Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

"We so appreciate your courage and tenacity to deliver on the promise of fundamental change to fix what everyone acknowledges is a broken health care system. If "starting over" is what Republicans still want, then I ask you to review the history of health care in Texas from George W. Bush to Rick Perry—because “starting over" here means no action at all to address woefully inadequate health care access in the least insured state in the country."

EL PASO - On Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 2 p.m., at EPCC Administrative Service Center, Senator Eliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso) will posthumously honor Esther Chavez Cano with the "Adelante Con Ganas" Award for the month of March. Every month Senator Shapleigh awards one or more persons who have made an extraordinary commitment to service, family and community.

A jury has ordered Houston homebuilder Bob Perry to pay $51 million to a retirement-age Mansfield couple who fought for a decade over a defective house that Perry Homes refused to fix. Perry is the biggest campaign contributor in Texas and a major figure in tort reform championed by Gov. Rick Perry (no relation) to limit lawsuits and cap jury awards against business. Bob and Jane Cull say Perry wouldn't fix their house and so went to arbitration, where they won an $800,000 judgment. The homebuilder refused to pay. He appealed for years through the court system to the Texas Supreme Court, which overturned two lower courts and sent the case back to district court in Fort Worth. Every member of the high court had each received contributions from Perry -- more than $260,000 from Perry, his family and his political committees.

Hi Guys:

Here’s a great piece by SAEN. All of these cuts will most massively affect—you guessed it—El Paso.

Massive cuts were predicted by your humble Senator when he called the Craddick//Perry tax scheme a “Giant Texas Tax Shift”. Swapping property taxes that fund schools, for risky business income taxes that have never been collected, resulted in exactly what we predicted—additional property tax burdens to El Paso homeowners mostly at schools struggling so hard to keep class size down---all because state leaders flunked the test of solving school finance in Austin.

LAST MONTH, A WEEK before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.