Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Thirty-seven agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are being deployed to the region. An official familiar with the plan said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is considering reassignment of at least 90 officers to the border.

Gov. Rick Perry’s top appointee to the Texas Workforce Commission has been working with state legislators to try to fashion a bipartisan compromise that would enable the state to accept $555 million in stimulus money from Washington for unemployment benefits without long-term federal strings attached.

During the latter part of the 20th century, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court undid barriers created by local and state governments to disenfranchise minority and poor voters, even outlawing the hated poll tax. The high court undermined hat effort a year ago, when it tentatively upheld Indiana's onerous law requiring voters to present a state-issued photo identification card on Election Day.

Nine El Paso County school districts should receive nearly $100 million in federal stimulus money during the next two years to increase their budgets for low-income and special education programs, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Note to Austin: Everyone take a deep breath, drop your gloves and retreat to your corners. There's a way for the state to accept federal stimulus money to help unemployed Texans without forcing businesses to pay higher taxes forevermore to the state's unemployment insurance fund.

The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost. Although private financing is available through solar companies, homeowners often balk because they worry that they will not stay in the house long enough to have the investment — which runs about $48,000 for an average home and tens of thousands of dollars more for a larger home in a hot climate — pay off.

Democratic lawmakers and labor leaders plan an all-out fight to overturn Gov. Rick Perry's rejection of federal stimulus money for unemployed Texans. "A hundred percent political," House Democratic leader Jim Dunnam of Waco said Friday, referring to Perry's rejection a day earlier of $556 million of stimulus money for unemployment insurance.

A total of 7,136 bills – 946 more than lawmakers filed in their session two years ago – have been proposed. The 15 percent jump could be attributed to freedom from the usual calamities legislators have faced in the recent past, such as a $10 billion budget shortfall (2003) or the courts throwing out the state's system of financing public schools (2005).

The Obama administration has proposed cutting what the government pays private insurers to cover about one in five Medicare beneficiaries and using the savings to help finance comprehensive health coverage.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said she would ask Vice President Joe Biden, who chairs a task force on the use of stimulus funds, to allow Texas to receive the money even if the state enacts provisions to automatically end these additional benefits after two years. Current federal rules forbid such a “hard-sunset” provision.

Republican state senators are poised this week to send a voter ID measure opposed by Democrats to the Texas House, where Republican Speaker Joe Straus of San Antonio expects the ID idea — approved twice before by House members — to reach the floor.

Calls for re-examining the revised franchise tax (aka the margin tax) have been growing in number as the economy retracts and more Texans lose their jobs. But the economic decline is only part of the reason people are taking a second look at the new business tax.

As Americans across the country struggle with rising unemployment and home foreclosures, many families in the U.S. face harder times. Because of several initiatives that our community launched at the El Paso Economic Summit of 1998, El Paso is doing well when compared to the rest of the U.S....Our local economy is in better shape than the national economy, and El Paso is likely to weather the economic troubles better than most cities.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday rejected $555 million in federal stimulus money that would expand state unemployment benefits, saying the money would have required the state to keep funding the expanded benefits after the stimulus money ran out.

Proponents of the so-called voter ID bill wanted to make a point to the political base back home: We won't let liars and cheats steal elections in Texas. Never mind that in the years that the emotionally charged issue has stalked the Legislature, no one has made a convincing case that impersonation at the polls is a problem in this state.

The proposal, designated a legislative emergency by Gov. Rick Perry, comes after the U.S. Department of Justice reported that the institutions known as state schools fail to protect residents from harm.

The seven schools are diverse in location, size and strengths: the University of North Texas in Denton, UT-Arlington, UT-Dallas, UT-El Paso, UT-San Antonio, the University of Houston and Texas Tech in Lubbock. Lifting just one of them to national stature will take years, even decades, of financial and political will. Advocates say the effort is worth it for all of the intellectual and economic benefits such institutions would provide for Texas.

Beth Mitchell, senior managing attorney with Advocacy Inc., said staff at both the Mexia and San Angelo state schools have provoked physical altercations between residents in the last six months – "creating a climate where abuse is acceptable, and in these cases encouraged." While the cases are serious, Mitchell said, they do not appear to be as orchestrated as the late-night "fight club" ring uncovered at the Corpus Christi facility.

Arrest warrants for four Corpus Christi State School employees and two former workers were issued Thursday for organizing fights among the mentally disabled just as Texas lawmakers in Austin blasted the state’s top disabilities commissioner for failing to take steps years ago to curb abuse.

Despite maneuvering by Democrats to try to stall the bill, the Senate result isn't in doubt because Republicans tweaked the body's rules in January to all but guarantee they'll advance the measure to the House.