The insurance issue blows up, the second-largest insurer plans to leave the state, more than a half million homeowners could be forced to change insurers during the next year. There's plenty for regulators and legislators to do next year, but how does that splash in the election pool?

Several months ago, a spokesman for Attorney General John Cornyn popped off about the Democratic "Dream Team," calling it a racial quota ticket that ultimately wouldn't work. Cornyn disavowed it right away. Then U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm told Republican Party state delegates that Democrats were trying to divide the state's voters on the basis of race. Soon after, in a press grab in Washington, D.C., Cornyn said Gramm was right to say race shouldn't be the basis for the elections.

The well-worn rule is that the political season starts on Labor Day, but we're doing now what would usually have been done then because of the 9/11 break in the political schedule. The ads are coming back on television now, and candidates who have been keeping a low profile are breaking into their sprints for the last six weeks before the elections.

While everyone is talking about the potential gap between income and spending in the next budget, the state is facing a big problem in the current budget. Put simply, lawmakers will face a combination of spending overruns and revenue shortfalls when they show up for work in January. Annual sales tax revenues have increased every year since 1983. But not last year: The state's largest single source of tax income dropped by almost $187 million during the fiscal year that ended on August 31. It was supposed to increase by $366 million.

Partisans in Dallas County are gathering for a fight over who will get to vote on Election Day in November and in the early voting that leads up to it. Republicans call it Ballot Security. Democrats call it Voter Education. Both sides refer to what the other side is doing as Voter Intimidation.

With state agencies filing budget requests for the next Legislature, all attention is on the growing demands on state spending. The Austin American-Statesman led the pack, reporting that the differences between available money and spending needs has swollen dramatically, to $7 billion and beyond.

The great thing about incumbency is that you control the government agencies you're seeking to lead. For example, lookit: Gov. Rick Perry started a commercial that touts the fact that the Texas Department of Insurance issued a cease-and-desist order against Farmers Insurance. The ad began running the same day the order from TDI was announced, letting the governor–through the regulators–control what was in the papers at the same time he was starting a political ad reinforcing the message. The trick is getting voters to believe in reforms put in place so close to Election Day.

A challenge to Texas politicians to lay off the rough stuff in the days around September 11 gives a little after-the-fact cover to candidates who've been leaving grill marks on your television screen.

Gov. Rick Perry pulled the trigger early on the negative ad everyone in Texas politics has been expecting for more than a year, hitting Democrat Tony Sanchez for a drug money scandal that hit a savings and loan that was controlled by the Laredo businessman and his family in the early 1980s.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez apparently likes answering questions from reporters about as much as Britney Spears likes pimples in the middle of her forehead. And any candidate likes to let things cool a bit before jumping into a hot story. And when one candidate is ducking stories, the opponent is sure to try to capitalize on that.

Watch the business page and you know why John Cornyn moved his July 13 fundraiser to a ranch owned by oilman/rancher Walter Mize. It was scheduled for the Beaumont Ranch, near Grandview (which is south of Fort Worth), but the owner of that spread is Cornyn supporter Ron Beaumont. Beaumont is also the chief operating officer of WorldCom. Revelations about that company's accounting scandals prompted Cornyn to start up the legal machinery in the attorney general's office–he's launched an investigation–and to move the fundraiser for his bid for U.S. Senate.

One of those things bubbling in the back of the current state budget is a list of contingent appropriations—unfulfilled items on the last Legislature's wish list. The list includes things like a pay raise for state judges and a 3 percent pay raise for state employees. It works like this: If the state is bringing in more tax money than she predicted, Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander is supposed to watch until there's enough extra money to fund the first thing on the list, and when there is enough, to tell the Legislative Budget Board about it. And so on.

The newest member of Gov. Rick Perry's anti-crime task force has two unusual traits: He's been under federal criminal investigation for more than two years, and earlier this year, he sought the Democratic Party's nomination to run against Perry. Former Attorney General Dan Morales was appointed to the panel by Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed and former AG and Texas Supreme Court Justice John Hill. He says it's not politics: He's serving on the task force because of his expertise in asset forfeiture and drug money laundering laws he helped write.

You would think the Democrats were holding their convention in the Yukon to hear some of the griping about going "all the way to El Paso" for the biennial state gathering. But the Democrats are the biggest convention that city gets, and El Paso is one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the state. They need each other.

A fair number of Republican state representatives in Texas–almost a third of them, in fact–think it would be a bad idea to decide the next speaker's race inside the Republican caucus.