Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Recently, the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS) released documents from nine state schools for the mentally challenged, showing that about one in every 17 residents each year is abused or neglected. Issues at these schools are deep, long-standing and chronic.

So, let’s talk about solutions.

In 2005, the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division swooped down on the Lubbock State School to investigate reports of wrongly drugged and restrained residents. Since 2005, the state said, about one in every 17 residents each year is abused or neglected.

On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that his investigation was expanding to include athletic departments at 39 colleges and universities nationwide, accused of steering student athletes to certain lenders in exchange for kickbacks. Texas schools on the list include Texas Christian University, the University of Houston, UT-San Antonio; UTEP and UT-Pan American.

The recent release of the findings of an internal investigation into the Texas Education Agency's awarding of contracts prompted more questions than it answered. State Auditor John Keel has now stepped into the picture to conduct his own investigation.

Javier Diaz is 78 years young. On Saturdays, he’ll drop by the office and ask ‘what’s up Senator? What are we going to do this week?” Every day Javier wakes up wanting to make El Paso a better place.

Now comes the Great Texas Tax Shift of 2007. On June 15, Rick Perry cut over $153 million of funding from Texas's community colleges. In his written veto message, Perry accused college presidents of “falsifying their appropriations requests.” “How do you accuse 50 community colleges of falsifying a report?

Abuse, neglect and humiliation are a common occurrence for hundreds of mentally retarded children and adults living in Texas' state schools, employee disciplinary records show.

State leaders have bowed to pressure from border legislators and college presidents, among others, and will now look at ways of reinstating $154 million in community college funding vetoed by Gov. Rick Perry.

A couple of weeks ago, the local paper printed names of El Pasoans with outstanding arrest warrants. 78,000 El Pasoans made the paper! When we compared Austin, same story: 11% of Austin has outstanding arrest warrants. How did that happen? Here are the facts.

Many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.

President Bush on Wednesday reiterated his threat to veto Senate legislation that would substantially increase funds for children's health insurance by levying a 61-cent-a-pack increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

State Board of Education member Don McLeroy of Bryan was named chairman of the panel by Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday, giving a boost to the social conservative bloc on the board.

A huge public corruption inquiry in El Paso has resulted in a second guilty plea. Elizabeth Flores, a former El Paso County commissioner, made the plea in early July in Federal District Court to six federal charges of mail and wire fraud.

The Blackstone Group, the big buyout firm, has devised a way for its partners to effectively avoid paying taxes on $3.7 billion, the bulk of what it raised last month from selling shares to the public.

Probably the biggest green initiative coming down the road these days, literally, is congestion pricing — charging people for the right to drive into a downtown area. It is already proving to be the most effective short-term way to clean up polluted city air, promote energy efficiency and create more livable urban centers, while also providing mayors with unexpected new revenue.

The Fourth of July is just fun!

Visiting with soldiers back from war. Feeling the energy from thousands of El Pasoans proud to be Americans. Celebrating the birthday of the United States! Along the parade route, people are excited. Flags are everywhere. The Jefferson Silver Fox band plays great march music.

Scores of Oregon payday and car title lenders have closed their doors as a 36 percent interest rate cap and other new regulations took effect last week. Gone are the 520 percent annual interest rates that were common among payday lenders before the Legislature recently passed new regulations.

Is Texas now slipping away from the GOP? The answer is more than a little surprising, and it's not just because of the president's sagging approval ratings.

Here are the stories of three veterans of this war, told in their voices, edited for flow and efficiency but otherwise unchanged. They bear out the statistics and suggest that even those who are not diagnosably impaired return burdened by experiences they can neither forget nor integrate into their postwar lives.

Here’s Tony. He’s worked at Barron’s Supermarket in El Paso for twenty years. He’s proud—and happy. Along with Robert and Gloria, the owners at Barron’s, he just finished putting all his kids through college. Now, they are using the income that used to go to tuition to build a bakery right next door.