Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

Grover's Tub: "The Real Joe the Plumber Meets the Real Grover Norquist"

What happens when Joe the Plumber meets Grover Norquist? What happens is this—Joe’s kids pay more to go to college and Joe pays more in taxes. Joe, welcome to Grover’s Tub. Welcome to Texas.

This map from the Portland Planning Division's 1966 development plan illustrates Robert Moses' vision for a city girdled by freeways. Red indicates existing freeways; green indicates freeways that were never built.

This is good news.

When he recently handed out assignments for Texas House members to pursue until the 2011 session begins, House Speaker Joe Straus gave the Ways and Means Committee a big priority: Monitor the business tax that supplies money for schools, and review the exemptions some businesses enjoy from various state taxes.

Patience paid off in Penwell.

This burg near Odessa had declined from oil boomtown to ghost town. Now, decades after being left for dead, Penwell's unlikely resurrection could help chart a path for Texas' energy future.

The Texas Hunger Initiative, an interesting group working out of Baylor University, hopes to end hunger in Texas by 2015.

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday issued a final ruling that greenhouse gases posed a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants, factories, refineries and other major sources.

WASHINGTON — State labor officials and worker advocates appealed on Monday for quick Congressional action to extend emergency jobless benefits and to renew health insurance subsidies for the long-term jobless.

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute.

SAN ANTONIO -Houston Mayor Bill White has been a Texas gubernatorial candidate for three days. and he's already talking as if the race is down to him and Gov. Rick Perry.

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

COPENHAGEN — A much-anticipated global meeting of nearly 200 nations — all seeking what has so far been elusive common ground on the issue of climate change — began here on Monday with an impassioned airing of what leaders here called the political and moral imperatives at hand.

It's official:Hutchison files to run for governor
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison filed to run for governor Monday at state Republican Party headquarters.

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that greenhouse gases spewed by power plants, oil refineries and vehicles constitute a public health threat, a verdict that positions the government to set new limits on global-warming emissions.

"The Predator’s King”

Over the last few months, Rick Perry has gained political points by calling Kay Bailey Hutchison “Kay Bailout.” What’s the real story here?

The headline in the San Antonio Express-News on July 13, 2008 read: “Troopers say they are just fatigued.” It was a telling story among a series of stories showing that the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) is in trouble.

In the story, troopers described an agency suffering an officer shortage and beset with grueling working conditions, many officers routinely working six or seven straight days and sometimes 10 or 11.

“Now I think you’re on to a better subject,” declared Gov. Rick Perry aboard a private plane as the topic turned to Texas. With relish, the longest-serving governor in the state’s history recounted its uninhabitable past. “I think it was Sheridan that said, ‘If I owned hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in hell.’ I mean, this was a really hard place. You look at the men that founded it — the Bowies and the Travises, even Sam Houston, in my opinion possibly the greatest leader this country’s ever developed. . . . I don’t think Texas becomes an urbany, really highly cultured place until like the last decade.”

Companies that offer short-term, high-interest loans go where the business is: primarily low- and middle-income neighborhoods.

So-called credit service organizations, a group of lenders largely composed of payday and auto-title loan companies, are clustered in Texas neighborhoods that are home to families with incomes of less than $50,000 a year. We compared the addresses of lenders statewide, obtained from the Secretary of State, to U.S. Census data on median household income.

Democrats haven’t won a statewide race since 1994, so why does this middle-aged guy with a bald head and big ears think he's the fresh face of the party? Because outgoing Houston mayor Bill White has a record that makes some Republicans envious, he can raise a ton of money, and he will kiss as many babies as it takes (whether they want him to or not).

A bell now rings out for justice from the besieged heart of what is perhaps the world's most violent city. Concluding a 13-day trek from Mexico City, a group led by women brought the large bell fashioned from keys donated in memory of femicide victims to embattled Ciudad Juarez early this week.