Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards announced his candidacy for President from New Orleans' Ninth Ward this morning. It capped off a series of what I would call rolling announcements, throughout which: today's announcement was announced, a YouTube video was released discussing today's announcement, a web site snafu which revealed the announcement site a day before the actual announcement, and so on. So now, officially, he is running for President.

I spoke with Jeff Montgomery from Montgomery & Associates this morning about the previously mentioned "Texas Directions" survey. He stressed to me the important point that, again, this poll is not of likely voters or even registered voters, but rather a random sample of the Texas adult demographic. Some of the detailed issue responses were very informative.

Harvey Kronberg had a story with serious implications late in the day yesterday, dealing with a new survey of Texas citizens and party identification. While the population was comprised of Texans rather than likely voters, the results (and trends) are important: for the first time since Montgomery and Associates began running the survey three years ago, more people identified themselves as Democrats than Republicans.

Representative Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth) is proposing legislation which calls for the undoing of the deregulation from the 76th session. Representative Sylvester Turner (D-Houston) is reportedly filing similar legislation, but the text of that bill is as yet unavailable.

Oh boy. This could lead to problems.

Shortly before Christmas, some rumblings began on the race for Speaker in the Texas House. This morning, I heard on NPR that Representative Brian McCall is claiming he has the votes to win.

The news is a little thin in this week when no one is around. But a few reporters are still filing stories, even if it is from hotel bars or interweb cafes.

The Chron is running a story today about how much money there is to be had for Republican presidential prospects in Texas. Texas is not particularly crazy for any single Republican candidate, so all the big donors, the Rangers and whatever elses, have room to fork over.

Texas gave Bush $23 million in 2004, which is classified scientifically as "not nothing."

The New York Times and CQ Political Money Line have posted an interesting collection of recent ethics filings detailing some travel gifts from corporations and other entities to elected officials. Southern Nazarene University, for some reason, sent Congressman Kenny Marchant to Cabo.

There was a special election all up ins House District 29 on Tuesday, in which Democratic candidate Anthony DiNovo came in third, setting the stage for a Republican run-off. Early results looked like this, representative of the way the whole thing turned out:

(D) Anthony A. DiNovo 1,642 22.43%
(R) John Gorman 116 1.58%
(R) Mike O'Day 3,508 47.92%
(R) Randy Weber 2,054 28.06%