This morning, the Texas Republican Party was busy imploding, and the enemy came from within its own ranks.

If you had any doubt that Texas is IN PLAY in 2020, let Tom Perez and Gilberto Hinojosa clarify your mind. The chairs of the Democratic National Committee and Texas Democratic Party, respectively, fired up electeds, donors and activists at the TDP’s annual Johnson-Jordan Dinner Saturday night (Oct. 5).

True story! When I was in college, in San Francisco, one of the local congresswomen died – not my rep, but in the next district over – and there was this big, wild special election to replace her.

We still have more than a year to go (!) but for so many Texas Democrats, victory is so close they can also taste it. That's especially true for two congressional candidates – Gina Ortiz Jones and Sri Kulkarni – whose near-misses in 2018 helped provoke the "Texodus" that has given Team Blue so many tempting 2020 targets.

This week on The Austin Chronicle Show, we contemplate Beto, the blue wave, and our favorite women film directors.

Is the Texas House in play? Is the Texas GOP in crisis? Are America's cities doomed to suffer the depredations of Trumpism? Two panels at the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival Friday morning, Sept. 27, dovetailed in interesting ways as both explored moving past the stasis of today's polarization into a more complex and diverse future.

U.S. Rep Will Hurd, R-Helotes – whose decision to not run for re-election kicked off a "Texodus" of GOP incumbents that may not be over yet – distanced himself from his president and kept his own political options wide open as he opened the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival.

On September 5, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Phillips, the case brought by reproductive rights advocates challenging the fetal burial law adopted by the Texas Legislature (as Senate Bill 8) in 2017.

Molly Ivins was a trailblazer: a woman in Texas political journalism when they were rarer than horse feathers, an unabashed iconoclast, and a firebrand who left the national stage to concentrate on Texas' mess. Now her story receives the documentary treatment, and fittingly Texas gets it first.