Duncanville and Cedar Hill ISD’s wanted more tax money. They asked the voters. The voters, in a special October election, said no.

Here’s to voter sovereignty, particularly in the present fraught context of economic uncertainty and rising costs for the support of government endeavors large and small. The school districts had wanted the money for teacher salary increases and as a reserve for fuel and utility costs: worthy enough motives yet unpersuasive to property taxpayers already overburdened by government needs.

School districts no longer can enact most tax increases by fiat. They must go for voter approval: meaning the approval of the people who get hurt, to varying degrees, when a tax increase goes through. Some 100 districts elsewhere in the state are holding rate-rise elections Nov. 4. It so happened that Duncanville and Cedar Hill got in front with their requests.

It’s tough all over these days: tougher by far than it should have ever become, thanks to the Robin Hood law and its broadly meted-out punishment of school districts deemed “property wealthy.” A say-so at the grassroots level respecting levels of school taxation is something the grassroots haven’t seen for a long time. Those voters who want to pay more can do so. Those who don’t, don’t have to, unless the state starts twisting arms. For now, a bit more freedom in bailiwicks like Duncanville and Cedar Hill; for now, a bit more money, too.

***

Bet you didn’t know the state agency in charge of betting is getting down on you. Possibly because you’ve spent so much of your income paying property taxes that you don’t have enough left to gamble.

Gamble? Ummm, boy. Baby needs a new pair of shoes! And the state needs …well, what states always need. Gambling is what the Texas Lottery Commission wants more of, as does its legislative claque. Mission Rep. Kino Flores complained at a hearing the other day that the lottery isn’t enough, that Texas should devise new ways of enticing its citizens to plunge.

It might not take much enticing these days, what with falling incomes and disappearing jobs bringing pressure on, especially, the lower-income workers who are the lottery’s best customers.

The Legislature should resist. It may be that gambling is a human indulgence of the most ancient kind. That hardly means the state should encourage it. The limits of the lottery as a revenue-raising measure are noticeable not just here but elsewhere. Even gamblers get tapped out, and competition for dollars is stiff. Casinos collide with each other, so to speak, just about everywhere, sucking away suckers and diminishing revenues.

We don’t look ready to abolish our own lottery, but that isn’t to say the Legislature must make access to it easier and more enticing. An alternative mode of balancing budgets suggests itself: Spend less. Not a bad rule for gamblers either.

***

It’s OK, kids. UT has decided to suspend a 10-year-old rule prohibiting sign display in dormitory windows – a rule that for a time blocked two residents from touting the virtues of Barack Obama in clear view of passers-by.

The question, like all questions having to do with modern universities, is a knotty one. Once high schoolers, in the ’60s and ’70s, obtained by court decree the right to wear what they wanted to, mostly, by way of sending messages, the domain of free speech in an educational context expanded and expanded and expanded.

Better, in general, to err on the side of free speech than on the side of suppression, not least because suppression never works in the end. It merely riles up the easily riled. Larger questions are on view than the right of college students to stick political signs in their windows: questions such as what happens if your side wins. One thing among other things happens: the losing side gets the right to say in ways various and compelling that the winners are a bunch of bums we need to evict from office first chance we get.

***

Only in Las Vegas Dept. (But maybe not “only,” which is the scary part):

Nevada officials launched an investigation on discovering the Dallas Cowboys had registered to vote there next month: Tony Romo, Terrell Owens, and so on. Into the headquarters of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) burst state cops who seized voter registration forms and computer databases. A spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said the files could contain thousands of phony forms, not a few of them furnished by some of the convicts ACORN hired as registration solicitors.

The issue of photo identification for voters is often presented by opponents as a racist gambit intended to suppress Democratic voter turnout. Yeah, sure. And Tony Romo makes his living as a blackjack dealer on the strip. Or maybe he does! It’s been that kind of year.

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