Top Stories

• Legislature sends broad health care reform bill to governor, Texas third state to approve health care compacts provision – Mark Lisheron, Texas Healthcare Report
• Texas' Economy Unequivocally Shines – WILLisms
• Five Reasons Why I Believe Texas Governor Rick Perry Will Be Our President In 2013 – Kevin McCullough, FoxNews.com
• Republican Race for President Gets Serious: Rick Perry, Bachmann and More – Mark McKinnon, The Daily Beast
• Perry takes on the feds – Washington Times

Recommended

• Formula One boondoggle good for investors, lousy for taxpayers – Jordan Brownwood, Texas Budget Source
• Must-pass budget measure clears both chambers – Kate Alexander, Postcards
• Texas House, Senate approve reworked bills over airport pat-downs – Dave Montgomery, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
• Compromise TWIA bill aims to eliminate as much litigation as possible, sponsor says – Mark Lisheron, Texas Watchdog
• Once again, Straus stands up to a mob – Jason Embry, Austin American-Statesman
• The Confederate license plate – Paul Burka, BurkaBlog
  The unsubstantiated speculation in the last graf is a bit jarring coming from an alleged “dean” of state political journos. Jerry Patterson’s contribution in the comments is interesting, at least.
• Another fiscal conservative gives Burka hives… – Blue Dot Blues
  

  Burka did issue a mea culpa in the comments, after getting an email from former YCT-TAMU member Mark McCaig. It is a bit buried but a page search for McCaig’s name will turn it up pretty quickly. I’ll give Burka credit for backing down on this.

  Except it’s buried in the comments of a post that is more of an undeserved character attack on David White than anything. One expects better of an alleged “dean” of state political journos.

• Glitch in Federal Health Reform Could Cost Texas – Emily Ramshaw, Texas Tribune
  

  If the [Obamacare] language isn’t changed or repealed — unlikely, considering Medicare’s chief actuary, and now the Obama administration, has acknowledged it makes no sense — Texas would see roughly 270,000 to 280,000 new Medicaid clients a year, starting in 2014. (That’s 9 percent of the nation’s total.)

  Clients?

• Rick O'Donnell, UT System Agree to Settlement – Reeve Hamilton, Texas Tribune
• Bloat? I Don’t See No Stinkin’ Bloat – Jay P. Greene's Blog
  

  The SHEEO report concludes that institutions have “improved their educational efficiency” only by combining all staff into one big category. If you dig deeper into their report where they break the results out by category, you can see that they also find that faculty staffing ratios have declined while senior executive and professional staffing ratios have grown. In Table 4 the total ratio of Executive and Other Professional staff to students went from 5.04 per 100 students in 2001 to 5.07 in 2009, while faculty declined from 8.41 to 8.09 during the same time period.

  That is, the SHEEO report confirms our basic finding. It only concludes that higher ed has improved its efficiency by adopting the strange idea that greater efficiency means cutting faculty while growing executive and professional staff.

• Planned Parenthood Takes on the States – Charmaine Yoest and Denise Burke, WSJ.com
  

  The next test for the administration’s position on Medicaid funding for abortions may come in Texas. The state’s Health and Human Services Commission is moving forward with eligibility changes to the Women’s Health Program (WHP), a Medicaid-waiver program that provides family planning and other care to women not otherwise eligible for Medicaid. The proposed changes would prohibit the state from contracting for Women’s Health Program services with any entity that also provides elective abortions.

  [snip]

  The administration’s response to Texas’s expected changes to its Women’s Health Program will be very telling. Will it again, in defiance of the will of the American people, join forces with Planned Parenthood to protect the abortion industry’s government funding? Or, true to its claims during last year’s health-care debate, will its priority instead be access to health care for thousands of low-income Americans?

Top Stories

• $86,000 for Chick-Fil-A – but can the children read? – Blue Dot Blues
  

  On the front page of today’s Dallas Morning News, highly visible despite Mike Rawlings’ mayoral victory thanks to a Tom Thumb coupon ad, was perhaps the most illuminating and damning story about school district waste since the credit card scandal in Dallas ISD. Found in Dallas ISD’s checkbook register for the last four years by intrepid DMN reporters was $57 million in wasteful, absurd spending – an amount that could save over 1000 teacher jobs.

  Among the cacophonous cries about the state legislature’s “failure” to “fully fund” Texas schools, you rarely hear so much as a whimper over how school districts spend the money they get, be it taxpayer dollars for M&O, bond packages, or state and federal money. Dallas ISD is one of the largest districts in the state, and plagued by scandal, corruption, and failure year after year. This exposé should be reprinted and redistributed across the state, to teachers, parents, activists, and legislators (it is, sadly, behind the DMN’s subscriber-only firewall online, but I’ll hit some highlights for you).

  This sort of waste isn’t confined to Dallas ISD. In Houston, Matt Bramanti regularly highlights (lowlights?) similar examples of food spending in the Houston ISD check register.

• Perry adds anti-groping bill to special session agenda – Postcards
• Amazon.com negotiating deal to stay in Texas – Fort Worth Star-Telegram
• Emerging Technology Fund needs sunshine if it’s going to exist at all – Jordan Brownwood, Texas Budget Source

Texans for President!

• Perry's Perfect Positioning – Jonathan Gurwitz, RealClearPolitics
• Texan Perry Sizes Up Roadblocks to GOP Bid – Neil King and Patrick O'Connor, WSJ.com
• Is it too late for Rick Perry to get into presidential race? – Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor
• Texas delegation presses Perry to run – Michael O'Brien, The hill
• Rick Perry aids prepped for rumor rehash – Maggie Haberman, Politico
• GOP magic trick: Making Bush vanish – Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Politico
• Does Rick Perry have his own Dukakis problem? – Steve Kornacki, Salon
• Why Ron Paul keeps winning straw polls – Chris Cillizza, Washington Post

Recommended

• Windstorm reform bill stalls in Senate committee – Mark Lisheron, Texas Watchdog
• Video of Burka and Blakeslee talking to Evan Smith about Best/Worst lists – BurkaBlog
• Failure to fix Texas budget leaves problems for later – Peggy Fikac, Houston Chronicle
  By “fix” the lockstep Texas political media typically mean raise taxes and increase spending.
• Family planning targeted by state – Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, San Antonio Express-News
  Why is it so hard to understand that many conservatives don’t see any good reason for the state to subsidize abortion providers, directly or indirectly?
• A false argument “reframed” – Cory Crow, Texas Iconoclast
• A Drug-War Plan Goes Awry – Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ.com
• A 'Fast and Furious' border fiasco – Michael A. Walsh, New York Post