who love America as founded.

It is our responsibility to cultivate the flame, not to lay down arms and walk willingly into Obama’s America.

Every conservative politician and activist first got involved to fix the system. The argument against the speaker race boils down to “leave the system alone”.

This isn’t good enough. Conservatives with a fighting spirit are ready for battle, and will benefit from their boldness. Conservatives who can’t stomach the fight should step aside for someone who understands where we are in time, and what is needed.

A panicky Paul Burka has taken to writing David Dewhurst’s political obituary with some regularity. Why he doesn’t just make it a weekly column on his blog is anyone’s guess.

Burka does it because the  Lt. Gov. has signaled conservative intentions for the next session. Paul Burka is a court journalist. Along with nearly every other creature of the big government establishment, Burka is dutifully attacking anything that threatens the continued growth of the bloated and broken system. The preservation of this growth is, at bottom, the real purpose of their labor.

What’s funny is that Burka doesn’t seem to have different ways to attack a Lt. Gov. versus someone he’d consider a grassroots nobody. Anyone who threatens to discipline the Austin machine is painted as a confused, wandering rube. It’s his one play. Maybe he has writer’s block.

Burka burdens his reader’s suspension of disbelief when he paints David Dewhurst as the rube. Dewhurst’s career – first in the energy sector, then as a politician – if compared to Burka’s side-by-side, dwarfs it. To be sure, most people’s careers would fare the same next to Dewhurst’s, but then, other Texans aren’t trying to publicly paint the Lt. Gov. as confused and incompetent. Whatever else Dewhurst may be, he isn’t that.

Burka finishes with an attempt to poison the grassroots well for Dewhurst. Burka says that conservatives will always know Dewhurst is of the establishment, implying that the grassroots can therefore never cooperate with Dewhurst.

Let’s think about Burka’s logic here for a moment, granting Burka’s point that Dewhurst comes from the political establishment. Conservatives know establishment politicians are part of the political furniture. They also know how rare it is for conservative true-bluers to get into positions of power.

Does Burka think conservatives are so un-clever that they will not take conservative cooperation from establishment politicians when those politicians decide they need to play to primary voters for a while? Does Burka think the grassroots are so un-clever that they will destroy the possibility of establishment politicians converting to conservatism after reaching high office by never giving them credit for potent conservative moves they make?

Take this as evidence of Burka’s radical underestimation of the intelligence of the grassroots.

–Burka’s Dewhurst hit piece

In the Austin-American Statesman’s “First Reading” John Tilove gave us the first glimpse of the conservative play that is likely to be performed in the House throughout the 83^rd Legislature. He labeled Speaker Straus’s increased spending agenda, with no hint of government and spending reform, “conservative”.

Straus ‘s functionaries in the media are also lauding his neglect of social conservatism.

This is how a state is moved left with minimal notice. What used to be “liberal” is simply renamed “conservative”.

Tilove also fully adopted Rice professor Mark Jones’ quote about Speaker Straus’s increased power this session. It could be very wrong or very right, depending on the Speaker vote.

If the legislators who got elected as conservative Straus adversaries vote for David Simpson, Straus will have a very hard time doing whatever he wants. He will have a truth teller’s caucus that will keep his theater from coming off as reality, and Straus’s allies will be thinking about their fallen comrades from primary season. The same primary dynamics will be even stronger, and they will be scared. Conservative movements always take many cycles to be midwifed to power – winning now was never the least bit necessary.

If Simpson doesn’t force a floor vote, Straus’s power will indeed be increased, and he has already said that his agenda is across-the-board moderate liberalism.

This would be a strange move for Simpson’s allies to make, if not so much for Simpson.

Simpson’s opposition of Straus is very public. He can always imply that he was the only one strong enough to do the right thing. This will make him very strong in district.

His friends are the ones who are likely to pay for it. They have already embarrassed Straus, that much is done. They have already destroyed the possibility of trust with Straus.

What not getting a floor vote does is provide them none of the benefits of being a Straus ally while simultaneously having none of the benefits of being a Straus opponent. It will demotivate the people who create their conservative discount at home. It will be Sid Miller all over again – a conservative who was easy to beat when his grassroots got wind of his speaker compromise and largely removed themselves from the equation.

Obstacles along the way are always learning opportunities. No floor vote would be that, but a bitter one considering it was so very illogical and unnecessary.

At this stage, not long before the vote, things looks bad. But Simpson and company still have a very real choice, and it isn’t yet final.

The good news is that there no shortage of good legislation to support and bad legislation to oppose in the coming months. The grassroots have plenty of important things to do, even if they’re disappointed.

Texans should keep close tabs on their legislators regarding Rep. Todd Hunter’s new Texas Tourism Caucus and gambling expansion.

