Democrats and liberals, both in the Lone Star State and throughout the nation, should greet every breaking day thanking Whomever they choose for the utter judicial and policy ludicrousness that is Texas' "Robin Hood" graft and redistribute public school finance "system".

The reasons for this Donkey daily raft of joyous reveling are myriad. Created out of whole cloth by the Texas Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Edegewood Independent School District v. Kirby, the modus operandi of the educative robber baron of Sherwood Forest is the grand theft lucre of "property rich" tax districts to augmentively munerate the very many others.

The bottomlessness of the pit into which said dollars have gone has forced these localities to raise and reraise their property tax rates, to the point where a great many of them are now bumping up on the $1.50 per $100 statutory valuation limit. Their being forced to this levy precipice is, of course, a direct result of the state's imposition upon them to pony up for their schools and everyone else's simultaneously.

Hence the lawsuit filed by these fiscally and politically exhausted localities declaring same. This is, by any reasoned, reasonable definition, a statewide something, and since it directly affects what these districts have to charge their property holders for the privilege of holding said properties within their confines, it has to be a statewide property tax. The Court, however, has reached another, inexplicable conclusion and decided otherwise.

Instead, the Court that initially foisted this inanity upon us has established a June 1st, 2006, deadline for the Legislature to take yet another bite at the rotten apple that they have been repeatedly trying to ingest to meet the mercurial demands of the Edgewood ruling.

Since its inception, and certainly since the aforementioned litigious filing, Robin Hood has stood astride the Lone Star political landscape like a Colossus, declaring to all conservative proposals seeking transit up legislative waters, "None shall pass". This has been a boon to anti-conservatives throughout the American polity.

Texas should be serving as the national bellwether for multitudinous conservative lawmaking, as it is almost inarguably the most antediluvian of the greater Fifty. Instead, it is mired in the Educative swamps of Nottingham. The Lone Star Republican ascendant dominance at the ballot box that began in the mid 1990s has not been reflected in Legislative output, because of the dichotomic swath this issue cuts through the conservative ranks.

The Elephantary electoral base exists predominately in two areas; the suburbs and exurbs, and the rural areas of the state. These two tracts stand in diametric opposition to one another on Robin Hood reform. The Republican outliers are largely from where the excess excises are culled, to be reallotted to urban districts (which are the only Donkey Lone Star grazing steppes left) and the very conservative bucolic circuits of the Texas hinterlands.

In these pastoral plains, the school district is quite often the largest employer going, with funds therefore being culled largely from the exurban elsewhere. The last thing these otherwise conservative areas wish to see is reform of the decidedly unconservative Robin Hood larcenous machination, of which they are amongst the principal recipients.

For it augments their tax base, thereby keeping their rates artificially low, and instills therein a synthetic demand for keeping alive the unnecessary make-work jobs that are rife within the purlieu of their local school fiefdoms. As a result, rural residents and their elected representatives often end up sounding indistinguishable from teachers' union spokesmen.

These balloted officials are then left with a fool's choice; vote their conservative principles and end the Robin Hood Socialist heist, or vote their districts and keep delivering the extortive pork to the frying pans back home.

It is through this dyslexic ideological prism that we should peer at the multiple failed efforts of the Republican leadership to deliver the goods hereon. And it is for this dyspeptic Elephantary condition that Democrats throughout the land should revel, as it is one of the only remaining impediments to the ongoing greater national conservative prepotency.