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** That man has a head of hair every Texan can be proud of, regardless of party. There is a difference of opinion over whether it is his only accomplishment.

* The 2003 session, when the Republican right seized control of both houses of the Ledge and ruled with callous disregard for the public interest and the rules of the House and Senate, was serious backsliding in the direction of the old Bush League Texas. Things got so bad that fifty-three Democrats in the House slipped across the Red River into Oklahoma to deny a quorum for Republican speaker Tom Craddick—a man possessed of Bob Dole’s charm and Tom DeLay’s hardass, hard-right agenda.

* Maureen Dowd, columnist for The New York Times, was apparently the first journalist to use the word consigliere to describe Baker’s role in the Bush family.

* Here’s how the student/alumni investigators described Harvard’s bailout of Bush. In late 1990, at a point when Bush held three high-level positions at Harken Energy, Harken and its largest shareholder, Harvard University, created the Harken Anadarko Partnership (HAP). According to minutes of Harken’s August 29, 1990, board meeting, Bush gave the deal his personal approval. Over the next two years the partnership allowed Harvard to bail out Harken’s struggling business by effectively shouldering a large percentage of the company’s loss-generating assets and debts in the Anadarko region of Texas and Oklahoma. This maneuver transformed the public perception of Harken’s financial state; the company’s reported losses and liabilities were drastically reduced over the next two years.

* The commission rule became known as the Enron exemption when it was passed into law in 2001, advanced by (Mr. Wendy) Phil Gramm, who chaired the Senate Banking Committee.

* If you would like to know more about Rapoport, he has an as-told-to autobiography out: Being Rapoport, Capitalist with a Conscience, University of Texas Press, 2002.

* It was always a slightly eccentric company. Everybody’s desk was covered with pictures of family, plants, birthday balloons, none of that “neat desk” stuff. Some underling once raced in to tell B one of the salesmen was gay. “How much business does he write?” asked B.

* As the great William Brann once observed, “The trouble with our Texas Baptists is that we do not hold them under water long enough.”

* Name changed to protect the identity of the subject.

* Scalia no longer has an opportunity to represent Sherry Durst. After two years he was a victim of an unwritten administration policy (the Rove Rule) that places pragmatic politics above principle. Scalia had assumed he would be going to court to clean up the mess at the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. The mess had been made by Douglas McCarron, who had liberally interpreted the union’s election rules to get himself elected union president. McCarron was also tainted by his role in an insider-trading scandal involving a union-owned company. All of this made him the perfect target for the solicitor’s office. But he is also one of very few friends George W. Bush has in organized labor. He was the only labor guy invited to Bush’s big (one-day) economic summit in Waco. And he was expected to endorse Bush in 2004. Secretary of labor Elaine Chao prudently decided that the Labor Department didn’t need to take Doug McCarron to court, as The Wall Street Journal lamented in an indignant op-ed piece. Working folks will find little comfort in Scalia’s replacement: his DOL understudy, Howard M. Radzely. Before signing on at the Labor Department Radzely was a law clerk for Michael Luttig, an arch-conservative from Tyler, Texas, sitting on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Radzely also clerked for Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, not exactly the working woman’s advocate on the high court. Radzely’s appointment might interest Sarah White back in Belzoni. He came into office as the United Food and Commercial Workers Union was leaning on the Department of Labor to enforce rules that provide worker access to