Well, this is neat. As the Republicans converged on Houston this weekend for their state convention, the Harris County Democratic Party "refuse[d] to yield the spotlight" and made some noise. The Harris County crew is proving to be formidable.

It has been a rough couple of years for conservative pundits. Unless you're like Fox News and you just don't care anymore, making your case to an unsympathetic public every day must be a real beating. Maybe that's why accusing Google of being unpatriotic is turning into a welcome way to wile away the days when they're bored or just get tired of losing on every issue.

Below the break you can see the text of an email circulated by the National Republican Campaign Committee. In it are the makings of the message they will be pushing this election year, which seems to say, "Hey, do you think things are terrible? Well, even though we're responsible for it, we do too!"

I know I've told you forever that national polls don't matter, often because they are so middling as to be completely undescriptive. However, sometimes some truly startling numbers jump out at you and then, well... listen, all I'm saying is that the new NBC / WSJ poll (condensed here in PDF format) dispels some myths, and there are some eye-popping revelations contained within.

On the heels of the Fox News ridiculousness in which newly-demoted presenter E.D. Hill referred to Senator Barack Obama's pre-speech fist bump with his wife Michelle as a "terrorist fist-jab" comes a serious undertaking by Media Matters: they used the Google and put together a pictoral history of the mysterious gesture, even capturing Senator Joe Lieberman in the act of the storied fist pound. Pound it, Joe. Pound it.

This morning I watched a little early morning MSNBC while I finished my coffee, and I saw a Campaign Alert(!!!!) that read: "John McCain to Criticize Barack Obama on Economy at 9AM."

...after agreeing to testify before the Judiciary Committee about the Bush administration. I think we all sort of expected this but it is still sort of weird to see it on the page.

The Texas Democratic Party has a YouTube channel, and from there you can catch all the hits from this weekend, including speeches and programmatic pieces. My favorite non-tribute video from the weekend was "By The Numbers," owing in large part to a great soundtrack. You can check it out here.

We were watching the speech from the floor, and there were some occasional feed outages. The most striking moment for me was a spontaneous outbreak of a chant.

The Nominations Committee is in recess, having just given 24 of 29 votes to Boyd Richie. Some extraordinary things just happened in this room, not the least of which is that Chairman Richie just answered questions for an hour and picked up a few votes, and he was able to do that while in the middle of running the largest TDP state convention in modern history. More on this after the jump.