UPDATE: The Nominations Committee has approved all three nominees the UT System Board of Regents. The full Senate will take up nominations next.

I walked in the east door of the Capitol yesterday with Senator John Whitmire. He asked if I was going to nominations. I said I was. Then he said, "I told them [the nominated regents], 'Don't even sit down. I know you're on a mission. And you're going to hurt your [reputation] very badly.'"

Kirk Watson carried the questioning in the early going. He got the candidates to agree that they cannot fire the president unilaterally, that the decision to initiate the dismissal of a president belongs to the chancellor alone. (For some background, read Jake Silverstein's exclusive interview with Chairman Gene Powell here.)

This morning I wrote about the prospects for a budget deal, the topic du jour that is uppermost in everyone's mind. The post contained, among other comments, this line: "House Democrats complained that Senate budget chief Tommy Williams had 'misled' them." That is what I was told by what I believed to be reliable sources; the problem is, now I don't believe it was true--or that Williams had sandbagged a deal. A Williams staffer asked me to correct another statement in the article, which was that Willams and Perry are close political allies. While there may have been a time when that was true, it is not true today. For example, a rider in the appropriations bill read as follows:

"Of the funds appropriated elsewhere in this Act to the Health and Human Services Commission in Goal B [never mind the jargon], no amount may be spent to modify Medicaid eligibility unless the commission develops a plan to create more efficient health care coverage options for all existing and newly eligible populations, and the commission receives prior written approval from the Legislative Budget Board before implementing the plan."

Perry wanted the bold-face language removed from the rider. Williams stood firm in resisting. He was determined that the Legislature should write the checks. This is as it should be; the Legislature holds the purse strings.