Morning Roundup: Sine die edition

Good morning, Houston. We hope you got your fill of the Texas Legislature, because the 80th session is officially over. Your Senators and Representatives have been hard at work since January, passing lots of bills and making even more news, and now they'll be taking a break. The Houston contingent did us proud, from strip club taxes to baby-selling to overcoming liver transplants. We hope all the Texas political blogs can survive until 2009. If not, do we hear "special session"?

>> Lampson not running for Senate: U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson (D - Sugarland), who holds Tom DeLay's former seat, has announced that he will run for reelection in 2008. Many had hoped he would instead run for John Cornyn's Senate seat. Lampson will face a difficult campaign, despite the fact that he is the incumbent in his district. The area he represents leans Republican, but Shelley Sekula-Gibbs was unable to beat Lampson as a write-in candidate last year. Despite his district's political leanings, Lampson did not want to "abandon" his constituents to run for the Senate.

>> More counties nix voting records system: Two more counties have dropped an unpopular new voting records system due to problems with the May 12 election, as the state continues to take criticism for the glitchy system that was recently put into place. Former Texas Secretary of State Geoffrey Connor has been criticized most harshly for accepting a higher bid from IBM to put a new centralized voting records system into place in Texas. Problems with the system include registered voters not showing up and the disappearance of old voter registration numbers without warning. Officials have also said that the system is slow and makes election preparations unnecessarily difficult.

>> Juan Garcia arrives in Brownsville: Juan Garcia, a 72-year-old retired steelworker, has arrived in Brownsville after making quite the trip. Garcia, a Korean War veteran, left Houston on May 18 - on foot. He walked to Brownsville to attend a memorial Mass for a soldier who was kidnapped and killed in Iraq last year and to honor all American POWs. This is the 17th such trip that Garcia has made, including several to Austin, San Antonio, and McAllen. He has made most of the trips near Memorial Day, but has also made several around Veterans' Day. We hope he takes a load off and lets his wife, who followed him the whole way in their Ford Explorer, drive him home.

>> Today's weather: We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but there's a good chance we'll have more rain today. And it's cloudy, so we won't be seeing much sun. Temperatures should be between 70 and 83.

But who knows, maybe you'll find a silver lining in the headlines...