Governor Phil Bredesen gave his State of the State speech on Monday, and with it an outline of his proposed 2008-2009 budget. Tax revenues are down, and apparently the increased tobacco taxes aren't helping as much as everyone expected, so the budget is tight, probably like that of the average Tennessee household. But Bredesen's budget doesn't tap the state's reserves, and doesn't have any new taxes. Actually, the budget looks like the least melodramatic of what awaits on Capitol Hill in Nashville this year. The state Senate is divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and since it's an election year - state as well as national - there's bound to be an annoying amount of grandstanding by lawmakers. The late Molly Ivins once said that she never felt a need to write fiction, because the reality of covering state politics always comes through with stories nobody would believe if they were written in a novel.