Daily News Roundup, 10/24/07: Community College Funding Restored

Just yesterday I found myself wondering when this week's news story about the impending restoration of Perry-vetoed community college funds was going to show up. This morning, I saw why that story was delayed: because the restoration actually happened.

Perry stuck to his bad decision to the very end, but he was beaten back by Dewhurst and Craddick, who seemed to understand what a politically volatile set of circumstances the funding had turned out to be:

Though Mr. Perry had proposed that part of the money be doled out as performance incentives, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick refused, agreeing only to study incentive funds as a part of future higher education budgets.

Perry will probably say a few times over the next week or so that the system will have to change, and there may actually even be some changes to the long term structure of community college funding, but this can't be seen as anything other than a defeat for Perry, who comes out on the other side of the whole deal looking foolish.

Also, if you weren't living under a rock yesterday day you learned along with the rest of the Mikal Watts decided to withdraw from the Senate race, leaving Rick Noriega as the lone candidate for the Democratic nomination. The Chron does bring up the interesting point that someone else may still file between now and the filing deadline, but it is getting a little late. For anyone else to get in now, they would need to come packaged with statewide name ID. My guess is that if we're going to see any additional candidates, we'll see them in the next few weeks, sooner rather than later.

California continues to look like some nightmarish hellscape, as more homes and miles burn almost unchecked. Over half a million people have been ordered to evacuate from San Diego County and the surrounding areas. Yesterday when I started watching the news, the first Breaking News bulletin I saw said "A quarter of California's coast is burning." That was a disconcerting stat.

So it is nice to see that California's government and FEMA seem to be well-prepared and totally engaged in the disaster response and recovery operations. That is especially nice to see considering the concerns Texas forestry officials have about drought conditions in parts of Texas. At any rate, there are several phases to dealing with widespread disasters like this, and we're not even really out of Phase 1: Response, but I am encouraged by the difference between how this response looks in comparison to Katrina's. The real test, of course, will be over the long haul and on into recovery operations.

There's been a great deal of discussion lately about the State Department and their use of contractors, and how maybe they can't readily account for just a skosh over a billion dollars in invoices paid for. This morning, the New York Times has it that the State Department has been awfully contractor-happy over the last four years, and now the tally for contractor work is around $4 billion, four times what it was before the Iraq War began. A shortage of oversight staffers is blamed for many of the problems. I guess if I was doling out billions of dollars, I would want more than 17 people working compliance. The rest of the story is here.

Lastly today, Republican candidates have been making fools of themselves lately, which is nothing new, but Mitt Romney is taking it to the Next Level:

But he paused to talk about the threat of terrorism, taking John Edwards, one of his Democratic opponents, to task for comments he made that labeled the “global war on terror” a “bumper sticker” for President Bush.

“I think that is a position which is not consistent with the fact,” Mr. Romney said. “Actually, just look at what Osam, uh, Barack Obama, said just yesterday, Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. ‘That is the battlefield. That is the central place,’ he said. ‘Come join us under one banner.’”

If you keep reading, you'll see that some reporters actually went to look it up, to see if the Senator from Illinois had said such a thing, ostensibly because there's no way Romney would say something like that just as a result of mild confusion or a slip of the tongue, right? Obama's response was totally enjoyable:

Campaigning Tuesday afternoon in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama was asked his thoughts on the matter. “I don’t pay too much attention to Mitt Romney,” he replied.

In California and elsewhere, stay safe.