Hunter, a key Straus ally, has been touting gambling expansion since the end of last session. Speaker Straus’s family are in the gambling business and need a bi-partisan 2/3 majority of legislators in both chambers to expand their gambling oligopoly.

The Caller article that reported Hunter’s new caucus said it has a bi-partisan 2/3 majority of Texas legislators in both chambers.

On the same day of Hunter’s caucus announcement, Texas Association of Businesses (TAB) leader Bill Hammond announced support for gambling expansion, focusing his talking points around tourism.

In reporting the story, radio station WOAI tried to paint TAB as an outfit with conservative clout. This is inaccurate. TAB is a government rent seeker at cross-purposes with conservatives, and only has lobby clout.

Considering the fact that increased gambling creates a predictable heavy union influx, Texas businesses should be particularly wary of the effort.

Could the Texas Tourism Caucus be a trojan horse for gambling? It is worth voters and grassroots activists keeping a sharp eye on.

Caller article on Hunter’s caucus

WOIA reporting on TAB

The Obama Administration has gotten socialized medicine and higher taxes, and now wants to disarm the citizenry. As if we needed a reminder, the GOP as-is has again proven to be a dummy opponent. Lucky for us, now that Obama temporarily got what he needed from the GOP, Speaker Boehner has become a man of the people, claiming to have returned to the conservatism of his youth. What a relief.

This is not the time for patriots to decide the system can’t change. Not if we want our children to respect us when they are old enough to take measure of the situation and our response.

The truth is, genuine conservatives don’t run a single chamber of a single state government in the nation, much less the federal government. All of the GOP-dominated state Houses are run by the lobby, as if our legislatures exist to pass the next law that will improve politically-connected businesses, unions, associations, and the bureaucracy.

The Democratic Party believes we don’t spend enough. They have no shortage of new spending proposals. They speed us over the fiscal cliff, even as they blame the GOP for it. They collect votes by offering other people’s money and a governmental blessing for anti-social, sinful behaviors that we used to be wise enough to know are corrosive to faith and freedom.

The GOP says it stands against those things, but has a deeply ingrained two-faced culture that everyone in GOP politics feels daily. There is, on the one hand, what the GOP says it stands for in order to corral vote groups. On the other hand, there are the lobby priorities; the real priorities that are served when sessions begin.

Whatever genuineness GOP politicians personally possess regarding long-term issues like true budget balancing, rule of law, and basic moral decency, is often buried under the weight of the short-term lobby priorities. Patriotic concerns end up being chips used in service of lobby demands.

Long term thinking in one party is sacrificed on the altar of power and goodies for the masses. Long term priorities in the other party are sacrificed on the altar of short term goodies for connected businesses and associations. Neither party dares challenge the powerful and bloated bureaucracy.

In Texas in 2011, 30 house members stood in caucus for a grassroots conservative speaker candidate, and 15 members voted on the floor votes against the person occupying the lobby-owned speaker chair. This helped generate a much more conservative session than otherwise would have been possible. It gave establishment moderates a tougher-than-usual “pretend-to-be-conservative” primary-prep project.

This opposition helped produce a very good primary for grassroots conservative candidates, and a very poor primary for moderate establishment candidates and incumbents.

Though we can’t be sure, it is likely that, even at the end, a speaker vote would have included 20 or 25 votes against the lobby-owned speaker chair.

To give perspective, growth of 10 votes each year puts the speakership in the picture in 12 or 14 years. While that probably sounds like eternity to politicians in a capitol city vortex, it isn’t very long to patriots who want to save this country. Think of it this way: it is only three presidential cycles away.

The speaker vote never made it to the floor, but it won’t cause Texans to throw their hands up in the air. We are neither helpless with a lobby-owned speaker chair, nor naive enough to think all problems be solved if we empowered a grassroots-backed speaker.

One thing is sure: our founders did not set up our system so that crony businesses, bureaucracies, and mobs with pitchforks demanding benefits would commandeer it as their personal vehicle.

We must not get swallowed by this system that is now trying to disarm us. We must change it. Anything less says Speaker Boehner’s recent performance as the best we deserve to hope for in this country. Anything less is giving up the war of our age because it is hard, turning on the TV, and wishing our kids and grandkids good luck.

We are in the second week of the 83^rd session and, not even counting weekends, legislators have had more days off than on. They worked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the first week, then Monday and Tuesday the second week. They’ve taken off the first Friday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of the second week, and now Monday and Tuesday of the third week. For those counting, they have met five workdays out of 11, and all they did the first Thursday was vote themselves permission to take their first vacation.

The first few months are always pretty leisurely. The wasted time creates an atmosphere at the end of the session in which  bills and amendments fly around too fast to follow. This makes it much easier to do things voters wouldn’t like.

