Friday Roundup - Tomorrow (Fund) Never Dies (?)

How much money have you saved in the Texas Tomorrow Fund for Junior and Sally to go to college? Really? I have some bad news for you: it's running at least a billion in the red, and could be as much as three billion short. This doesn't mean that your money is gone, specifically, it just means that the program, which launched in the mid-90's, couldn't keep up realistically with tuition rates when they started to rise after deregulation. The program has been closed to new participants for four years, and they aren't sure how to pay for the 154,000 or so enrolled when the time comes.

Perry did a little corrective PR in refocusing the attention on what the sale of the lottery might do rather than who it might benefit. I know it's popular to brandish partisanship against anyone who isn't on the team, and it might all be empty rhetoric, but when the guy says "Let's use some money to try and cure cancer and give poor people health insurance," well, there's very little wrong with that. Plus, the end results, the cancer-curing and health insuring, are Democratic ideas; you can't disallow them because the guy in charge talking about them is a Republican.

DA Craig Watkins is opening the doors of Dallas County to the Innocence Project, which pursues the modest goal of testing the DNA of people with questionable convictions in serious crimes like rape and murder to see if they actually belong in jail. 12 convicts in Dallas County have already been exonerated by DNA tests, which is more than any other county in the nation. If you know me, you know I'm a fan of justice, so this is a nice story to hear.

Harris County Judge Robert Eckels made it official — he's leaving office and heading for the private sector. Some eyebrows are being raised that he's leaving now after having just run for another term in November. I imagine Judge Eckels is going to be keeping an eye on which statewide Republicans do what in the next several months, so that he might align himself for a run at something in 2008.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is counting on some scheduling sorcery to move the Senate forward on the anti-surge Iraq resolution: he scheduled a weekend debate on a procedural vote which would actually get something happening. When Republicans took part in stalling the debate on the resolution earlier this week, the Democrats carried forward with a disciplined message that Republicans were blocking an important debate on a subject of enormous importance, and they may have been adequately shamed into duking it out on the floor. Reid was unapologetic that the vote might interfere with the plans of Presidential candidates, many of whom are in the Senate Democratic caucus, saying simply that he hopes they'll be there. Somehow, I bet they will be.

Speaking of Presidential candidates, the Washington Times is really trying to sell the story that Newt Gingrich is a dark horse ready to break away from the rest of the lackluster Republican field, a force to be reckoned with, a sleeping giant — even though he is currently little more than a shadow candidate. He polls well around the country, and he says he won't get in until September if at all. If that's the case, he's already out of it. While there is a ton of money out there, it is still a finite amount, from a finite amount of sources, and there's no way anyone can get up to speed in finance if they start in September.

Tom DeLay and Martin Frost have a sort of pamphleteer debate underway over at The Politico. It only takes DeLay about two and a half paragraphs to use the word "Clintonistas," and he bemoans the fact that Hillary Clinton knows a lot of well-connected people with money. Frost argues that if you're right, people will come around to your way of thinking (eventually), and two teams with essentially the same amount of grassroots organizing and money will be distinguished by which one's politics are essentially out of step with what the electorate wants. I think it is a little weird for Tom DeLay to write that his party's grassroots organizing wasn't strong enough to defeat a vast liberal conspiracy led to victory by George Soros. It implies an admitted weakness rather than the usual reification we hear from the GOP leadership.

You remember a few days ago when I told you about the memo Representative Chisum circulated about how evolution shouldn't be taught in schools? Well, Chisum sort of apologized for it and the story made it to one of our favorite national blogs, Talking Points Memo. We need to do something to get some non-embarrassing stuff onto the national wires. So someone send me a big story about Texas that doesn't make me cringe, STAT.