Welcome to the first day of spring! Seriously. The high temp today is set for 35 degrees and the weather's supposed to stay like this through mid-April. Which is bogus.

1. Rich Lord calls the Pittsburgh Police Bureau "storm-tossed" in his story today about a court case on police discipline gone awry, which concerns specifically a detective who could have been fired at least twice (once after allegedly choking his son) before he choked a Squirrel Hill man after a fender-bender. Speaking of, another cop caught on video going after a South Side bar patron denies he's a "rogue cop."

2. As our pal Melissa Daniels at PA Independent writes, Pa "is a pretty sweet place to be an elected official" -- the second-highest state lawmaker salaries, the biggest number of full-time legislators and no limits on fundraising. Add to that the highest salaried governor in the country --at $183,255 -- though Gov. Corbett freezed his salary when he entered office so he takes home about $8 grand less.

3. Heather Heidelbaugh, Allegheny County Council's GOP member at large and all-around nettle in the side of executive Rich Fitzgerald, says those undated resignation letters he makes county appointees sign "violate the law" and are an attempt to seize power by the exec.

4. Around and around it goes -- now Washington County, like its neighbors to the north, is getting forced into countywide property reassessments.

5. Congrats to Robert Morris, which shocked the world when it beat college basketball defending champs Kentucky last night, sealing it with two free throws with 8 seconds left after the Wildcats came back to tie.

Allegheny County controller Chelsa Wagner has launched her "Windfall Watch" website, listing 2013 municipal tax rates and sussing out who is making more money than they should after the countywide reassessment.

Well, sort of. Kudos to Ms. Wagner for putting some vital stats out there -- especially the 2013 municipal tax rates, which haven't been reported anywhere else (except here, of course.)

UPDATE: Well, actually the county treasurer has them up too. Never mind.

But her numbers are already out of date. Ms. Wagner is using assessment values from December, which have changed a bit in the past three months.

And the charts could be a bit better on context. Nowhere does it say which municipalities are actually receiving windfalls, leaving it up for the taxpayer to do the math.

So we did. See the results after the jump.

By James M. Perry

Unquestionably, Ted Cruz, the rookie Republican senator from Texas, is smart.

He was, for example, a champion debater at Princeton University, competing for The American Whig-Cliosophic Society (Debate question: Do you favor changing the name of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society?) He and his partner, David Panton, cleaned up just about every debating prize at Princeton. He graduated with honors and moved on to the Harvard University Law School, where he won honors again.

He clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and wrote one of the briefs in District of Columbia v Heller, a landmark case in which the High Court ruled that the Second Amendment did, indeed, allow private citizens the right to be armed.

He was one of the youngest partners in Philadelphia's biggest law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius (1,200 lawyers in 24 offices here and abroad. Cruz's office was in Houston).

Many Republicans think he should run for president.

The question before the house might well be: Do really smart politicians always make good office-holders?

In Senator Cruz's case, the early evidence suggests the answer might be, Not always.

In early votes in the Senate, Cruz voted no to helping the victims of Hurricane Sandy, no on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, no on raising the debt ceiling. He was one of three senators to vote no on confirming John Kerry as Secretary of State. He voted against confirming Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, too, even suggesting that the governments of Saudi Arabia and North Korea might have paid him speaking fees following his retirement from the Senate.

During the Hagel confirmation hearings, the 42-year old senator lectured 79-year-old Dianne Feinstein of California on the meaning of the Second Amendment. "I'm not a sixth grader," she replied. Senator Feinstein, when she was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, heard the shots and then discovered the body of supervisor Harvey Milk. The mayor, George Moscone, was also assassinated. The senator (left, at Milk memorial in 1978) knows something about guns.

Kerry and Hagel are both decorated veterans of the War in Vietnam No one, said John McCain, should question Chuck Hagel's integrity. (Or, for that matter, John Kerry's.) Senator Cruz has not spent time in the armed forces.

Anyone observing Senator Cruz's academic record might think he would want to step forward and rejuvenate the Republican Party, awash these days in tea party conspiracies and scurrilous denunciations of men and women whose only crime is that they belong to the Democratic Party. Not Senator Cruz. He chimes right in. President Obama, he once said, is the most radical president in U.S. history. He surely knows better. Either that or Princeton and and Harvard (supposedly two of the world's leading scholarly institutions) didn't do their job. He once said, too, that there were a dozen communists, intent on overthrowing the U.S. government, on the Harvard Law faculty when he was there in the early '90s. Not so, said one of his professors, Charles Fried, a Republican.

We have had brilliant men who turned out to be mediocre or even losing presidents. Jimmy Carter, for example, admitted publicly his IQ was an astonishing 176. Richard Nixon and Woodrow Wilson both had high IQ's.

Franklin Roosevelt's IQ was probably about average for a U.S. president. Walter Lippmann, a leading columnist, said FDR was "a pleasant man, who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." Washington, Jackson, Eisenhower, and Reagan probably had middling IQs too.

Brilliance really isn't good enough. We need common sense and a conviction that members of the other party aren't all villains. A touch of humor wouldn't hurt, either. It worked for Lincoln.

James M. Perry, a prominent veteran political reporter, is contributing regular observations for post-gazette.com. Mr. Perry was the chief political correspondent of The Wall Street Journal until his retirement. Prior to that, he covered national politics for the Dow Jones weekly, The National Observer.

It's relatively rare for a US Senator to wade into state legislation, but that's what Democrat Bob Casey did today in coming out against a GOP proposal to change the way Pennsylvania awards presidential electoral votes.

Casey issued a letter to the proposal's lead sponsor, state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, saying the bill "would drastically alter the method by which the Commonwealth allocates its 20 electoral votes and diminish the historical role Pennsylvania has played in electing our Nation's presidents. I respectfully urge you to reconsider this legislation."

Like most states Pennsylvania uses a winner-take-all system for awarding its votes. Pileggi's proposal would divvy them up by voting percentage, while a similar proposal in the House would award them by congressional district. (The GOP currently has a 13-5 advantage in congressional seats.) Republicans say the change would more accurately reflect who the state's voters want to be president, while Democrats say it's a GOP power-grab that would render the state relatively meaningless in presidential years since it would put few electoral votes up for grabs.

The full letter from Casey, a Democrat, is below: