Michael Barone has an interesting take on Tuesday's Republican primary in Texas. As background, incumbent Gov. Rick Perry ran against Sen. Kay Hutchison and Debra Medina. Medina came from the Tea Party wing of the party. Hutchison was seen as more moderate than Perry, who last year suggested that Texas might want to secede from a United States where the federal government had grown too intrusive.

Debra Medina is from Wharton, a small town, and was the most conservative of the bunch. She ran best in the Dallas area and in liberal Austin. Hutchison, the most liberal of the three Republicans, ran best in San Antonio and outside the big metro areas. Perry, who ran hard to the right, did best in Houston, which just elected a gay mayor. (Perry won with 52% of the vote.) 

In other words, all the geographic expectations in this vote went unfulfilled. Liberals did well in rural Texas. The Tea Party candidate did best in the Peoples Republic of Austin. And the governor running hard to the right did best in the town that just elected the gay mayor and didn't do particularly well outside the metros. In fact, if the votes out of Houston disappeared, Perry wouldn't have won fewer than 50% of the vote.

Finally, the federal government has settled a long-running dispute with black farmers, who say the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against them. The Obama Administration announced the $1.25 billion deal Thursday. The funding of the settlement must be approved by Congress. h

Black farmers, led by Black Farmers Association president John F. Boyd Jr. (above), have been fighting through three administrations. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack said that some farmers had lost their land because they were unable to plant crops local USDA loan administrators failed to approve loans. The government paid $1 billion to settle a similar case with 16,000 black farmers in 1999 (known as the Pigford case), but many farmers were left out of that deal. Up to 70,000 farmers may be part of this settlement. Farmers in this round can submit claims for up to $50,000.

"I'm going to focus all my time and resources on making that happen," Vilsack told reporters Thursday. "The president is prepared to indicate that it's a priority not just for his administration but for the country."

After reading that Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh (above) was "retiring" (at age 54) won't run for re-election, we turned to an article in Politico about a wave of Republicans running against entrenched Democrats in eastern coal country. "Republicans believe there are three words so powerful that they might reshape the political order in an economically beleaguered corner of the country: War on coal," reports Politico's Jonathan Martin.

Martin finds that in races in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia, established Democrats who have been supportive of the coal industry are facing stiff opposition from Republicans. A former state supreme court judge switched parties to run against 17-term incumbent Rep. Nick Joe Rahall. Elliott "Spike" Maynard said he would "fight to end this war on coal." Similarly, former strip miner Mike Templeman is running against Rep. Ben Chandler, saying he "opposes the Obama Administration's war on coal." Anyway, lots of contested races in Appalachia this year.

Okay, back to Bayh....The Indianapolis Star reports that Bayh was retiring because of excessive partisanship in Congress. In his statement (to be released later this afternoon), Bayh cites recent failures at bipartisanship — the demise of the jobs bill and the defeat of a commission to deal with the nation's debt — as reasons for his decision.

U.S. Department of Agriculture spending would rise 2.3% under President Obama's proposed 2011 budget. Most of that increase would go to people receiving assistance in buying food. Food stamp expenditures would rise 3.9%. Meanwhile, however, ag subsidies would fall 11 percent, according to Bloomberg, as "the administration tries to limit payments to wealthy farmers." 

This is a replay of the fight over the 2008 farm bill, when there was an attempt to limit direct payments to farmers who reached a certain level of gross income. The Obama plan would restrict direct payments to those with gross farm incomes of less than $500,000. Some farm groups responded in the negative. “I guess what the cut does, for one, it takes money out of rural America, just like that,” Keven Bradley, Montana Grain Growers Association president, told Tom Lutey of the Billings Gazette.  “I cannot stand by as the president moves to cut direct payments to farmers and ranchers. We’re only two years into the 2008 Farm Bill, and Montana producers have made long-term plans based on what they thought was a solid agreement with the government for the life of that bill,” Montana Sen. Max Baucus said in a written statement.

Meanwhile, an editorial in the Washington Post said that "Agri-hypocrites" attack the Obama plan to cut subsidies. (Whom might these people be? The Post quotes Democrat Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia as two who oppose the cuts.) The country is in "deep trouble" financially, the Post. "And the fatuous hypocrisy of self-proclaimed deficit hawks who then go to bat for welfare to well-to-do landowners is endangering us all."