Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

"Where there is a pocket of poverty, you can be sure there is a high rate of subprime lending," said David Beckmann, president of the institute. "Our country's poorest areas are the epicenter of the subprime mortgage crisis."

Private insurance companies participating in Medicare have been allowed to keep tens of millions of dollars that should have gone to consumers, and the Bush administration did not properly audit the companies or try to recover money paid in error, Congressional investigators say in a new report.

Texas would lose more than $3.3 billion in Medicaid funding if Congress doesn't stop new rules designed to arrest the growth of federal health care spending, according to a congressional report issued Monday.

Texas spent $3,638 per year for each person in the state, according to the report — less than one-third the amount of top spender Alaska's $12,833. While the Lone Star State budget ranked third in the country, Texas spent about half as much per resident as the states ahead of it, California and New York.

Profiling women with good credit histories as subprime borrowers has so far attracted less notice than other forms of lending discrimination. But at least a few researchers and think tanks issued warnings during recent years.

Our healthcare system in Texas is broken. With the eyes of all America on universal healthcare, the Texas model will soon take center stage. "Texas Borderlands: Ground Zero of Healthcare in America" tells the story of healthcare in Texas.

Texas is experiencing a tsunami of early voting that has no precedent. I have linked to the Secretary of State's Web site, which provides day-by-day election totals and an archive of early voting history in previous elections.

The city of El Paso has been cleared by a bankruptcy court in Corpus Christi to seek the revocation of Asarco's air discharge permit and permanently close the smelter.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rick Noriega, while releasing his military records Wednesday, said that Republican incumbent John Cornyn has not voted to take care of U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families.

A new study conducted by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) shows, the economic costs associated with diabetes is shocking. In 2007, diabetes cost the United States $174 billion; $12.46 billion in Texas and $515 million in El Paso alone.

The Lone Star Project has constructed a Texas Democratic Primary vote calculator. Just enter the percentage vote you believe Hillary Clinton will receive in each Senate District. The calculator will automatically determine the vote Senator Obama would receive and then calculate the number of votes and delegates awarded to each candidate.

Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says.

Turnout for early voting in the March 4 primaries has been impressive in El Paso so far. Let's keep it up!

Thirty-six years ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton knocked on doors through southern Texas registering voters for the Democratic Party. It was her first job in politics. Now she's after the top job in politics and the door knocking Wednesday was distinctly different.

Hillary Rodham Clinton kicked off her campaign in Texas with a rally attended by 10,000 enthusiastic supporters, staking her claim to this must-win state.

Texas regulators on Wednesday approved a controversial air permit to allow Asarco LLC to restart a dormant copper smelter in West Texas over objections of elected officials in El Paso, Texas, New Mexico and Juarez, Mexico.

For the first time in nearly a century, railroads are making large investments in their networks -- adding sets of tracks, straightening curves that force engines to slow and expanding tunnels for bigger trains. Their campaign is altering the corridors of American commerce.

"Texas Borderlands: Frontier of the Future" is a comprehensive report published biennially on the issues facing Texas and its Border region. Every month, we publish a new chapter, with a final volume completed in 2009. This first chapter addresses issues in higher education.

As I’ve tried to explain in previous columns, there really is a big difference between the candidates’ approaches. And new research, just released, confirms what I’ve been saying: the difference between the plans could well be the difference between achieving universal health coverage — a key progressive goal — and falling far short.

President Bush rolled out a $3.1 trillion budget Monday that boosts funding for the military while cutting projected spending for Medicare and Medicaid, proposals that would have a noticeable impact in Texas.