Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Earlier this summer, El Paso’s Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority (EPMHMR) announced that nearly one in three with significant mental health issues will no longer get care. On September 1st, 1,107 of its 4,441 adult clients and 320 of 1,350 its child clients with issues ranging from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia will get a pink slip—all will be moved from treatment and care to Rick Perry's waiting lists.

The greatest heights eluded Ted Kennedy over a lifetime of achievement and pain. No presidency. No universal health care, chief among his causes.

Instead, Kennedy built his Washington monument stone by stone, his imprint distinct on the Senate's most important works over nearly half a century. He toiled across the Potomac River from the graveyard of his fallen brothers.

Our government has never been more dysfunctional than it is today. Well, maybe it has, but I wasn’t paying attention until a few years ago.

No matter how high-school dropouts are counted, Texas has a lot of them, and together they pack quite an economic punch to the gut.

City of Houston officials have wrestled for years with this dilemma: How do you prevent industrial facilities from violating clean air standards if the state agency entrusted with that responsibility doesn't do the job?

A proposed solar power plant in Santa Teresa, which would supply electricity to El Paso Electric, isn't the only solar development going on in this area.

The federal government has hired tens of thousands of temporary workers to prepare for the 2010 Census -- a population count that could remake the political map even as the foreclosure crisis makes it more difficult to account for millions of dislocated Americans.

President Barack Obama on Thursday managed to undo some of the damage he did recently with immigrants’ rights advocates — who were angered when Obama said in Mexico that immigration reform would have to wait until after health care and energy bills passed Congress

Standing to the right of the pitcher's mound at the field that bears his name, Socorro High School baseball coach Chris Forbes retired as a winner on Thursday.

Here's a statistic that says a lot about how real estate markets have changed.

The battle for public opinion over health care intensified further on Thursday when a strange-bedfellows coalition including drug companies, doctors and a big labor union, all favoring an overhaul, opened a $12 million television advertising campaign directed at 12 states.

Researchers have discovered a way to identify drugs that can specifically attack and kill cancer stem cells, a finding that could lead to a new generation of anticancer medicines and a new strategy of treatment.

As chairman of one of the more obscure federal agencies, Glenn M. Hackbarth is little known outside the world of health care and his hometown, Bend, Ore. If President Obama has his way, Mr. Hackbarth could become one of the most important people in government, with the power to say how Medicare spends more than $450 billion a year.

Finding work typically came with an extra hurdle for Estela Rodriguez.

IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

The graduates of a radical bilingual education program at Alicia R. Chacón International, in El Paso, would have no trouble reading either of these headlines. What can they teach the rest of us about the future of Texas?

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

American taxpayers are ploughing billions in. Will they get their money back?

Agree with them or not, Gov. Rick Perry has fairly well established positions on most bread-and-butter issues at the heart of state government. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's campaign to end his record tenure requires more than critiques of Perry's performance. Those we can come up with ourselves. (Like, can the state really keep borrowing and tolling its way to a first-class transportation system to hand off to the next generation?)

While the private sector has shed 6.9 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, state and local governments have expanded their payrolls and added 110,000 jobs, according to a report issued Thursday by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.