Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Texas schools must improve math and science education in all grades and improve low graduation rates if the state is to remain competitive in the global economy, a panel of business, education and government leaders said in a report Wednesday.

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson pronounced that the rise in feed costs in the cattle industry is not the result of the Renewable Fuels Standard mandate.

Violence and chaos never come at a good time, but the current upsurge is frustrating for Texas's sixth city. El Paso is separated from the rest of the state by hundreds of miles of mostly empty desert; in fact, it is closer to San Diego, on the Pacific, than to Houston. Locals complain that nobody cares about them. In the past, some would have added that the city did not care about itself.

Right now, concentrated poverty is resurfacing in the U.S., reversing the fortunes of many cities and neighborhoods that saw steep declines a decade ago, according to a disturbing study released Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute.

The executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality recommended that the commission grant Waste Control Specialists a second license for disposal of low-level nuclear waste in Andrews County.

At a House Pensions and Investments Committee meeting, Chairwoman Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, floated the idea of a fund to which local governments could contribute to help pay for health care, life insurance and other benefits for public-sector retirees.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn't leave his office to vote.

June and Terry Ellingson are two of hundreds who came to Hudspeth County after purchasing a cheap "ranch" they learned about online or in newspaper advertisements. But instead of the American dream, these property owners find barren, barely habitable scrubland. Most give up, leaving behind a desert dotted with dilapidated dream homes and lost life savings.

The Texas Lottery Commission has paid nearly $100,000 to settle a 2-year-old federal lawsuit brought by a former employee who accused the agency of firing him for going public with his concerns that legislative leaders were being misled about a vital computer system that he said was inoperable.

Despite efforts to add Border Patrol agents in areas where immigrant traffic is high and drug violence is flaring, officers assigned to the 2,000-mile boundary with Mexico are bunched up near the California coast. And some critics see politics at play.

The conclusion of an illegal-voter investigation by the Bexar County district attorney's office should put to rest the mythical conspiracy that unauthorized immigrants are using their coffee breaks at meatpacking plants and on farms throughout America to plot the takeover of the elections system.

By 2015, Texas would need more than 4,500 additional primary care doctors and other medical professionals to serve all of its residents who have limited access to health care, according to a report being released today by the National Association of Community Health Centers.

To be sure, nurses face the same pay issues as other Americans who are struggling with rising food and fuel prices. But working conditions are a far greater concern for many bedside nurses, conditions that are eroding the quality of hospital care and lessening the likelihood of good patient outcomes, they say.

Texas should spend $50.2 million to make state trooper pay competitive with large city and county law enforcement departments, the state auditor recommended Wednesday.

In a new rebuke of the troubled Texas Youth Commission, two key lawmakers on Wednesday accused the agency of financial mismanagement.

The 95-page landmark ruling issued recently by Judge William Wayne Justice on how Texas is failing limited-English schoolchildren is a deeply depressing read.

Deregulation offers a prime example of the inherent flaws and extreme danger in Norquist's philosophy. Norquist's followers argue that government is always the problem and never the solution; therefore, any attempt to regulate government is wrong. As Paul Krugman puts it, "If a problem can't be solved with deregulation and tax cuts, then they pretend it does not exist."

Every biennium, our office studies issues critical to Texas and the Borderlands, and publishes a report on the findings. In the year leading up the legislative session, we publish a new chapter every month. This month, our office is releasing "Texas Borderlands 2009: Housing Challenges Along the Border."

Americans have grown accustomed to extraordinary prosperity. Young voters have no memory of a serious recession, since the last one was in the early 1990s. Some do not even realise that cyclical downturns are normal. But elections hinge on shorter-term concerns. Four-fifths of Americans say it is harder to maintain a middle-class lifestyle now than it was five years ago.