Wednesday Roundup: Minor Threat(s)

TXU keeps threatening people. It threatened to shut down coal plants if they got fined earlier this month, and now it comes out that it threatened litigation against another group attempting to make a bid to buy TXU. The Star-Telegram has the story, and I have some advice: PR is something that must be managed, guys. Plant some trees or something.

Some indictments were handed down in the TYC scandal, and if the emerging legislative leaders in the TYC overhaul have their way, the two guys who got arrested won't be the only ones. State Senator John Whitmire is on a tear, and the Texas Rangers are all over it. As more justice gets doled out, you can bet that even more people will come forward to take credit for it.

Speaking of state Senators, some Texas colleges got an earful yesterday from the Senate for their ongoing habit of increasing tuition each year. Tommy Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands, had this to say, which is entertaining:

"This is like crack for the universities. They just can't seem to get enough of these tuition increases."

State Senator Chuy Hinojosa actually filed a bill which places a three-year moratorium on tuition increases and lamented tuition ever being deregulated in the first place. With the oncoming tide of the student loan scandal, I bet there'd be some time within those three years to look into why tuition suddenly went up so much.

The toll road moratorium passed the House last night by 134 - 5 and must pass another vote today. And there was much rejoicing. Mind you, this only covers private toll roads, and does nothing to stop public toll roads from being built or sought. Get ready for the weirdness, though: somehow, many projects in North Texas got exempted from the bill. The Trans-Texas Corridor still falls under the bill's purview. It will probably pass the Senate.

Fred Thompson, who may or may not be running for President, revealed in a statement yesterday that he has lymphoma. This makes me think he's definitely running for President. The classic strategy is to get everything bad about you out in the open as early as possible, and I don't know why he would have announced this otherwise. The way he describes it makes it sound like something he'll die with rather than from, which sometimes happens with cancer, and his stance on the race is still "wait and see," which sometimes happens with Presidential campaigns.

And that's probably a wise approach for now. Behold, yet another story about how Republicans are getting more and more convinced that they will lose the White House in 2008. These are getting pretty popular, and if they keeps popping up, I'll get paranoid and think this is some sort of ruse to motivate the Republican base.