Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

The Texas job-creation machine may have broken down at the end of the year as the state economy continued to weaken and recovery seemed more distant than ever, according to a Federal Reserve report released Wednesday.

"The youth of Texas will be better served, and the state's resources will be better allocated if we move to a single agency," said commission Chairman Carl Isett, a Republican House member from Lubbock. "We need to move while the clay is wet and consolidate these agencies and make this a seamless system."

James Harrington, director of the nonprofit foundation that promotes civil rights and economic and racial justice, said the rules, which went into effect in October, discriminate against Hispanics and people of other nationalities, and place an unfair financial burden on certain immigrants, including victims of domestic violence.

Two years ago, the House passed a bill that for the first time would require all voters to show photo IDs at the polling place before voting. Most Democratic legislators are strongly against such a law because they think it will prevent many more elderly and poor citizens from voting than it will discourage unqualified people from voting.

The study, based on data that colleges and universities report to the federal government, also found that the share of higher education budgets that goes to instruction has declined, while the portion spent on administrative costs has increased.

The dismissals announced Thursday are the result of continuing reforms at the dramatically downsized TYC, not the Sunset Commission's Wednesday night recommendation. With just 2,400 youth offenders, the TYC is half the size it was before a 2007 sexual abuse scandal that prompted an overhaul.

For weeks, perhaps even months, Sen. Tommy Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands, had been researching the history of the Senate's rule that requires two-thirds of the body's approval to bring a bill up for a vote.

Texas would get $2.3 billion for highways, $370 million for transit, and $277 million for clean-water projects, based on federal funding formulas.

On Wednesday, President-elect Barack Obama urged the U.S. Senate to act with the "same sense of urgency" as the House to pass an expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. It looks like that will happen. Fast.

El Paso's all-Democrat delegation has listed several key items it will push -- in the House by our five state representatives and in the Senate by Eliot Shapleigh. It's good to see six items champion the causes of health care and education.

The Mexican army has sent an estimated 2,000 troops to Juárez as part of a rotation even as the death toll surpassed 35 so far this year.

For years, state leaders and academics have said Texas needs another Tier I school to educate the best graduate students and to continue to attract high-level jobs, but the political will to invest and elevate one campus over another has proved nettlesome.

Where Straus forecast clear skies ahead, the Senate opened with a storm reminiscent of the 2004 war culminating in Republicans redrawing congressional districts not long after federal judges had done so.

The move threatens to ignite partisan division in the chamber not seen since a bitter fight in 2003 over redrawing boundary lines for congressional districts in Texas. That change sharply increased the number of Republican U.S. House members in the state.

The Republicans aimed the exception at one issue — voter ID — to force a future vote, which Democrats would otherwise have been able to block. The final vote was 18-13, mostly along party lines, just as a series of procedural, 19-12 votes leading up to the last one had been. That stirred some Democrats to label the skirmish as the start of the "War of 19-12," referring to the partisan split in the Senate.

The glitches, which began in August and lingered until last month, were not disclosed by the Veterans Affairs Department to patients even though they sometimes involved prolonged infusions of drugs such as heparin, which in excessive doses can be life-threatening, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.

As the 2009 session of the Texas Legislature convened Tuesday, the fall of the former House speaker and the election of San Antonio Republican Joe Straus changed the political dynamic for two Dallas-area lawmakers.

Hours before the Senate began its business, however, bickering was going on behind closed doors over a proposal by some Republican leaders to change the Senate rules to make it easier to take up two hot-button issues: requiring a photo ID to vote and redistricting.

The two-thirds rule occasionally frustrates majorities, particularly partisans, and in the Senate there are 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats. There was a move by some Republicans to exempt two issues — redistricting and voter ID — from the two-thirds rule, and it's no coincidence that both are highly partisan issues.

Because she speaks only Spanish, there is usually an added level of anxiety when she visits a clinic. But a new first-in-the-nation state law requiring health insurers to provide interpreters for members with limited English skills spared Pantoja the confusion of trying to communicate with her doctor on Tuesday.