Health care costs open $1.7 billion hole in Texas budget
AUSTIN – Lawmakers have been thinking ahead to a massive shortfall, topping $10 billion, that's probably coming when they write the next budget in 2011. But state officials told them Monday that they'll have to fix a hole in the current budget, too.

Wayne Slater: Former Texas GOP chairman Tom Pauken blasts Bush, Rove in new book
"Republican politics is barely recognizable to many of us who were grassroots activists in the early days of the conservative movement – especially after eight years of a Republican administration headed up by George W. Bush, who claimed to be a conservative," Pauken writes in Bringing America Home.