EDITORIAL: Strayhorn should have expressed her concerns during regular session

EDITORIAL: Strayhorn should have expressed her concerns during regular session: "Carole Keeton Strayhorn, in her position as Texas comptroller and a candidate for the governor's seat, could be contributing quite a bit to the seemingly never-ending effort to revamp our state's public school finance system.

She's not.

Strayhorn is pushing Gov. Rick Perry, who she is sure to face in the Republican gubernatorial primaries next year, to add another issue to the current special section — one that would let legislators add enhanced penalties for sex offenders who prey on children.

As much as we'd like to be able to put away every child sex offender (Bill O'Reilly of Fox News told Perry that he should pass a law like one in Florida, where people convicted of sexual battery on a child face a minimum 25-year sentence for a first offense), we'd say now is not the time to be having this discussion.

The reason Perry called the current special session is to force lawmakers to keep working on what is most important to the state at this moment: the school finance crisis. That's the problem on which the Legislature needs to be focusing all of its attention."