53 percent of Texans strongly favor a repeal of federal health care reform legislation, while 24 percent strongly oppose repeal, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.
TribBlog: Texans Strongly Back Repeal of Health Care Reform
Posted inState Government
2010: Perry 51, White 38
Rasmussen Reports released new poll numbers today showing Gov. Rick Perry widening his lead over Bill White.
Posted inState Government
How’s Tricks?
Staring down a shortfall of as much as $18 billion, lawmakers could employ a handful of accounting tricks to kick some payments down the road, saving several billion dollars. How exactly would that work? This dramatization demonstrates how similar tricks could be used to lower a restaurant bill.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
The War at Home
For many of the more than 150,000 Texans who have returned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the struggle to cope with the horrors they’ve seen can result in drug addiction and violent outbursts. To deal with those harsh realities, 10 counties are working to establish “veterans courts” that would emphasize treatment or counseling over punishment.
Posted in
Politics
Neener-Neener
It’s an impulse most of us learn to suppress in the seventh grade — the need give your enemies wedgies, to tape “kick me” signs to their backs, to put lizards in their lunchboxes. Political people don’t suppress it — they channel it into goofy stunts to attract attention, ridicule opponents and blow off steam.
Posted in
Higher Education
Data App: More University Pay
The top professors and administrators at Texas universities routinely earn between to $250,000 and $500,000 year, while presidents and chancellors earn up to $900,000, according to salary data for more than a dozen universities and university systems added today to the Tribune’s public employee salary database. Some 57 employees at the University of Texas make more than $250,000; by contrast, only 13 employees at Texas Tech make that much.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
On the Records: Paycheck U.
Today we’re adding another 17 agencies to our government salaries database, an extra 67,000 workers who collectively earn $2.9 billion in public payroll. The database now has records on more than 550,000 employees working at 62 of the largest state agencies, cities, universities, counties and mass-transit authorities.
Posted in
Health care
The Red Party
Don’t look now, but the Texas GOP, the party of budgetary teetotalers, has been piling up debt like a college kid with his first credit card. According to Federal Election Commission reports, this isn’t exactly a new development. The Republican Party of Texas has ended every year in the red since 2001. But lately that amount has ballooned from a low of about $70,000 in 2003 to last year’s high of $624,000. Now — a month out from the state party convention where 14,000 delegates will elect the chairman who will guide the faithful for the next two years — the latest FEC report, for the month of April, shows $556,000 in financial obligations. In contrast, the Texas Democratic Party currently carries about $49,000 in debt.
Posted in
Health care
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Grissom on the transgender marriage conundrum, Hu on the workers’ comp whistleblowers, M. Smith on the Texas GOP’s brush with debt, Garcia-Ditta on why student regents should vote, Aguilar on the tripling of the number of visas given by the feds to undocumented crime victims, Hamilton on the paltry number of state universities with graduation rates above 50 percent, Ramshaw and Stiles on the high percentage of Texas doctors trained in another country, Ramsey and Stiles on congressmen giving to congressmen, Galbraith on how prepared Texas is (very) for a BP-like oil spill, and my conversation with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst: The best of our best from May 10 to 14, 2010.
