Jeff Wentworth had just completed a San Marcos campaign forum Wednesday when I asked him about the criminal complaint filed against him in Travis County two months ago. It was the first he’d heard of it.

Wentworth can be excused for not keeping up with the complaints directed at him, because the source of these attacks – a disabled, 67-year-old, retired Army veteran from Folsom, Calif., named Dave Palmer – has bombarded the veteran state senator with ethics complaints and accusations over the last four years. Palmer isn’t obsessive, necessarily, he’s just a guy who derives entertainment from spending eight to 10 hours a day in front of a computer screen, combing through campaign finance reports and state-comptroller spreadsheets, all in the hope that he can bust some lawmaker for ethical misdeeds.

In recent years, Palmer has filed more than 100 complaints against various Texas public officials, but Wentworth stands out as his favorite target. What drives this campaign-finance vigilante who calls himself The Watchdawg? He swears it’s neither political partisanship nor personal animus.

The fracas over Tina Torres' residency in Texas House District 117 is about where the attorney sleeps at night. Well, that and a toxic stew of other stuff, such as her recruitment and path to the Democratic primary, the historic neglect of the South Side, and former City Councilman Philip Cortez's politics of grievance.

As the state Senate District 25 runoff battle between Republican incumbent Jeff Wentworth and Tea Party insurgent Donna Campbell hits its home stretch, it’s largely being funded by forces on opposite sides of litigation issues.

Texans For Lawsuit Reform, an ultra-conservative Houston political action committee, has been determined to oust Wentworth, who they perceive as a friend of trial lawyers and an opponent of tort reform. TLR funded the failed primary campaign of former Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones – to the tune of nearly $700,000 – and has quietly shifted their support to Campbell, according to a campaign finance report submitted Tuesday by Campbell to the Texas Ethics Commission.

Campbell, a New Braunfels physician, reported two in-kind contributions totaling $19,595 from TLR in mid-June. Wentworth’s support from Texans for Insurance Reform – a group that advocates for trial lawyers against insurance companies – was considerably more substantial. He reported contributions totaling more than $91,000 from TIR during the first month of the runoff campaign, enabling him to raise nearly five times as much money as Campbell during this period.

If you've driven on the North Side's major thoroughfares lately, you probably already know Eliot Garza believes in you. He's got billboards that say so – "I believe in you, San Antonio." Next to the sentence is a smiling Garza in a nice suit.

Garza is the 38-year-old owner of NSIDE Publications, a stable of glossy magazines dedicated to the upscale and upbeat. He's also the third person to go public with his desire for the City Council seat Reed Williams is giving up in 2013.

He joins Rolando Briones, owner of an engineering firm and a veteran of the City's planning and zoning commissions, and Ron Nirenberg, associate general manager of Trinity University's KRTU Jazz 91.7 FM and former staffer at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

For those who waited in line to see him, President Obama’s Tuesday fundraising visit to San Antonio was a heartening reminder of the man’s undiminished charisma. For those who held Obama-go-home placards outside the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, the stop merely confirmed their suspicions that this chief executive’s time and attention come with a hefty ($250 and up) price tag. For me, the visit was a good excuse to think about the electoral college.

Between them, Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney have made four trips to Texas this year, and every single one of them has been of the take-the-money-and-run variety – open only to those who are willing to open their wallets. If either candidate sets foot in Texas anytime in the next four months, it won’t be for a meet-the-masses campaign rally, but for another fundraising pit stop.

It’s no secret that Texas is irrelevant in presidential politics. Romney knows he’s going to carry the state, so he doesn’t bother to campaign here. Obama knows he’s going to lose the state, so he doesn’t bother to campaign here, either. But we’ve got plenty of company on the political scrap heap. At least 35 of this country’s 50 states will be ignored during this fall’s presidential race, and we can blame most of it on the electoral college.

Susan Narvaiz doesn’t exactly fit the modern Republican profile.

The former San Marcos mayor – and current GOP nominee in U.S. District 35 – got pregnant and dropped out of high school at the age of 15 (she later earned her GED). Her son was born in a government-funded county hospital, and, after her first marriage ended in divorce, she raised him as a single mom, with the invaluable help of the federal government’s food stamps program. Ultimately, she managed to launch her own consulting business and establish a side career in municipal politics. She’s voted in four Democratic primaries and runoffs since moving to San Marcos in 1995, and has never been actively involved in the Republican Party.

When Narvaiz tells her story, it’s easy to imagine her delivering an “average-citizen” testimonial at the Democratic National Convention about how a compassionate government gave her a hand up, and enabled her to fulfill her dreams. Instead, she’ll spend the next four months trying to knock off Lloyd Doggett and put one more Congressional seat in the Republican column.