If people complain about the reckless pace of legislation that the end of session brings, establishment politicians, on cue, blame the fact that the Texas legislature only meets six months out of every two years.

Additionally, a  new amendment carried by Phil King makes these last-minute bills and amendments harder to stop because it gives the speaker discretion to override points of order brought against the bill.

On the day the King’s speaker-empowering amendment passed , other amendments designed to make the legislative process more fair and transparent failed. Legislators who opposed them argued that they simply don’t have enough session days to burden themselves with passing such legislation. One wonders how such legislators spent their early vacation.

There is one permanent fact that can make a legislators job much less confusing: politics has only two power sources; the lobby and voters. All political actors, including media and activists, derive their influence from one or both of these sources.

Trying to succeed on grassroots issues the same way lobby succeeds on its issue isn’t possible. The different nature of these two power sources ensure this.

The most important difference is that the lobby pays attention to everything, and the grassroots only see the most visible things. This isn’t a criticism of the grassroots, it’s just a practical fact. The lobby gets paid a lot of money to watch, and participate in, everything. The grassroots can’t give this kind of sustained attention for obvious reasons.

The grassroots takes longer to get going, but when it does it cannot be stopped. Appropriating grassroots power is impossible without creating the kind of visibility that grassroots radar is equipped to detect.

Grassroots visibility comes from an issue containing three basic factors: simplicity, urgency, and build-up. Without any of these three, real grassroots legislation ends up being visible only to the lobby, giving it zero chance of passing.

For this reason legislative strategy is apples and oranges for special interest legislators and grassroots legislators.

Lobby legislation

Lobby legislators do a lot of tricks and deals because they have a very low bar to meet. All they must do is obscure an issue enough that the the issue’s visibility (simplicity, urgency, build-up) stays low. This is why they get to do ingenious-looking things that, in reality, aren’t very hard.

Visibility can be kept low by making legislation highly complicated-sounding. This damages the simplicity factor of visibility.

Visibility can be kept low by putting a cover story designed to appeal to the grassroots. This damages the urgency factor by giving it a “some good guys like it, some don’t” gloss.

What is urgency? Urgency is about whether or not a bill addresses a known problem. Real problems that are nevertheless unknown in the grassroots must be consistently messaged before a bill addressing it has enough urgency to attract grassroots power.

Lobby legislation is even stronger with a cover story and “card carrying” conservative, freshly wooed off the reservation, carrying it. People think, “Surely something even one of the good guys supports isn’t urgent, right?”

Finally, the lobby can do bad things when the grassroots know nothing of it. That is why they operate at such low volume levels.

This is also why, when lobby legislators can’t convince grassroots legislators to back off of something that would hurt the lobby, the next thing the lobby legislators ask the grassroots guys to do is – pretty please – do not talk about it publicly. However tough their posturing is, they are saying, “if you’re going to expose us, can you at least expose us less?”

The lobby passes bad bills when grassroots visibility is low, usually because one or more of the following factors is absent: simplicity, urgency, and build-up.

What do these factors mean for success for grassroots issues, and how does all of this apply to the first few weeks of the session? We’ll return to that next week.

Patriotic governors have a chance to expose the dangerous games Obama is playing against Americans, and Texans in particular.

The rap against Obama since the beginning is that he resents America as it is, and wants to transform it fundamentally. Among other things, he has taken our dangerously high national debt and deficit and accelerated it beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. This is a highly dangerous game Obama is playing against the American people, and ObamaCare is the most damaging piece of it.

Obama’s media cheering circle is currently reinforcing his reputation with an anti-citizen feature of ObamaCare. This feature supposedly issues Medicare freebies to privilege legal immigrants over citizens in states with governors fighting against ObamaCare in the struggle to save this country from disaster.

If it happens, this would be a monument to Obama’s conspicuous preference of just about everyone over traditional Americans. Texas citizens should wear their refusal of such benefits, in the name of saving the country, as a badge of honor. The message would be that Obama is pitting citizens and legal immigrants against each other in a Hunger Games-style fight for debt-funded freebies, and Americans are getting tired of playing.

Obama’s media chorus would like to fix the blame on patriotic governors, like Rick Perry, for such a situation, ridiculously claiming that the governors are the ones pitting legal immigrants and citizens against one another.

The truth is the exact opposite. Having faith in the common sense of Texans and Americans to figure this kind of thing out is necessary for getting off the Obama tilt-a-whirl.

Last week Politico reported that Democrats have their hearts set on turning Texas blue. For conservatives who have been paying attention to the push for expanded gambling, this comes as no surprise.

Expanded gambling is the Democrats meal ticket to expanded power in Texas. It is an invitation to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Harry Reid’s political base of power in Nevada. Conservatives must kill the backdoor power grab.

