Progress Texas

The City of Dallas is poised to step into the global spotlight, as the most-watched sporting event on the planet, the FIFA World Cup, arrives in North Texas this summer.

The coverage by the Texas Observer, a longstanding and legendary liberal Texas media outlet - of a recent hit piece on Houston State Rep. Gene Wu by the Dallas Express, an upstart, well-funded right wing rag masquerading as a "spin-free" media entity - has us thinkin' about how difficult it has become to tell fact from fiction in the news...and that's before we even start thinkin' about AI.

Fresh off her recent appearance at SXSW in Austin alongside progressive legend Stacey Abrams, we're proud to have a talk with Skye Perryman: a Waco native and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a leading legal organization based in Washington, D.C., known for wielding their expert litigation and policy advocacy to challenge executive overreach and protect democratic institutions.

As federal authoritarianism threatens civil rights, immigration, and economic justice, cities are stepping up to defend democracy. If democracy survives this moment, it will be because cities held the line.

The 11th Congressional District is one of those wildly gerrymandered and gigantic slices of Texas designed to amplify GOP power in rural areas while diminishing the more progressive voices in our urban areas - in this case, stretching from the Permian oil patch all the way through north Austin and Pflugerville. Just so happens, the long-time GOP nominee is August Pfluger, a lockstep Trump puppet who has gone without a challenger in his last two elections - but not this year.

The second pod presentation from last weekend's Harris County Democratic Party Convention is a live take of the panel of featured speakers, who brought incredible energy to a packed ballroom at the University of Houston: 00:55: Host and Harris County Democratic Party Convention Executive Director Jeff Hilton 03:09: Emcee and Lincoln Project Co-founder Rick Wilson 07:15: Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones 13:30: Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia 18:13: Harris County Democratic...

Lately, Jesus has taken the wheel of politics at both the state and federal level - from Pete Hegseth's pastor wishing God's lethal wrath upon James Talarico while his disciple wages holy war in Iran, to Ken Paxton and Kelly Hancock squabbling over how best to discriminate against Texas Muslims, to Dan Patrick's new Senate committee on religious freedom - formed mostly from Republicans well-versed in imposing their religion on your freedom - Christ, it's been a week.

We had a blast in Houston over the weekend as media partners of the Harris County Democratic Party Convention! Later this week, watch for a recording of all the speeches given in the convention hall - but we start with all of the interviews with lawmakers, thought leaders, candidates and more that we gathered over the course of the day! These are presented in the order we recorded them, between 9am and about 4pm on Saturday March 21.

All across Texas this weekend - Friday March 20 thru Sunday March 21 - county-level conventions are being held by the Texas Democratic Party. It's a terrific (and free!) way to dive into progressive politics, and an especially fun way as a bright blue wave appears to be building across the Lone Star State.

A theme has emerged this week: as the Dallas County Democratic Party throws in the towel on a lawsuit over denied voting access on primary Election Night, judging the Republican-dominated Texas Supreme Court a hostile venue for that complaint - while our senior Senator John Cornyn reverses himself on the filibuster out of pressure from Donald Trump and Ken Paxton to pass the SAVE America Act, which will allow the GOP to disenfranchise untold millions of American voters - the very foundation...