Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

A state advisory panel voted earlier this month to combine the state prison system for juvenile offenders with the less troubled Juvenile Probation Commission.

State Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, said he hopes Zaffirini remains a member of the state budget conference committee that reconciles the differences between the House and Senate versions of the budget. Zaffirini was an automatic pick for the conference committee while serving as vice-chair of Finance. That may not be the case this session.

Proponents told lawmakers during a transportation meeting Wednesday that they’re reaching out to former opponents such as Southwest Airlines, which fought the last high-speed rail project as a potential competitor.

At the forefront of the complaint, Figueroa said, are the changes that mandate applicants present visas that are valid for more than one year at the time they apply for a driver's license application and the department's decision to issue non-citizens a vertical driver's license instead of the standard horizontal version. MALDEF also opposes the policy change that requires legal residents to furnish additional documentation, including immigration or naturalization papers, before they can apply for a license.

We believe Texas, which already has a lottery, should legalize slot machines at horse tracks, as does nearby New Mexico, where Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino is only five minutes from Downtown El Paso. And we believe our state's Indian casinos, including El Paso's Speaking Rock, should be allowed to reopen.

The obvious cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don’t know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

The cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said. Last year, drug enforcement authorities confiscated record amounts of high potency plants from Miami to San Diego, and even from vineyards leased by cartels in Washington State. Mexican drug traffickers have also moved into hydroponic marijuana production — cannabis grown indoors without soil and nourished with sunlamps — challenging Asian networks and smaller, individual growers here.

It wasn't really a surprise that Gov. Perry's Monday legislative laundry list was more 2010 campaign kickoff than official State of the State address. He and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison have been jockeying for position for months. But it would have been helpful to more Texans if he'd hewed a little better to the task directly at hand: informing the Legislature on the actual current economic and social conditions in Texas. He did manage a passing opening reference, "We are blessed that the state of our state is strong," and then closed with predictable sanctimony: "The state of our state is good [and] her character is strong and her people are great ... [and] our best days are yet to come."

The board convened in Austin Jan. 21-23 to hear public and expert (depending on wildly uneven definitions of "expert") testimony on evolution and then cast a first-reading vote on revising the Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills requirements for K-12 public education.

On Jan. 6, the council had passed a resolution proposed by the city's Committee on Border Rela­tions, expressing the city's support for its beleaguered sister city, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Juárez is at the center of a brutal turf battle between rival drug cartels; in 2008, nearly 1,600 people were murdered there. The city of nearly 1.5 million people has become a front line in the War on Drugs for both Mexico and the U.S. – a war that both governments are, by all objective measures, losing.

An amendment to the stimulus package passed by the U.S. House on Wednesday would provide a back door for states to receive federal funds if a state’s governor declined to request the money.

Texas needs to overhaul its failing higher education system - which isn't adequately reaching its fastest growing population, Hispanics - to avoid a downward spiral in quality of life and economic competitiveness, according to a new government-commissioned report meant to inspire legislative action.

The whole world is in recession. But the United States is the only wealthy country in which the economic catastrophe will also be a health care catastrophe — in which millions of people will lose their health insurance along with their jobs, and therefore lose access to essential care.

Here is the reality behind the rhetoric. 5.83 million Texans have no health insurance—one in four— making Texas the least insured state in the nation. Not a single Texas city even reaches the national average in citizens with health insurance. From 2001 to 2005, Texas families saw their health insurance premiums soar 86 percent—six times faster than their incomes increased.

Unless one of them blinks, Perry and Hutchison are on a collision course to meet in the 2010 Republican primary, with the GOP nomination awaiting the winner. For the next thirteen months, the impending confrontation will be the hottest political story going. A clash of major officeholders belonging to the same party is rare in politics; the natural instinct of most politicians is to look for the safest route to advancement. For Perry and Hutchison, there is no safe route. They must settle their differences between the ropes.

But some of the few available statistics suggest the state is outsourcing more and more of its work.While the state budget has grown over the past decade, the number of full-time state employees excluding those at its fast-growing institutions of higher education has dropped about 4 percent. At the same time, the value of the state's contracts with outside vendors increased 55 percent between 2003 and 2007, a period during which state spending overall increased 24 percent.

Tuesday's inauguration signaled a new beginning that offers wonderful opportunities to break with the past. Clearly, the ill-conceived economic policies that put us in this bind must be corrected, and more stimuli are needed. We should, however, heed Obama and face our challenges with urgency — but also with shared responsibility, common purpose and sacrifice.

Border sheriffs, who Perry gave $2 million to line the Texas-Mexico border with hundreds of Web cameras, installed only about a dozen and made just a handful of apprehensions as a result of tips from online viewers.

Supporters say reducing the number of uninsured youngsters — now one of every five — would benefit not only the children's physical health but the fiscal health of Texas taxpayers. The federal government picks up 72 percent of the cost, and providing health care in doctors' offices is almost always cheaper than treating children in public hospital emergency rooms.

The Senate was expected to vote Thursday on legislation that would spend $31.5 billion more on a children's health insurance program over the next 4 1/2 years. The additional money would help about 4 million uninsured children get coverage and draw 2.4 million more kids into the program who otherwise could get private coverage.