Shockingly for Texans who know about it, In December Harry Reid tried to expand gambling in Texas by way of the U.S. Senate. Reid’s ploy ultimately failed but, if passed, the measure would have given casinos a loophole through which to launch.

For Democrats casinos mean a very powerful lobby (think: trial lawyers but more violent) and unions. Reid relied heavily on casino unions to hold onto his seat in 2010. Gambling expansion in Texas means unions and built-in campaign infrastructure.

Lawmakers and Texans should know this fight isn’t about public policy.

Talking policy is how John Montford, the Democrat, is leading a PR campaign, largely aiming at gambling’s opposition party, the Republicans. (Most recently Montford was an Obama handyman at GM.) However, gambling in Texas consists of several hugely regulated and protected oligolopolies. It is as far from “free-market” as possible. “Free market” is just the veneer Democrats like Montford put on it to try to quiet the opposition.

Democrat Rodney Ellis was the first to file legislation to create casinos in Texas. Like the lottery before it, Ellis is promising that this will bring additional revenue to the state. Texans have been there, done that. The lottery has failed to live up to its promises, and continues to makes the lion’s share of its sales in districts most reliant on government assistance.

Like the lottery, expanded gambling won’t benefit Texans, just a select few who are in on the ground floor.

Gambling expansion is an important plank in the Democratic Party’s plan to take over Texas. Casinos, and the unions that come with them, would be a big victory for them. Conservatives must mobilize in opposition.

Grassroots issues must be visible to pass, so they must be simple and urgent, and they require build-up.

Urgency comes from widespread knowledge of the problem. A grassroots legislative push may address a real problem, but if the problem is relatively unknown to the grassroots, it won’t garner enough grassroots support to overcome lobby and liberal pressure.

Even the election of the third-ranked constitutional officer in Texas has taken time to make urgent.

Speaker race build-up has centered around the lobby-controlled speaker chair being too liberal. This is why making the speaker race about a virtually unknown problem – House rules – was bound to damage the urgency of the cause. Even the most engaged conservatives, if asked during the speaker race if they honestly knew the House had a big rules problem, were likely to shrug their shoulders and say, “Sure, I mean, I would think so, ya know?.”

House rules may well be a serious problem. If so, this needs to be messaged thoroughly in the grassroots before the grassroots can provide power to propel an action addressing it.

Also, the grassroots has been lied to so much over the years that no politician can get away with a wink. If you don’t publicly say your bill is about the thing they care about, they have every right to expect that you don’t plan to deliver.

Simplicity is also required to marshal the power of the grassroots with regard to a bill. If the bill’s “pitch” is hard to give, it will keep in-district opinion-makers from convincing enough people.

This was likely the case with regard to the school vouchers several session ago. The strategy provided for it was a complicated, hard-to-follow, incremental plan to spread vouchers all over Texas via inner cities. This bill had tons of build-up. The issue was, and is, urgent  - average citizens throughout the country are disgusted by the public school system. However, the bill lacked simplicity.

Why was it made complicated instead of simple?

One of most attractive and common strategic blunders is that of trying to win enemies before friends. In politics things happen because of power. Going to the natural enemies of a political move in order to, essentially, ask their help winning your friends, is feeble.

What is not feeble is going to the next-closest undecided legislator to your cause and saying, “Everyone to your right is signed on. Do you want to be the line between good and bad on this issue?” Strong.

Also, thinking you can distract them from recognizing a bill that will dismantle the educational establishment, or ObamaCare, or anything else with a too-clever-by-half  “oh, no, this is all about a brand new thing that I think you can get behind…” may be a comforting way to sidestep the natural opposition to a political move. However, it only does so because it sidesteps natural support, too, leaving the opposition unworried. A wise man once said, “You’ll always know a battle by how much it feels like a battle.”

What about build-up?

The lobby deserves to slink around Austin, slipping their legislation in under cover of darkness. People whose deeds are evil love the darkness. Good deeds, however, love the light, and often need it to grow.

People with the moral high ground simply cannot accept a set of circumstances in which they must hide.

If they do, ostensibly wishing to limit opposing pressure, they’ve signaled to lobby legislators that they aren’t going to do the one thing that could hurt lobby legislators – tell the grassroots what they are doing.

Far from discouraging opposition, conservatives doing business this way ensure intimidation, explicit or implicit, will always be used. And why not? Intimidation is preventing the one thing guilty legislators fear.

This strategy amounts to hoping lobby legislators accidentally vote yes to legislation sneaked in at the last moment. This happens in the lobby’s favor, but against the lobby can this type of thing happen more than once in a blue moon? Can it consistently succeed on impactful items? Not likely.

The shadows are always a home game for them. Full daylight is always a home game for conservatives. The grassroots takes time to get going, but once it is moving it is very hard to stop.

