Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Texas has spent nearly $300 million since 2003 on expensive anti-psychotic medications for poor children – drugs that cost more, have worse side effects in kids and are no more effective than older generics, according to a new federal study.

The Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, created by the state Legislature to sell windstorm coverage to those who can't find it in the private market, only has $2.1 billion available to pay for a claims estimated at twice that amount.

Insurance companies all but stopped offering hurricane coverage for property on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 cost them billions of dollars in claims and as property values soared, raising their exposure to disaster claims.

Early conversations about the streetcar program would have the city install three lines in three different phases: the first one would be around Downtown, the second from Downtown to the UTEP area and the third one from the international bridges to the Downtown.

"There have been cases around the country of people in this population dying prematurely because of abuse and neglect," said Walter Ochinko, assistant director of health care for the GAO, which is the investigative arm for Congress. "There need to be systems in place to ensure that when a person dies, it really is of natural causes. Of all the states we looked at, it's clear Texas was the outlier."

State Rep. Lon Burnam said cost estimates for the border wall were now running as high as $49 billion. He said there was no question which of the two projects was the better value for money.

After a massive registration drive by the Barack Obama campaign, The New York Times reported, local election officials incorrectly warned students that by registering to vote in the county they may lose scholarships, no longer be eligible to be claimed as dependents on their parents’ income tax, and could possibly lose car and health insurance under their parents’ coverage.

As insurance adjusters began tallying the damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike, state officials braced to see whether the losses will ripple through a taxpayer-backed insurance fund.

In late 2005, however, it was safe to say that nobody outside of Kempton, a cluster of grad students and Mandelstam himself imagined offshore wind power actually coming to Delaware. Which is not to say they shouldn’t have been thinking about it. Delaware citizens had recently experienced the kind of awakening toward which most environmentalists believe we’re all headed — a collective recalibration of what it costs to keep the world up and running.

Republicans, very much including John McCain and his advisers, don’t believe there’s a problem. Former Senator Phil Gramm made headlines, and stepped down as co-chairman of the McCain campaign, after he described America as a “nation of whiners.” John Goodman, a Republican health care adviser, explained that we shouldn’t worry about Americans without health insurance, because you can always get treatment at an emergency room.

Since 2002, Democrats have replaced Republican governors in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. It is possible to drive from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and not pass through a single state governed by a Republican. “That’s a good pictorial of how you can think about what Democrats have done out here,” Ritter said.

What Latinos like to tell themselves is how much they have in common -- even as they laugh at their differences. What Latinos like others to notice about them is how diverse they are -- and they consider it politically incorrect if not downright hostile for outsiders to lump them all together.

Texas doesn't compare well with other states in every category, but it's doing a lot better in an important one. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that immunization rates for Texas children increased 19 percent in the past five years, reaching a record high in 2007. The Texas rate was 77.4 percent for that year - 22nd in the country.

Four years after the Texas Department of Agriculture announced plans to ban deep-frying from public school cafeterias and limit the serving of unhealthy high-fat, high-sugar foods, Georgetown is one of 14 Texas public school districts still deep-frying. All other Central Texas districts have pulled the plug.

Childhood obesity is increasing at such an alarming rate in Texas that the next generation of children could be the first to grow up less healthy than their parents, a professor has warned.

TBC Chair and Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster said the group has thoroughly reviewed the Republican and Democratic Party platforms dealing with immigration and border security. “While we find a lot to admire, we also find both miss the point,” Foster said.

"This is the wrong solution. You don’t build a wall like this. I just don’t think this is an intelligent use of resources," he said. "It’s a retrenchment. We’re going to retreat a mile to protect our border. That’s absurd, and the bottom line is it won’t work."

Imagine our outrage that neither Republicans nor Democrats addressed (immigration) substantively during their recent national conventions. It was as if Barack Obama and John McCain regarded the entire topic as radioactive. When it comes to answers, the two men running for president either have no new ideas or are too afraid to venture forth with them publicly.

Ohio lawmakers sought last spring to aid borrowers like Ms. Minda by capping annual interest rates for payday lenders at 28 percent, a sharp reduction from 391 percent. But lenders are fighting back in a novel way, collecting enough signatures, once certified, to force a vote in November on a ballot measure that could overturn legislation that established the rate cap.

John Goodman, an adviser to Senator McCain, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, although the government will be the payer of last resort. Well, if that’s his definition of health insurance, it’s not the kind Americans want or need.