Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

"Quit lying about El Paso; quit conflating drug dealers with Hispanics to whip up fear; quit the Tea Step tour and come home—get to work and fix DPS—that’s one responsible thing you can do on your watch.”

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

HANDS down, the State of the Union’s big moment was Barack Obama’s direct hit on the delicate sensibilities of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The president was right to blast the 5-to-4 decision giving corporate interests an even greater stranglehold over a government they already regard as a partially owned onshore subsidiary. How satisfying it was to watch him provoke Alito into a “You lie!” snit. Here was a fight we could believe in.

Texas officials called it blackmail and coercion and resented "the federal government pointing a loaded gun at the Legislature."

"Why Texas Needs Health Reform More than Any State in the U.S."

Unless our community supports President Obama now, reform will not happen in our lifetimes. Over the last decade, Texas leaders have failed our state. Governor Rick Perry and U.S. Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn have all had a decade to fix Texas' broken health care system. During the last ten years, Perry’s approach has been to kick over 230,000 kids out of the Children's Health Insurance Program, 500,000 out of Medicaid, call it victory, then vacation with Grover Norquist.