Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Budget writers in the Texas Senate have decided how to use almost $11 billion in federal stimulus money in the upcoming state budget, with some of it filling an expected budget hole.

American workers – whose taxes pay for massive government health programs – are getting squeezed like no other group by private health insurance premiums that are rising much faster than their wages.

Crime on the Texas border is on the way down after decreasing 65 percent over the past several years. Apprehensions of illegal border crossers are down more than 40 percent, and that was before they started building a fence.

Senators Elliot Shapleigh, D El Paso, Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth and Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, spoke out this morning against so-called “predatory lenders” who make “obscene profits” at the expense of families just trying to make ends meet.

Davis and state Sens. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, and Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, called on lawmakers to approve a package of bills to reform subprime mortgages and regulate payday loans and tax refund-anticipation loans in Texas.

The House Committee on Human Services on Thursday considered more than two dozen bills on CHIP and Medicaid, including ones that would add a CHIP buy-in option and let families stay in children's Medicaid for a year at a time, rather than having to reapply every six months. The panel didn't vote on the measures.

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

The two most prominent grandstanders — Rick Perry of Texas and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — should listen to lawmakers and taxpayers in their own states who are demanding that they do what’s best for their most vulnerable citizens.

Opponents have dismissed the project as "the perfect Google border" and say the cameras do little to deter criminal activity. "Border security deserves trained professionals, not pub-goers in Perth," said Eliot Shapleigh, a state senator from El Paso, Texas, who claims that the programme has resulted in only a handful of arrests. "It's wholly ineffective for the governor's stated goal of security, it panders to extremists for political purposes and it's not an effective use of $2m for just three apprehensions."

Abortion opponents said the bill by Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, which would force doctors to perform the sonograms and check a heartbeat monitor at least two hours before the abortion, will remind women that they're considering terminating a human life. They say it still gives women a choice: the bill, as it's currently written, lets them to decide whether to see the image or listen to the heartbeat.

On Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will appear on Capitol Hill specifically to address the crisis for the first time. The hearing, before the full Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, also will offer the highest level of attention from Congress on the issue thus far, following a string of subcommittee hearings in both chambers during the past two weeks.

For too many Texas families, college is a distant dream. And if we don’t meet the challenge of educating our children, for the first time in Texas history, the next generation will be less prosperous than the generation today.

The state was, fortunately, late to the party: The national recession started in December 2007. It took another six months before Texas’ economy began to slow down, the report said.

State Sen. Eliot Shaleigh, D-El Paso, introduced two bills to soothe “the invisible wounds of these wars,” he said. Senate Bill 196 would double the counseling efforts in schools serving students with parents in combat zones overseas to offer more one-on-one time. Working with three other senators, Shapleigh also drafted Senate Bill 1030 to improve health care services for military personnel and families affected by post-traumatic stress disorder.

At a high-end hardware store in Houston's ritzy Galleria area — to highlight the dire plight of Texas small businesses, no doubt — Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday he will turn down $555 million of stimulus money that would replenish Texas' dwindling unemployment insurance fund.

The latest debate is over the top 10 percent rule for college admission, crafted more than a decade ago as a colorblind remedy after affirmative action policies were banned in 1996.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Mexico in two weeks as part of an Obama administration effort to bolster its neighbor in its bloody war with organized crime cartels and quell mounting U.S. anxiety over cross-border violence.

The loss of $6.5 billion in value has left a dent in the long-term condition of the fund, which is now at $15 billion. The system has 89 cents of every dollar needed to cover promised benefits over the long-term, down almost 4 percent since August.

Signs indicate the Texas Legislature will not designate funds this session to increase the number of state universities considered tier-one in research. This should not stop the seven state schools vying for that high status symbol.

Taking the stimulus money will actually save on taxes, at least in the near term, and it would cover the cost of benefits for an additional 45,000 out-of-work Texans for years to come. That’s right: Take the stimulus, and Texas businesses avoid taxes. Reject the federal money, and they’ll pay an estimated $60 per employee in additional unemployment taxes in the next year, says the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association in Austin.