Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Like laundry dumped on the front lawn, hundreds of internal e-mails from Gov. Rick Perry's office spilled out into the open Thursday, but the long-serving Republican offered no apologies for some of the raw exchanges among top aides and allies.

Texas no longer has scores of abused and neglected children sleeping in Child Protective Services offices each month, the agency said Thursday.

But CPS officials told lawmakers they are not sure why the number has dwindled, almost as dramatically as it soared a year ago.

Opening its own inquest into the death of killer Larry Louis Cox, 48, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee appeared shocked to learn that low-level staff appeared to have made key medical decisions because properly qualified medics were not assigned to the Estelle maximum-security prison near Huntsville.

E-mails released by Gov. Rick Perry's office to an open government activist reveal candid and sometimes heated exchanges among staffers, other state officials and political power brokers in which current and former lawmakers are referred to as racist and evil.

The Texas Youth Commission, the state's corrective system for juveniles, still continues to lurch and stumble in its recovery from the scandal that wracked it last summer. The system came under glaring scrutiny when it was discovered that youths under its care were being abused by staff and, worse, that the abuses had been ongoing for some time, covered up by bureaucratic inertia and callousness.

To Mr. Washburn, public records are the flashlight into the dark rooms of government. It began in 2004, when he started examining voting irregularities in Wisconsin's presidential election. He then sought election records in Florida and decided to jump into the Texas fray, thinking it would be easy.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has prosecuted 22 cases of voting or other election fraud in nearly six years, and none would have been prevented with a law requiring photo IDs at polling stations, officials from his office told state lawmakers on Friday.

The open enrollment policy at Texas Southern University undermines the school's credibility, its reputation in the larger employment and academic world and contributes mightily to an abysmal dropout rate. Creating admission standards will be a boon to TSU, but it likely won't be an easy undertaking.

The state spent $1.19 on corrections for every $1 spent on public universities and community colleges last fiscal year. Only Vermont's ratio was higher, according to a new report released by the Pew Center on the States, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Last year, the Legislature ordered a study on the state’s programs to see if they’re run efficiently. The group, working with a consultant, will forward its recommendations to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The Legislature and governor’s office will receive a final report in July, which will help guide financial aid decisions in the 2009 Legislative session.

To Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: From personal experience, I can certainly appreciate the drama of a close race. And I also appreciate the fact that our state is playing a deciding role in this election. As Texans, we like it that way.

An effort to put some muscle back into Texas physical education classes has been undermined by school leaders who were more focused on test scores than heart rates, some state officials say.

A former University of Texas athletics official responsible for handling money for the Texas Relays is under investigation in connection with up to $60,000 in missing event fees, UT officials said.

There are 155,242 Texans enrolled in Star Plus, including 14,536 in Central Texas. The Legislature mandated the program to help curb the cost of Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people.

In 1972, Hillary Clinton left Texas in far better shape than did Sen. George McGovern.

He got trounced in the Lone Star state in his campaign against President Nixon. But Clinton — then Hillary Rodham, a Yale law student — came away with ties to Hispanic voters that she now sees as crucial to her campaign for Texas' March 4 presidential primary.

State lawmakers are laying the groundwork for legislation that could force cement plants to test cutting-edge pollution controls and require state regulators to consider regional effects before permitting new power plants.

Today, I received an inspiring e-mail from Bonnie Escobar recounting her experience in the Democratic caucus. She writes, "Today was a milestone for Texas voters ... I have attended numerous after election caucuses and thought I had seen it all, but tonight outshined everything."

Texas produces more carbon emissions than most countries, but the state government and business community don't seem too concerned.

If Texas were its own country, it would be the 48th most populous in the world, right between North Korea and Ghana. In terms of landmass, at 268,000 square miles it would be the 40th-biggest. But when it comes to environmental impact, Texas is on par with some of the largest, most industrialized nations on the planet.

With this year's flu season in full swing, nearly half of all U.S. workers who fall ill or have sick kids must decide whether to stay home and lose wages or go to work sick and expose others.

Payday loan businesses have long been accused of preying on the most economically vulnerable and charging exorbitant interest rates. Some U.S. cities have used that reasoning to support regulation of the shops. But Mesquite primarily based its ordinance on the shops' effect on image and economic development.