Weekend Roundup: More TYC fallout

On the heels of an announcement by Travis County DA Ronnie Earle that he intends to open a criminal investigation into possible TYC sex abuse coverups, Governor Rick Perry has appointed a special master to conduct another investigation. The state legislature is conducting an investigation. Statesman puts the total number of investigations at seven.

As with most political and government scandals, this will boil down to who knew how much and when. It is not going to be a pleasant experience for anyone even remotely connected to the administration of the program. You can expect to see Republicans in leadership positions who had nothing to do with the whole thing calling for the heads of those that did. And, as a positive, a state-run program in which very bad things were happening will get cleaned up. Or at least, it is to be hoped that it will get cleaned up.

Speaking of shining some sunlight on the darker corners of government, the Dallas Morning News spends a whole editorial calling for public record votes on legislation in the state house. I'm still sort of surprised in general that this hasn't happened in Texas yet, but maybe this will be the year. It would certainly make life more difficult for the people that actually have to do the voting in some ways, but the playing field in that respect will be level, at least.

March 9 is the deadline for lawmakers to submit bills for consideration this session, unless Perry, Dewhurst, or Craddick categorize late-breaking measures as emergencies. There will likely be some latecomers this week, and while I don't necessarily know that they will be inordinately interesting, we will keep an eye on them just in case someone proposes making Lufkin the official birthplace of Elvis, or something similar.

At this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, some interesting things happened. First, Mitt Romney won their presidential straw poll with 21%, which is good for him. Bad for him is that Crouching Liberal, Hidden Democrat Rudy Giuliani was only four points back. When you have a straw poll at CPAC and Giuliani beats Sam Brownback and McCain and loses only to a former Governor of Massachusetts, you're seeing the ascendancy of Giuliani as the sole candidate the GOP base considers to be cut from presidential timber. If I were Romney, I'd be paranoid. If I were McCain, I would drop out.

The other thing that happened, as if the GOP candidates didn't have enough to worry about, was that Ann Coulter did what she does best by saying the following:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot," so I ... so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards.

So, as you can imagine, Romney, McCain, and Giuliani immediately distanced themselves from Coulter's comments as hard as they could. There will be a lot of bluster over this as people talk about how horrible Ann Coulter is, she'll sell some books, and Edwards may end up gaining from it in the long run from the media coverage. The campaign had a pretty clever response to the whole deal - they threw an online fundraiser in which they encouraged people to send them "Coulter Cash." Only in American politics, folks.

No, really. Only in American politics.

Finally, for the creepy story of the weekend, check out this from the Washington Post: apparently, the FDA is going to approve an antibiotic for use on cows despite knowing it is dangerous to humans, because use of the antibiotic will speed the evolution of supergerms.

We'll see you later this week with the goods, including some works on BRAC and T. Boone Pickens.