Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

On Wednesday, January 31, we will release a report called "Texas on the Brink: How Texas Ranks Among the 50 States." Leadership means dealing with the facts today to inspire all of us to make a difference tomorrow.

"Texas on the Brink" will show the hard facts about where Texas is today.

A new Senate budget for 2008-2009 unveiled by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst Tuesday includes $43 million for El Paso’s medical school. “Our number one goal for El Paso is to fully fund the $43.8 million needed for 1st and 2nd year faculty. With the full amount in the base bill, we're off to a great start," said Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, a longtime champion of the medical school.

Forget the $14.3 billion surplus you've heard about. Lt. Gov. Dewhurst said most of the $14.3 billion in new revenue forecast by Comptroller Susan Combs should go to property tax cuts and other obligations--leaving $2.5 billion for other state needs.

The first of 604 armed Texas National Guard troops were on patrol along the Rio Grande and elsewhere in the state today as Gov. Rick Perry launched a "rolling surge" of soldiers whose goal is to curb border crime.

No smoking would be allowed inside public buildings in Texas — including restaurants, bars and workplaces — if a legislative proposal is approved to make the Lone Star State one of 18 states with sweeping bans on smoking. "It is a public health crisis and a very expensive one," said state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, who is spearheading the proposal.

For many Texas legislative sessions, groups of lawmakers have tried but failed to pass a school voucher plan. This time, state Sen. Florence Shapiro, the Plano Republican who heads the Senate Education Committee, is backing a plan that is sure to appeal to parents of autistic children.

Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but who could imagine we’d already be in danger of replaying that rotten year 2003?

Americans are increasingly living in a house of cards — credit cards. A disturbing new report shows that with health care costs continuing their sharp rise, low- and middle-income patients are reaching for their credit cards with alarming frequency to cover treatment that they otherwise would be unable to afford.

My read on the elections of 2007 is that Texans (and most Americans) want us to walk across the aisle and work together to solve the challenges of our generation. So, what are those challenges in Texas -- the great state that we call home?

We're here to celebrate Texas' $14.3 billion surplus, but we must invest the surplus wisely. If we do, Texans will gain. If we don't, we will be the spoiled children who squandered their gifts.

Several key state lawmakers say they have plans this legislative session to work on revamping Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for low-income Texans. The future of the program, which is priming to be one of the premiere issues of the 140-day session that began Tuesday, is likely to trigger a fight between those devoted to ensuring the well-being of the most vulnerable Texans and those who fear that the swelling program could soon overwhelm the state budget.

In 1989, Congress made major improvements to Medicaid, which insures the nation's poorest kids. It ordered states to actively reach out to parents to educate them about the importance — and the availability — of preventive health care for their kids. In Texas, state officials have fought the law every step of the way and, after 13 years of litigation, Texas still refuses to comply.

This is an important year for health care in the United States and Texas. Since Texas has not provided adequate state dollars, it has lost about $865 million in federal matching dollars. That money has gone to other states, which have used it to fully fund children's health care and, in some cases, health care for the parents.

In a sign of how the political climate is shifting, powerful business interests that once teamed up to defeat Democratic healthcare plans are joining with labor unions and other unlikely allies to advocate extending medical insurance to millions of Americans.

Not too long ago, you could tell whether an election was under way by watching prime-time television and counting the number of ominous recitatives about prisoners and ex-prisoners in the commercials. This fall, however, the 7 million Americans who are in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- did not loom large on nightly TV. Prisoners are no longer the charged political symbols and campaign-season scapegoats they once were.

Cellular subscribers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year to subsidize landline telephone service, enriching big telecommunications companies while providing little or no benefit to cell phone users.

A laboratory that has tested most of the nation's electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.

Tennessee has collected nearly $3.5 million since it began enforcing its tax on illegal drugs two years ago, officials from the Department of Revenue said Wednesday.

Eliot Spitzer ended 12 years of Republican rule here on Monday with a blunt critique of the past and a call to “end the politics of cynicism and division in our state.” With his predecessor, George E. Pataki, gamely looking on, Governor Spitzer said in his 20-minute inaugural address that New York, “like Rip van Winkle,” had “slept through much of the past decade.”

It’s called the “golden hello.” For a chief executive of a large corporation, it is the one thing — more than the corporate jet or any other perk — that must be guaranteed before the executive will move to run another company. These multimillion-dollar payments and perks are used to draw in not only chief executives, but virtually every member of the executive suite.