Grassroots issues need to be visible to the grassroots if grassroots power is to be marshaled. This requires simplicity, urgency, and build-up. In the last part of this series, we’ll discuss realistic expectations for grassroots issues.

KLBJ online reported that the city of Austin is giving Robert Rodriguez’ Austin-based Troublemaker Studios $200,000 of taxpayer money. The city of Austin seems to be filling the hole created when the state of Texas wisely revoked a $1.75 million subsidy to Rodriguez’ race-baiting anti-white revenge film “Machete”.

KLBJ online made no mention of “Machete”, or that a new “Machete” film called “Machete Kills” is coming out later this year. The news outlet described Rodriguez as the maker of “Spy Kids”.

KLBJ story

“Karl Rove declares war on conservatism” was a Sunday headline on Breitbart.com, the news site named for deceased conservative champion, Andrew Breitbart.

It seems Karl Rove, the architect of Romney’s election night “shellshock”, is creating an anti-conservative GOP PAC designed to keep conservatives from winning. The anti-conservative PAC’s name, appropriate given the GOP establishment’s silver-tongued MO, is “Conservative Victory Project”.

This is unsurprising, since Rove’s moderate-playbook election night disaster left him with only one option: double down. He is doubling down.

Rove is blanketing his project with William F. Buckley’s “back the most conservative candidate who can win” rule.

This new anti-conservative PAC seems intent to scrub the GOP of candidates the establishment doesn’t control.

However, Grover Norquist has already pointed out the falsity of Rove’s pitch. Norquist said, “People are imagining a problem that doesn’t exist. We’ve had people challenge the establishment guy and do swimmingly.” Just maybe, the point isn’t to get rid of candidates that can’t win, but to get rid of candidates the establishment doesn’t control.

What makes the premise of this group most distasteful is Rove’s own behavior toward Todd Akin, Rove’s poster-boy for the “too conservative to win” tea-party candidate pool that he is trying to defeat.

It was Rove himself who led the charge to beat Akin, seizing on a campaign comment, and relentlessly hounding Akin on national TV. Rove declared Akin finished in his race, and sought to make an example of him, even when Akin was still ahead or close.

Is there any reason Rove’s scathing criticism couldn’t have waited until after the election? Of course not. The Democrat was clearly preferred. His premature post-mortem was trumpeted relentlessly, helping bring about Akin’s defeat.

This new PAC’s aim is counter-intuitive given the state of American politics and recent events.

The one thing everyone on the right agrees on is that the GOP must become more attractive to Hispanic voters.

Hispanics are reliably socially-conservative, including flagship issues like life and marriage.

However, Rove and his faction are leading the push for the GOP to get rid of the social issues, or at least mute them even more than they already are.

Giving away the best common ground you have with the main group you need to attract may seem bizarre and backward to people thinking for themselves, but it is also an established page in the defunct moderate playbook.

Ditching the social issues is exactly what the GOP establishment has always pushed for, and is a major reason for the ever-present grassroots/establishment friction that is strong in the GOP and nearly absent in the Democratic Party. Ditching fiscal conservatism has now pushed the GOP establishment to the brink.

The pro-life movement recently turned out 500,000 people in Washington for a peaceful march in favor of ending legal abortion. These numbers dwarf the capability of any side of any issue in American politics, including the paid professional Left. Still, the GOP establishment would have Americans believe alienating this unparalleled political juggernaut is the path to victory.

It doesn’t make sense, but fear never does. The cowardly GOP establishment are infamous for caring much more about avoiding enemy criticism than appealing to allies. Luckily for Democrats, the former is an impossible goal – a goal the GOP is 0-for-life accomplishing. The latter is not only possible, but is actually desired desperately by everyone but Democrats. The GOP establishment goes for the former and dumbly takes for granted the latter. Go figure.

Conservatives also point out that the GOP will expand it’s base by running candidates that average voters identify more closely with.

Rove’s establishment GOP faction, on the other hand, insists on running candidates with the look and feel of a Wall Street CEO. Their campaigns are then run directly at this group, and only secondly to other vote groups on the right.

“Gordon Gecko” is precisely the GOP caricature that Hispanics, and most everyone else for that matter, have never met, and certainly don’t trust.

Additionally, Mitt Romney was the GOP establishment’s gift to Obama. A flip-flopper on almost every conservative issue, Romney was the most moderate candidate available. He only beat more conservative candidates due to a deluge of ad money in states two weeks before each primary vote. Oh, Romney got the crossover voters and independents the entire establishment was so sure was the key. However, he failed to turn out the GOP base, and was crushed. “More of a bad thing, please,” is the establishment response to this.

