Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Thomason Hospital has been rated among the nation's top 100, which can only help attract more physicians and benefit both the new Children's Hospital of El Paso and next-door neighbor Texas Tech medical school.

There is neither time nor a reason to slow down a plan to update the English language arts and reading curriculum for public schools, State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy said Wednesday after a Texas lawmaker pleaded for input from Hispanic experts.

"I realized I was going to go down when I saw the change in voter turnout and all the new folks. I'm just getting over it right now," Moreno said several days after his crushing defeat. "I have too many things to do. I'll call it the new era of Paul Moreno."

It's time for Public Insurance Council Rod Bordelon, who represents consumers in insurance rate cases, to move into high gear. Five years of fat profits for insurance companies means that it's time for some relief for Texas rate payers. It's time for those promises of rate relief to be delivered.

Between now and the next session of the Legislature in January, Hardcastle predicted he and his committee will enact several energy-related changes "or look at them before the next session." He said he expected topics to include renaming the Railroad Commission and "two or three others, like adjustments to our bonding regulations."

For Republicans, what gives them hope is the fact that even though most Hispanics voted Democratic in the primary, many are new voters and can be persuaded to favor the GOP in future elections. As for Democrats, their challenge is to persuade them to keep voting Democratic.

The report nailed Texas for failing both to limit its class sizes and to require site visits to monitor the program's success, two of six benchmarks in a 10-point checklist that the state missed.

Strict US immigration controls at the Mexican border mean that it's easy to get in to Mexico, but not to get out. For the people of El Paso, one of the world's largest bi-national communities, it is a perfect example of why the US should guard against the ever more vocal isolationists on immigration.

At least 15 touch-screen voting machines that produced improbable numbers in Ohio's 2006 statewide election are now under double-lock in an official crime scene. And the phony "Homeland Security Alert" used by Republicans to build up George W. Bush's 2004 vote count in a key southwestern Ohio county has come under new scrutiny.

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Tuesday he would ask payday lenders throughout the state to shut down immediately or face the likelihood of lawsuits from his office.

Between 50 percent and 55 percent of food stamp applications assigned to TIERS in December were not processed in 30 days. Federal rules allow no more than 5 percent to be handled that slowly.

Offer debtors a cheaper alternative, one that they can rely on instead of payday loan operations when their financial lifeline snaps.

The last time the broad public grasped the danger of budget deficits was in 1992, when Ross Perot paid for half-hour television infomercials, complete with dramatic charts and graphs, as part of his presidential campaign. That seeded the ground for Bill Clinton's 1993 effort that succeeded briefly in wiping out those deficits.

Several South Texas property owners testified in federal court Monday that government officials seeking access to land to survey for the border fence did not try to negotiate before suing.

The State Board of Education should not change the curriculum until the board's subcommittee is expanded to include a border representative and until it considers expert advice from researchers familiar "with the challenges of language minority groups," Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, said in a letter to board Chairman Don McLeroy of Bryan.

Shapleigh, D-El Paso, says the BHC has failed to provide results from its border health initiatives and requests HHS reply with solutions to the problem. The senator said the commission has been a “disappointment” because its budget is not large enough to make a significant impact on the health of border residents, it has not maintained data on its initiatives and thus there is no way to measure the commission's effectiveness.

Freelance financial watchdogs who examined the paperwork on sub-prime home loans being sold to Wall Street had an inside view of the boom in easy-money lending this decade. The reviewers say they raised plenty of red flags about flaws so serious that mortgages should have been rejected outright -- such as borrowers' incomes that seemed inflated or documents that looked fake -- but the problems were glossed over, ignored or stricken from reports.

U.S. currency traders launched a furious sell-off of the dollar immediately after the Fed acted Sunday, some staying up all night on concerns, they said, that major U.S. bank failures could be on the horizon. Major stock market indicators swung wildly, with the Standard and Poor's 500-stock index falling as much as 2.4 percent but ending 0.9 percent lower. The Dow Jones industrial average rebounded from early losses, finishing up about 0.2 percent on the strength of J.P. Morgan Chase, which has agreed to purchase Bear Stearns for a fire-sale price.

If Republicans needed any more evidence of how difficult this fall may be, the past week had it all, analysts said. The Illinois race demonstrated new levels of disaffection, the party's efforts to go on offense elsewhere were thwarted by recruiting failures, and the NRCC scandal will divert campaign resources and could frighten off badly needed contributors, they said.

It was an old-fashioned bank run that forced Bear Stearns to turn to the government for salvation on Friday. The difference is that Bear Stearns is not a commercial bank, and is therefore not eligible for the protections those banks received 75 years ago when Franklin D. Roosevelt halted bank runs with government guarantees.