Paul Burka at Texas Monthly connects all the dots in Rick Perry’s plan to remold Texas’ two flagship higher education systems. At some level, though, I can’t blame Perry as much as the allegedly-well-meaning liberals down the food chain who spend a lot of time before faculty distancing themselves from Perry’s policies yet implement them (and, worse, hare-brained, half-thought-out extensions of them) with the zeal of a convert. At the flagships at least faculty and campus administrators appear to have grown a pair and recognize the threat Phoenixization/Capellaization of the academy—the ultimate end-point of the Perry agenda—poses; in the relative boonies of the A&M System, not so much.

Update: More here. And today UT’s leadership is at least making the right noises, confirming that at least one university system in Texas isn’t completely tone-deaf.

Our esteemed governor apparently thinks there isn’t a recession in Texas. I’ll gladly concede that the economy here is doing significantly better than in many other states, but the idea that there’s no economic downturn here is either optimism run amok or crazy talk. Perhaps both.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has officially launched her campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination against incumbent Rick Perry. Given the general disarray of the statewide Democratic Party, this one may be for all the marbles.

þ: Texas native-in-exile Steven Taylor.

Isn’t anyone else still curious whether or not Sonia Sotomayor is still a secessionist*? Our esteemed governor was—quite rightly—recently ridiculed for his ramblings in that direction, and the idea that someone who could be appointed to the Supreme Court who apparently doesn’t (or at least didn’t) believe that her people should be a part of the United States seems a bit odd. This, to me, would seem to be the more important question than her views on the value of descriptive representation or her apparent inability in Ricci to preemptively read the minds of her soon-to-be colleagues on the Court.

* I realize that the historical circumstances of Puerto Rico’s association with the United States are not entirely comparable with those of the incorporated states, and thus that there is more legitimacy to be given to the idea of Puerto Rican self-determination and to providing some sort of finality of its status.