Wednesday Roundup: You Can't Do That On The House Floor

The Texas media is all atwitter with news that House Speaker Craddick has lost control of the store, the inmates are running the asylum, the wheels have come off, and so forth. Though it took longer to happen than I had originally thought, the weaknesses exposed by the contested race for Speaker back in January are starting to show themselves.

This is, of course, the same sort of speculation that was under way back around the time of the aforementioned leadership contest, and look how that turned out. I think there are too many days between now and the next session to start calling the race for someone, but I think the results of this session (as well as the public perception of it) will weigh heavily on GOP officials and decision makers as they put together a plan for the next election cycle.

Speaking of leadership defeats and party decisions, it has been yet another in a long line of very bad days for Governor Rick Perry, as he decided not to veto the Lege's rebuke of his HPV mandate. With the kind of margins HB 1098 passed by, the possibility of a veto override was very real, and the only thing worse than the current string of defeats would be open revolt at the Capital. The guys with jobs down there are seemingly tired of the Old Bosses, and I don't see how that situation gets any better. That being said, this hasn't always stopped Republicans from winning in the past, so don't take anything for granted. That's the line from Electoral AdviceBot 3000, anyways.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are cutting taxes, which in specific cases like this I will take every day of the week and twice on Sunday, especially if there's good press to go along with it. State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer is calling for a suspension of the gas tax for a couple of months, which will drop the price of gas by twenty cents or so. If that's not something you can put on a mail piece this summer, when gas is $11/gal, I don't know what is.

The Politico tells us that Fred Thompson has sharpened his strategy. Now it includes 1) not running and 2) talking about it in a more focused way. I guess it seems like I have a lot of ire for Thompson, but with candidates, I feel much the same way that the proprietor of Fashionable Male felt in Mallrats: I have no respect for people with no shopping agenda. Thompson and other people who are continuously flirting with getting into the race are no better than mallrats, consuming space and resources while waiting around for the opportunity to eat all the free samples.

I anticipate argument from George on this point. (And by that, he means that he heard the argument as he was typing that paragraph. — mng ed.)

Arianna Huffington makes the very reasonable point that accountability in this country is seemingly set up all wrong. Yes, I will voyeuristically enjoy Paris Hilton's jail time as much as the next guy, but when her doing time is viewed in light of others that cause more direct and visible harm to America and Americans and are reelected for their efforts, the whole deal feels wrong. In a country where accountability is fleeting and rarely attached to the people that really have it coming, I think we should collectively yearn for justice to have more justice to it, but for some reason, we don't. The other day my wife was talking about Martha Stewart, and used the phrase "...when she was in jail," and I outwardly cringed. Not that I think famous people should be spared from prison when they do illegal things — far from it. I just think there's a societal discord there that should be more obvious than it is.

Lastly today, the national media has taken to drawing spurious relationships since Nikolas Sarkozy won the French Presidency. I have some news for you, News: There is nothing to learn about the forthcoming American presidential election from the recent French presidential election, except maybe that getting clobbered in a debate doesn't help you much, and that you should probably start out with a platform rather than personally taking a poll and using that to define your issues.