We have had exactly one tea party election year that wasn’t hijacked by the GOP establishment – 2010. It was an historic year of victory for the GOP.

The fear-and-appeasement-minded GOP establishment needs to be rescued from itself if the party is to have any future at all.

–Breitbart article

House committees were finally announced last week. Mike Hailey, a reporter with establishment ties in Austin, made a lot of predictions about the appointments which we will examine.

Writing after the state GOP convention in June of 2012, Hailey floated that Jodie Laubenberg had turned on conservatives by supporting Joe Straus for Speaker in exchange for a plum committee assignment. Laubenberg publicly announced her allegiance shift in November. Too bad for her, the rumored kickback never materialized.

Hailey also predicted that Phil King and Dan Flynn would benefit greatly by joining Team Straus. Wrong again. The veteran King isn’t even co-chairing a committee, much less chairing one, and Flynn was left out in the cold, too.

Our advice: get your silver pieces in advance next time.

Really these moves by Straus are quite logical. Why would you want to empower legislators you hope to shortly replace? They are now legislators without a home, primed to be replaced by candidates without a conservative reputation holding them back.

There were two conservative members elevated to standing committee chair posts by Straus – Tan Parker and Geanie Morrison. Hailey predicted the Parker appointment, but not Morrison.

The original redistricting map forced Morrison out of her seat as she was paired with powerful cardinal Todd Hunter. Morrison had a good chance of winning the seat but bowed out, only to get her district back when the courts redrew the lines.

Some establishment Republicans were passed over for advancement.

Ralph Sheffield, a vice chair in 2011, could have moved up. Sheffield has been an ardent supporter of Straus, but after the 2011 session Sheffield was frank about the Speaker’s vindictive approach to conservative members of his own caucus.

Then, Sheffield performed poorly in his last election against an underfunded challenge from the right. Straus keeping Sheffield un-chaired helps protect against another routing of his committee chairs in the 2014 primary.

By contrast, Freshmen Representatives Drew Springer and Ken King showed that freshmen can get exactly what they ask for. Each West Texas member was given the assignment he wanted.

Link to Amarillo article

Two days ago Austin Democratic Judge John Dietz sided with Democrats in a decision that public schools need even more tax money. To make matters worse for taxpayers, there is still a legislative session at hand in which educrats have been empowered by Joe Straus.

Straus has done his part to ward off reform to the public education system in Texas, a system that is broken in one sense and high-performance in another. It is broken for the purposes of education, but it is lean, mean, and high performance as a political special interest juggernaut.

The 2013 Public Education Committee is comprised entirely of Democrats and educrat-sympathizing establishment Republicans. New chairman Jimmie Don Aycock was endorsed by Parent PAC in 2008, and his appointment has made liberal bloggers quite happy. Appointments only go downhill from there.

Democrats on the committee include Vice Chair Alma Allen, who received campaign money from Parent PAC in 2012, Justin Rodriquez, a 2012 Parent PAC endorsee, Joe Deshotel, Harold Dutton and Mike Villarreal. These members are all aligned with the anti-reform efforts of the liberal Parent PAC.

All but one Republican members- John Davis – are also Parent PAC lackeys.

Marsha Farney, most recently a member of the State Board of Education, received money from Parent PAC funder Charles Butt to help her beat a conservative in a 2010 runoff. Her two year SBOE tenure saw her pitted against conservative members of the board.

Rounding out the committee are Dan Huberty, a Parent PAC alum from 2010, and two freshmen – Bennett Ratliff and Ken King.

Ratliff is the son of former moderate Lt. Governor Bill Ratliff and brother of embattled SBOE member Thomas Ratliff. Ken King, was gifted a district redrawn to rid Straus of an adversary, but had a much-harder-than-expected fight on his hands from conservative Jim Landtroop.

Yesterday, phony grassroots group Texas Conservative Roundtable hosted an establishment get-together in Austin. According to the Texas Tribune’s executive editor, this group with Straus ties was formed to undermine conservatives.

At the event Jim Craymer said:

“This is sort of his goodbye wave to the state (for Judge Deitz). Whether he waved with all five fingers rather than just a subset is a matter of debate”

According to the DMN, the crowd laughed.

The ruling is a hat-tip to the room full of grow-government cronies, and a middle finger to taxpayers.

The conservative movement is full of people who care deeply about the long term health of their country, activists and politicians who get into politics out of a sense of duty.

They don’t see politics, as others do, as competition to be a special interest power broker. That kind carry a short-term agenda of either special laws for crony corporations or new giveaways for a trained and organized mob.

These two special interest crews are “enemies” of one another, but only in a sibling rivalry kind of way. They are two versions of the same thing. One condescends, the other projects victimhood. Same thing, different side of the tracks.

