Updating Trish’s story from Thursday, “The Hot Item at the Texas Republican Convention,” the Texas Republican Party has moved to distance itself from a vendor who sold buttons at the party’s state convention that bore a racist message about Barack Obama: “If Obama is president … will we still call it The White House?”

According to The Conservative Voice, the Texas GOP says it will donate $1,500 in rent paid by the vendor, Republicanmarket.com, to victims of the flooding in the Midwest.

Said Texas GOP spokesman Hans Klingle, “This vendor need not apply to another Texas GOP state convention. We will neither tolerate nor profit from bigotry.”

How conservative is the Texas GOP? The Conservative Voice notes that in “1998, the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest organization of gay Republicans, was denied a booth at the GOP state convention in Fort Worth and likened to the Ku Klux Klan by a Texas Republican Party spokesman. “We don’t allow pedophiles, transvestites or cross-dressers, either,” then-GOP spokesman Robert Black said at the time.

The fact that the Texas GOP has shifted to the left on an issue like this backs up assertions by Arianna Huffington and others that liberal positions are increasingly becoming mainstream.