U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and other federal officeholders might be able to use their federal accounts for state races after all. That big fat federal appropriations bill kicked out of Congress in the last few hours before Thanksgiving includes a change in campaign finance law that would allow candidates to transfer money from their federal campaign accounts to state accounts.

To recall the business half of an old curse, these are interesting times in Texas politics and government. The Texas Legislature is coming back for a regular session in January, faced with the usual stuff. There's a state budget to write, difficult even when everything's humming and it's not. They have business fights to referee: workers' compensation insurance, tort reforms (particularly asbestos), and health insurance for people on the job. The state's health and human services safety net for children and adults is so fouled up that the state agency in charge has been indicted. The agency that oversees that and all other HHS programs is in the middle of a complex and controversial reorganization. Pour on local issues, pet legislative issues, social issues and so on that make up the rest of a regular session and you have a busy time. But that's normal. Look at what else is in the in-box:

When they say it's all over but the shoutin', that's another way of saying it's not over. Voters have done their part, and a handful of Texas House contests are now in the hands of lawyers and election officials. Several close elections involving incumbents still fall short of final outcomes.

Texas Republicans won four of the five expensively contested congressional seats on Election Day, grabbing hold of the last cul-de-sac they didn't fully control in the neighborhoods of federal and state government. With the results now in hand, the Texas elephant herd's dominion now includes the White House, both of the state's U.S. Senate seats, the Texas congressional delegation, every statewide elected position in the executive and judicial branches, the state Senate and the state House. Twenty years ago, that landscape was populated mostly by donkeys.

It's a strange thing to be surrounded by an election that has the whole country in a lather while at home, there's no doubt about the outcome at the top of the ticket and — with exceptions for a handful of congressional races — a ballot dominated by personality clashes, professional feuds and local races.

An Austin judge ordered the Associated Republicans of Texas PAC to stop taking, spending, or soliciting any corporate money until after the November 2 election. If the ruling holds — ART is appealing it — it'll mean money from corporations and unions can't be used for any purpose by political action committees that aren't affiliated with them, either directly or through a trade group. And the ruling could have implications in ongoing grand jury investigations of campaign finance in the 2002 elections that put the first Republican majority in the Texas House since Reconstruction.

After the 2002 elections, it was obvious to every political wonk with a spreadsheet and a lick of sense that Reps. John Mabry, D-Waco, and Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, were in trouble. They appeared to be downright pre-cooked: Mabry won in Republican territory when his opponent imploded; Mercer won in Democratic territory when his opponent was indicted. The conventional wisdom was (and this is not over yet) that the two politicos would soon be giving up their spots to the rightful owners from the opposing parties. But they're both alive and each has a chance at winning a sophomore legislative term. Their opponents have run sloppy campaigns, they've run good ones, and in Mabry's case, the environment is under the influence of a hotly disputed congressional race.

An old saying: One's an accident, two is a coincidence, and three is a trend. The biggest of the missiles aimed at U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, missed when a congressional panel decided to admonish him in a letter instead of doing something more severe. But they didn't dismiss serious campaign finance charges, choosing instead to put those on hold while prosecutors and grand jurors in Travis County, Texas are still working.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison told a gaggle of reporters this summer that she'd be announcing her political plans early next summer, and aides say nothing has changed since then. The question, of course, is whether she'll run for reelection, run for governor, or give up show biz. None of that is new, and it's no longer news that political people without much to watch in state elections this year are obsessing on that question. But that obsessing, along with worries over the financing of schools and the financing of political campaigns, is producing some weird and interesting ideas about politics in Texas over the next 18 months, through a legislative session and into the 2006 primaries. To wit:

After 21 months of investigation by Travis County prosecutors, deliberations by three different grand juries and skirmishes along the way that went all the way up the appellate food chain, 32 indictments of three individuals and eight corporations might seem like a small string of fish. These aren't even public officials, though they worked with top officials in the Texas and U.S. Houses.

State District Judge John Dietz, ruling on the heels of closing arguments, said the state's system of funding public schools is unconstitutional and ordered the Legislature to fix it within a year. His detailed ruling won't be out for a couple of weeks, but if you do a quick calculation of what he said so far, it's easy to argue that the state will have to spend another $3 billion or so each year on public education. That's in addition to any money that would be used lowering local property taxes. (Click here for a copy of Dietz's bench ruling.)

With Labor Day behind us and the finish line on the horizon, at least a dozen Texas House races should be handicapped as serious contests. Mark another nine or so as contests that could turn if conditions change significantly or if an incumbent slips or underestimates the problem.

Political journalists are often called fight promoters — people who'll try to start a contest where there isn't one — but the state's senior senator and the governor are making the job easy. They're even giving us facts to play with, and starting the fights without much prompting from the likes of us.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census prefaced the Republican Party's national convention with a bummer of a report that says, among other things, that Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured people of any state and that the median income here dropped during the first years of this decade.

Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, is in a pretty safe district for a Democrat, as these things go. In the last election against his current opponent, Jeffrey Hibbs, Dunnam pulled 60.2 percent of the vote. And with the exception of Tony Sanchez Jr., who lost by a little in this House district while losing by a lot statewide, the Democrats running for statewide office in Dunnam's district swept in 2002.