Unfortunately, another human drive is routinely used by the ruling class to derail good conservatives. It is the drive for “success”, along with the security it allegedly brings.

“Success” can mean different things. Here it means what Ron Burgandy meant when he said, “I’m kind of a big deal…”

This impulse is referred to elsewhere as “the pride of life”.

But we all want success, right?

And, oddly, when it comes to getting our  “success”, we suddenly have blind faith in the goodness of our social system – though we admit society’s broken priorities other times.

We believe that if we do things right, “success” will just come.

Then, when success and our altruistic intentions unexpectedly come into conflict, we prioritize. We choose which one gets to stay in its original shape, and which one gets radical cosmetic surgery in order to begin supporting, and stop holding back, the other.

For eventual sellouts, it is the “if you can’t beat ‘em (at zero cost), join ‘em” moment. It will eventually be seen as a coming of age.

Still, this moment presents a big choice, and it is a choice the ruling class will help you make imperceptibly, and in stages. Much of it is not “on purpose” – it is just people obeying the pull of power.

For conservative movement people and conviction conservative legislators, their siren call always boils down to the same thing:

Every day, in a dozen attenuated ways, the ruling class says to conservatives, “Follow my cues and you will have access.” To dignify these decisions, words like “reasonable”, “prudent”, and “credible” are always close-by.

You see, we must be reasonable, like the young Civil War General who said to his superior, “General, I’m afraid any further acts of valor will bring us in contact with the enemy.”

In the end, the ruling class wants trained managers in charge of every conservative issue, every conservative caucus, every conservative body, and every conservative group, including tea parties.

They leverage access to powerful people, which, in capital cities, is like crack. Everyone is jonesing for another hit – not always even sure why.

It is a great setup for the ruling class. They funnel credibility to their issue-managers via first class access, the managers, in turn, reduce the credibility of the political move the ruling class opposes by not supporting it.

Then, to complete the loop, when real fighters finally make an issue unstoppable, the ruling class positions their issue-manager out in front of it so that his first class status is reinforced. In this way, the ruling class controls the flow of conservative movement credit.

Then people say about the trained issue-manager, “that person really gets things done.”

Yes, he’s very reasonable, very credible. Very useful.

The whole thing is built on a series of lies. One is the lie that conservative sellouts can’t buy back in.

Moving forward

Grassroots power derives from primaries. Providing a clear conservative contrast with moderates makes it easy for the in-district grassroots to help conservatives defeat moderates.

It also motivates the grassroots,  creating and improving the conservative discount/moderate premium effect (people telling the truth need less contact, less money to win votes).

The danger of a clear contrast was shown last primary when, even without an ambitious slate of primary challenges, Straus lost many key members of his team.

By the same token, blurring the line is dangerous. It demotivates the grassroots from the pro-conservative/ anti-moderate cause, and reduces the conservative discount, making the primary into more of a money fight.

This is, again, why lobby legislators always ask conservatives to keep their bold moves quiet. They know that a bold move that is quiet is like a tree that falls in the forest with nobody around.

The multi-session conservative job

Building the number of genuine conservatives, and helping them be more consistent and bold, is a multi-session task, and always has been. Conservatives have a law of increasing returns at work with regard to this. Conservatives can be added by challenging moderates and winning open seats.

Placating the establishment means allowing them to dictate the conservative agenda. Moving the government in a suustainable, common sense direction becomes harder the more conservatives choose to live in fear of the establishment.

The future of our country depends on legislators who vote with grassroots common sense over the special interests in both parties. Unfortunately, there is very little middle ground in politics. A watchdog tamed by the burglars has become part of the problem. After all, it would be better if the owner knew the house was unwatched than to have a watchdog that cooperates with the burglars. The burglar prefers a tamed watchdog to no watchdog.

Conservative legislators, grassroots, and activists got into politics to change things, not to join the problem. Changing things is hard, but rewarding. Obama’s success has put conservatism in a down cycle, but it will be back, and soon. There is a right way and a worng way to be the “out of power” group. How conservatives perform out of power will dictate how much they can do when the next conservative cycle comes around. Will precious time have to be wasted rebuilding the foundation, or will it be there, ready to be built upon.

To a large extent, it is the grassroots’ and conservative movement’s job to make sure the foundation stays in place.

On what basis should CSCOPE receive political support from government officials to stay in Texas classrooms, and profit from Texas taxpayers?

CSCOPE has been exposed engaging in the worst educational malpractice possible.

With disregard for the rules in the State of Texas, CSCOPE brought curriculum into our children’s classrooms that:

1. Calls the Boston tea Party a terrorist act,
2. Makes kids create a communist/socialist flag,
3. Christianity is called a cult, and treated as illegitimate,
4. Communism is placed at the top of the ladder of big ideas of the last 2 centuries, captialism is at the bottom and socialism is in the middle,
5. Free Enterprise is framed as a selfish system
6. Islam is taught under the cover of “cultural understanding”

This is just a few things CSCOPE is guilty of. It is hard to imagine a higher level of educational malpractice or broken trust.

