The Lobby Made Them Do It

Not a lot of time for commentary now, but a few good links leads to a lot of good reading to get us all back in the frame of mind for our lege being back in session today.

Bob Lichter puts it all in perspective with his followup column:

If you can't plow through the hundreds of column-inches in the Express-News series, here's its bottom-line moral: About 2,000 people ? the 181 members of the Legislature, a handful of state elected officials and about 1,700 lobbyists ? make laws and write a state budget that affects the incomes and the lives of 22 million Texans.

Essentially, we put a lot of faith in them and ? if the Express-News series is accurate ? they don't deserve it. But if you readers don't care how stuff happens in the Capitol, stuff will keep on happening. There is no urgency or interest by the folks presiding over this orgy to change the rules.

In the 1980s, as the Soviet bloc was collapsing from within, President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze agreed the Soviet system was so corrupt it wasn't worth saving. That resulted in "glasnost" ? openness ? and "perestroika" ? restructuring ? and the end of the Cold War.

Glasnost and perestroika are needed in the Texas Capitol, for the same reasons. Texas has an unrepresentative government run by an elite ruling class presiding over an largely uninformed, apathetic constituency.

Yeah right! It'll be a cold day in hell before Texans take their cue from two communists. But if the shoe fits, wear it.

So retrieve those old Express-News from the recycling bin and the birdcage, read those stories and tell us ? and your legislators ? what you think ? like you do when you can't find the Spurs pin coupon.

SIDENOTE: Not really related to the above, but pertinent to the special session, Comptroller (and Gubernatorial candidate) Carole Cougar Mellencamp Strayhorn has just located nearly $6 billion in new dough for the budget. Of course, she's also pushing video lottery terminals like a Lake Charles slot jockey. I'm just curious when someone other than Scott Hochberg is going to start talking about dedicating some of this "new" money toward undoing many of the horrible cuts made in the Wolgemuth era. Just a hint - it takes about $143 million to restore CHIPs funding to pre-Wolgemuth levels. That's literally a decimal out of the "new" money that Strayhorn has found.