Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

How can a comparatively poor, high-immigration town that sits across the border from super-violent Ciudad Juarez be one of the safest big cities in America?

Lorenzo García, the El Paso Independent School District superintendent, received a vote of confidence Tuesday night when the district's trustees voted unanimously to extend his contract.

The extension comes without a pay increase as the board voted to continue paying him $280,314 a year -- the same amount he received last year.

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.

The future of Texas depends on our greatest resource—namely Texans. If we educate Texans to compete for good jobs in the 21st Century, we win. If we don’t, we lose. So, are we winning?

The Select Commission on Higher Education and Global Competitiveness, created by a resolution sponsored by our office, recently released a report that bluntly states:

For 15 years, from Bush to Perry, the Grover formula has given tax cuts to the wealthy and delivered budget cuts to you.