Wednesday Roundup: Jumping Ship

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was, up until last night, something many Texans have encountered in the past: a Democrat who switched parties and then enjoyed electoral success. Last night, however, something different happened, something rarer — what you might call "pulling a Jeffords:" he left the Republican Party.

This obviously created a lot of instant speculation that he's going to run for President, but he denies it and his aides deny it. He did release a statement, however, which sounds awfully presidential:

“I believe this brings my affiliation into alignment with how I have led and will continue to lead my city,” Mr. Bloomberg’s statement read. “Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles, and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.”

See? It might be a little long for a bumper sticker, but it sounds like a commercial paid for by Americans for Bloomberg.

Speaking of elected executives, the list of groups and people angry about what Governor Perry chose to veto continues to grow. Perry vetoed an appropriation for about $150 million to Texas community colleges, the vast majority of which went towards group health insurance for administrators, staff, and faculty. In dealing with those funding cuts, community colleges will have to find more money to pay into the group health care plans so that insurance rates won't go up, and that probably means tuition increases. The linked story features specific commentary from some Midland College representatives, who took umbrage that their requests were called "fraudulent" by the Governor.

Texas Observer's Jake Bernstein has written an overview of the Legislative session, and has chosen "A Fish Rots from the Head" as his title. In case that leaves anything to the imagination, it is a treatise on how the state's governmental leadership performed, and he is not incredibly merciful to Craddick, Perry, or Dewhurst.

There might be some trouble at the Texas Lottery in the form of kickbacks. The Star-Telegram reports that the Travis County DA's office is looking into a complaint concerning financial management firms enlisted to help lottery winners, some of whom may have been suggested improperly by official lottery employees. No one's been convicted yet, but the regulating board is all over it, acting with the kind of vigor I would think might normally be reserved for much larger infractions.

In Farmers Branch news, a federal judge ruled that the city can't enforce the ban on renting to illegal immigrants until some points of law are hashed out. From the AP wire report:

On Tuesday, the judge found the ordinance essentially deputizes private individuals to serve as federal immigration agents.

I can see how the federal government might be offended by this, or at least have something to say about it.

Returning to national news, I spent a little time with some polls yesterday, as you might have noticed. I stated, as I have before, that national polls this early don't matter, and that you can't accurately predict anything with them this far out, and I stated this in spite of my own sad addiction to them. Washington Post's Chris Cillizza talked to a few pollsters about some recent poll results, and they make some good points about what national polls mean: namely that they drive media coverage and hint at the overall viability for a candidate. So that's just what I needed — a smidge of justification to keep watching and analyzing.

Finally today, something I heard about on The Daily Show last night and is a few days old but is too good not to be repeated: Do you remember Robert Bork? The Reagan Supreme Court nominee the Democrats successfully blocked, and who has long been an enemy of tort plaintiffs, a champion of efforts to make it harder for victims to be compensated for damages suffered at the hands of corporations? Well, he slipped and fell at the Yale Club in New York City, and now he's suing them for damages around $1 million. I've never known a conservative who rips into trial lawyers every chance he gets who didn't immediately sign up for some civil litigation after getting rear-ended at a stop light or something similar, and it is humorous to see that the trend of "I don't like this unless it applies to me" reaches all the way to the highest levels of legal scholarship.