I agree with you on all of those points.

I drove out to San Antonio today to visit an old friend of mine, and along the way I could definitely see what I understand to be truly Texas.

But the People's Republic of Austin is in many ways a scaled-down version of Brooklyn, or parts of Boston.

I'm not entirely convinced that is a Good Thing. Sure, the cosmopolitanism is nice, up to a point- in that one can find a decent cup of coffee, not the weak-kneed flavourless stuff that Starbuck's insists is "espresso". But the rest isn't necessary.

The simplest and fastest way to stop carpetbaggers from turning Texas blue- and God help America if/when that happens- is to enact a law forbidding any resident of Texas from voting unless he was born there and lived there for at least twenty years, with a minimum of ten of them being consecutive.

Inevitably such a thing would be found un-Constitutional, but then, the Constitution is pretty much done by now anyway…