Normally I would wait until Monday to post reflections on a Sunday afternoon political outing. But I couldn't wait that long to give some online kudos to the crew at Our Revolution. Mainly thanks to Facilitator Ann Rosenwinkel, the two-hour Texas Gulf Coast regional quarterly meeting at the Havens Center was well attended, ended well ahead of schedule, and accomplished quite a bit.

Mostly, the meeting gave members a chance to chat with some candidates and choose their delegates to next weekend's state meeting in San Antonio.

Sigh. Once upon a time, the Harris County Green Party could run a meeting that accomplished a lot and left attendees feeling energized afterward. Even when some members occasionally used meetings as soapboxes for their pet issues, we got stuff done.

Now that I have signed into an Our Revolution meeting, apparently I'm a member of something. Do I feel sufficiently jazzed by the experience to want to pour my blood, sweat, and tears into OR? Nah. But even if I have lingering suspicions about it being just another way to keep wayward progressives voting for Democrats, I must respect the way they ran this meeting and the group's sense of purpose.

That word "Looms" in the headline is the verb, not the noun. If there is a deadline for filing looms, as in the tool for weaving, I'm not aware of it. And why candidates would want to file looms in the first place is beyond me.

If you're a hopeless wonk like me and are curious about who's running, I can't reveal too much at this point, mostly because I don't know much. However, it is a matter of public knowledge that these two Harris County Greens intend to run for office in 2018:

• Janis (Jan) Richards for governor, and
• Joshua (JosH) Darr for US House in TX-2.

The filing deadline for partisan candidates is this coming Monday, 11 December. If you read DBC Green Blog on the regular, you should know this stuff. If you have any intention of running but haven't started the process yet:

1. go to txgreens.org
2. download and print the form
3. get it notarized, and
4. submit it to the proper Party officers: county co-chair for district races within a single county, state co-chair for all others.

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A Tale of Two Strategies
Jan has filed to run as a Green. That means that her viability as a candidate depends upon the Green Party of Texas collecting the required number of signatures for the party to regain ballot access.

In case you aren't aware or have forgotten, those signatures must be collected from

• registered Texas voters
• who did not vote in any party primaries or sign any other party's ballot access petition
• in the 75-day period following the precinct caucuses on 13 March.

The required number of valid signatures statewide is 1% of the total vote count in the 2014 gubernatorial race—just over 47,000. GPTX will have until Memorial Day to collect, get notarized, and submit the whole pile.

JosH is filing to run as an independent candidate. In order for his name to appear on the November 2018 ballot, he needs to collect and submit just 500 signatures from residents of his district who are registered voters who have not voted in a party primary in 2018. There is no restriction against signatures from voters who have signed a party's or another independent candidate's petition. The petitioning deadline for independent candidates is 21 June.

Although US House District 2 lies entirely within Harris County, JosH must both file with and submit his petition to the Texas Secretary of State's office. Along with his petition, he must also attest that, at least for 2018, he is not a member of any political party, recognized by the state or not. For what it's worth, if JosH gets on the ballot and no Green candidates file in TX-2, as a longtime Green he will still most likely have the Green Party's endorsement.

You may recall that, at a Green-sponsored candidate workshop a couple of months ago, a few candidates showed up and announced their intention to run as independents. We should know by next week whether those folks actually filed. Watch this space and txgreens.org for updates.

Brief Introductions
Jan and JosH don't have websites yet to introduce themselves. After the filing deadline, I plan to be involved in creating sites for both of them. Meanwhile, here is some useful information.

Jan came to the Greens just last year as a disappointed Sandernista, after Senator Sanders's was mathematically eliminated from the Democratic Party nomination. She is an even more hopeless wonk than Yours Truly, with an interest in organizing at the precinct level  and targeting precincts in Harris County that are likely to produce votes for Greens and Progressives. She went to high school in Highland Park, Illinois, with a certain Jill Stein. She speaks fluent Russian.

JosH was active with HCGP in the early '00s, serving a term or two as treasurer (one of only three people ever to have held that position in HCGP, as he recently reminded me). After several years of sporadic attendance at meetings, he got active again in 2014 and ran for the TX-2 seat as a Green last year. For a while, he held a union organizing job, then a job delivering seminars in Total Quality Management; in the latter capacity, he made presentations at HCGP meetings to help with improving various Party processes. Oh yeah, he has a campaign Facebook page.