Yikes, what a wild ride it has been since February, a veritable bucking bronco, to make an allusion to Saturday's 134th running of the Kentucky Derby.

As we head into the stretch run of this dusty, dismal 13-week stumble to the legislative finish — where the merchants of Connecticut politics have been peddling budget bilge water as if it were mint juleps — it's time to think of winners and losers.

We're Americans, so that's what we do, especially in politics. There are winners and losers who must be chronicled.

Don't worry, you taxpayers have lost. When it comes down to it, 2008 won't be a memorable year for the General Assembly, but you definitely lost.

There were a couple of interesting bills, such as opening up the state-employee health plan for cities, towns, nonprofits and small business. The legislation at this writing is hanging fire in the Senate.

That's the principal accomplishment of House Majority Leader Chris Donovan, D-Meriden, who's a winner this session.

Donovan's a multiple winner because he's essentially distanced himself from the revenue falloff that melted away like the Vermont ski slopes that are now pushing the Connecticut River past flood stage.

Donovan will enjoy the fact that the political clock has moved up two years, because Speaker of the House Jim Amann has eschewed the pro forma third two-year term and Donovan is now the speaker-in-waiting.

Rep. Denise Merrill, D-Mansfield, the co-chairwoman of the Appropriations

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Committee, seems the likely favorite to become majority leader after the November election and is therefore a winner, although the budget her panel pushed out is barely worth the paper on which it was printed.

Minority House and Senate Republicans won. The budget deficit grew, their cries for fiscal austerity, first sneered at by Democrats, became a necessity.

Too bad that it's anticipated that a big year for Democrats in the president race bodes poorly for a couple feisty caucuses that could use a few more members of the House and Senate to increase their relevancy beyond the current nearly two-to-one Democratic majorities. Amann, D-Milford, is the big winner of the 2008 legislative session. Tah dah!

He didn't buy into the optimistic early winter forecasts for robust budget surpluses, which evaporated before the daffodils finished blooming. He wasn't lured to promise election-year pie in the sky.

Maybe it's because he knew for a while that he was going to retire from the General Assembly this year. Whatever. Amann's going out on his terms and is thoroughly enjoying his final few days, or weeks if the budget isn't hammered out before the denizens of the 2008 General Assembly turn into pumpkins at midnight Wednesday.

Given a chance to comment on winners and losers the other night, before the Kentucky Derby, Amann chose Gov. Jodi Rell as the loser.

"I think there have been a couple stumbles along the way, to use the horse analogy," Amann said as he left the House podium and was shooting the breeze with reporters. "She continues to have her share of problems."

Ah, yes. It was not a very good week for the governor, what with her threatening to veto the tough-on-violent-offenders bill that has been the source of so much political posturing since last July, when a pair of career burglars broke into a Cheshire home and allegedly killed a mother and her two daughters.

To illustrates a point on the surplus, she hinted she'd veto the persistent-offender law because it had a $10 million fiscal impact. In an $18.2 billion budget, that is literally horse feed.

Then, on Thursday, the day before they were to appear in a confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, two Rell appointees to the new Board of Parole bailed out after the governor finally realized they had been members of previous parole panels that had reviewed the Cheshire burglars when last they left prison.

Rell, at the start of the session in February, also got swept up in the once $263 million budget surplus, which is now a nearly $68 million deficit, and proposed spending increases that are now distant echoes.

But the big loser of the 2008 legislative session has to be Senate President Pro Tem Don Williams, D-Brooklyn, whose apparent gubernatorial aspirations had him out on a limb.

The election-year "refunds" he proposed? That seems like such a long time ago.

Williams has now stationed a podium inside the door of the Democratic caucus room, for quick placement out in the hall for overblown media pronouncements.

This is bad news. He called one of those instant news conferences the other day to overreact to a Republican amendment — that would have been easily crushed like a bug in the 23-13 Democratic majority — that would have required photo IDs at state election polling places.

The manufactured news event featured more than a half hour of pre-emptive blather about Jim Crow and voter discrimination. When the bill came up in the Senate, the GOP minority never called the amendment. A lot of amendments don't get called in both the House and Senate.

The effects of the Democratic protests were substantially nullified and reporters were left wondering what the point was beyond Williams' apparent desire to run for governor in 2010. Saturday was Derby Day. Does that mean tomorrow morning, various high-profile state politicians will finally dismount from their high horses, saddle sores and all?

Ken Dixon's Capitol View appears Sundays in the Connecticut Post. You may reach him in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or via e-mail at kdixon@ctpost.com. His daily Web log, Connecticut Blog-o-rama, can be seen at forum.connpost.com/politics.