Action is currently being taken against CSCOPE, but so far “regulate them better” is the only message out there. Hopefully, the grassroots changes that soon.

What would it say to other bad actors trying to infiltrate our schools if mighty Texas can’t kick CSCOPE out of classrooms, and off of taxpayers bill?

The progress the grassroots has made against CSCOPE so far is great, but good things are never easy. The grassroots should stay involved to make sure the punishment fits the crime, and to make sure the punishment advertised is followed through on. Words guarantee very little these days.

Especially now, Texas needs to show that there is still a government somewhere that knows how to match a problem with the correct solution.

Today, the Speaker dealt a significant blow to two important conservative gun bills when he referred them to a committee chaired by a Democrat.

One of them, a campus carry bill, could have easily been sent to the Republican-chaired Higher Ed Committee. This bill, HB 706, was co-authored by Reps. Capriglione, Leach, Klick, and Laubenberg.

Instead, it was referred along with Rep. Lavender’s HB 700 – a bill to legalize open carry in Texas – to the House Committee on Security and Public Safety, chaired by El Paso Democrat Joe Pickett.

Rep. Pickett was previously the Chairman of the Transportation Committee, and a Republican was the Chairman of the Committee on Security and Public Safety. This session is a high-impact time to switch to Democrat Chairmanship of this Committee, given President Obama”s prioritization of gun control nationally.

Pickett will now choose to take up the bills or not. Considering Pickett’s party is more aggressively anti-gun than ever, these bills may have been given a death sentence.

The GOP is revisiting its stance on immigration because the GOP establishment is in need of a scapegoat to hang their 2012 failure on.

Whatever conservative issues you care about, and they are all on the chopping block, immigration is the fight the establishment has picked to shift the 2012 blame onto conservatives, and chart a liberal course for the future of the party.

Their irrational, counter-intuitive “blame conservatives” accusations have not been enough by themsleves. They believe that an anti-conservative “party fix” will do the job of officially placing the blame for 2012 on conservatives.

Of course, at a higher level, we’re talking about immigration right now because Obama is trying to make the Democratic Party unbeatable via amnesty, and the GOP establishment are playing their traditional role of selfish losers.

And yes, blaming 2012 on the people who ran the table against the Democrats in 2010 – the Tea Party – is absurd.

The non-jello-minded haven’t been distracted from the facts. In 2012 the GOP establishment got their presidential candidate, spent record amounts of money, and generally dominated the GOP landscape. The results? They followed the Tea Party Landslide of 2010 with the Establishment Shellshock of 2012.

So, don’t be surprised at the muddiness of this debate. The GOP establishment won’t actually say that anti-rule of law legislation will win more Hispanics to the GOP, because amnesty in 1986 did the opposite. It strengthened the Democrats and led to increased illegal immigration.

Instead they will say two things independently, but in close proximity  to one another, waiting for us to connect the dots: A) The GOP needs to sell itself to Hispanics, and B) Rule- of-law conservatives are racists not to support the rewarding of immigration lawbreaking.

The problem is, amnesty or quasi-amnesty won’t make Hispanics into Republicans – we have hard evidence of this. And, opposing the rewarding of lawbreaking makes someone sensible and mature, not a racist.

This establishment move on immigration is nothing more than peer pressure straight out of the high school lunch room.

It’s true that the GOP needs to sell itself to the inner-conservative in everyone, including Hispanics, and it is true that Hispanics have a very strong and deep conservative streak, whatever political impulses they are acting on today.

But the GOP establishment is not doing this. Instead, they are trying to enter the liberalism market, fully conceding the playing field to their enemies.

They won’t argue that legal immigrants – Americans who can vote – like the idea of rewarding illegal immigrants, because legal immigrants don’t like the idea of rewarding illegal immigrants.

They won’t explain their “racist” accusation against people who support legal immigration and oppose illegal immigration, because the claim is perfect nonsense.

And, we can all expect the sycophants in the establishment-obedient wing of the conservative movement to help the establishment, using a variety of cynical justifications, such as, “Hey let’s get together and beat the racists!”.

The GOP establishment is using innuendo suggesting something they know to be false – that amnesty or quasi-amnesty legislation will strengthen the GOP. They are doing it to get the GOP to make a bold anti-conservative adjustment, which would have the effect of “officially” shifting the 2012 blame off of themselves, charting a liberal path for the future of the GOP, and handing long term victory to Obama.

This issue is about the GOP establishment hanging on to the driver’s seat by their fingernails.