Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

In a world where the link between scientific progress and a rising standard of living is becoming increasingly undeniable, the next generation of Americans is shrinking away from these fields that are so important for our economic future.

The House Human Services Committee sent a strong, important message last week when it voted 8-1 to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program.

A state lawmaker said Monday that the Texas Youth
Commission's system for investigating abuse allegations and referring
them to authorities is so inadequate that most of the cases have ended
up in the records rooms of local police departments "to gather dust."

The power of a governor's executive order was reduced to an executive suggestion in an informal attorney general's opinion, revealed Monday, that Gov. Rick Perry doesn't have the legal authority to order sixth-grade girls vaccinated for a sexually transmitted virus.

A unit of Dallas-based TXU Corp. manipulated the state's wholesale power market two years ago, causing at least $70 million in higher electricity prices during the summer of 2005, an independent investigation said Monday.

A Texas Youth Commission policy may have dead-ended hundreds of abuse and neglect complaints from its juvenile lockups by providing local law enforcement with too little information for follow-up, even if there was a case for prosecution, investigators revealed Monday.

There's simply no acceptable excuse for the gross negligence – and, most likely, willful intent – that allowed rampant sexual and physical abuse to infect virtually every Texas Youth Commission unit across the state.

Disgusting and infuriating revelations continue to spill out from the Texas Youth Commission scandals. We have learned, for example, that commission policy allowed the hiring of convicted felons and that one former supervisor accused of sexual relations with youths at the West Texas State School lived with a 16-year-old boy — on school grounds.

Senate budget-writers voted Tuesday to spend more on parks, prisons and human services than the House but didn't follow its lead in draining teacher incentive pay for an across-the-board educator pay raise

Hereford and Dumas may be less than 100 miles apart, but when it comes to bilingual education teachers, the towns' school districts are worlds apart.

Before 9/11, the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots. Little Lies aren’t meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.

Aides to key state senators were told of sexual abuse allegations at Texas youth prisons in an e-mail two years ago. Other documents and testimony two years ago by a Texas Youth Commission official described the problem as well. Gov. Rick Perry's office was alerted, too

Getting tough on juvenile crime was one of the cornerstones of the campaign that elected George W. Bush governor in 1994, and he fulfilled that promise by almost tripling the size of the state's youth corrections system.

The [Texas Youth Commission] has allowed felons — possibly including murderers — to work with troubled juveniles as long as one of the agency's two top officials authorized it.

In a move that would stymie Mayor Bill White's plans to clean up Houston's air, two state lawmakers have filed legislation that would prohibit local governments from regulating pollution coming from outside their boundaries.

I have a theory about the Bush administration abuses of power that are now, finally, coming to light. Ultimately, I believe, they were driven by rising income inequality. Let me explain.

From the poles to the tropics, the earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being shaped by the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and face inevitable, possibly profound, alteration, the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change said Friday.

One in 30 homeowners in Philadelphia has been hurt by predatory lenders who target people who live in moderate-income neighborhoods and whose homes are often their only asset, illustrating a problem that's captured the attention of federal and local legislators throughout the country.

The driest periods of the last century — the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s — may become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades because of global warming, according to a study released Thursday. The study, published online in the journal Science, predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest — one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation.

The Texas Youth Commission's chief internal investigator was suspended Friday over allegations that he removed damaging information from a report on sexual abuse at a West Texas juvenile prison.