TEXAS TRIBUNE: When Longhorn football kicks off at home a week from Saturday, so will a brand-new marketing effort aimed at peddling, of all things, green electricity. Texas Longhorns Energy promises customers 100 percent power from Texas wind. "Let your power power the Texas Longhorns," says former star quarterback Colt McCoy, whose family has signed up, in a promotional video. Coach Mack Brown offers potential customers the chance to submit a pep-talk video that he might even show the team.

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TEXAS TRIBUNE: Each weekday, Darby Theilen leaves his Lake Conroe home at 6:30 a.m. and drives to southwest Houston, where he works as an operations manager for an automobile dealership, and where his 3-year-old son, Harrison, attends private school. He makes the round-trip commute — about 120 miles — in a full-size Dodge pickup, along Interstate 45, the city’s North Loop and U.S. Highway 59. But the distance is only half his trouble: He crosses several of the state’s most-congested roads, according to a new study expected to be released today by the Texas Department of Transportation. And so the journey consumes up to three hours out of every day.

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TEXAS TRIBUNE: Rashad Deckard has something going for him that eludes many of his peers in Palestine, his hometown. In December, he'll graduate with a bachelor’s degree in business marketing from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. “People who come from small towns, we have few role models,” he says, “especially in the black community." "They see me in college and the things I’m doing,” he says of younger Palestine students, “and it makes them want to go to college.”

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TEXAS TRIBUNE: Reporter Emilio Gutiérrez says he knew the script the Mexican general wanted him to follow. He was to report what the Army wanted, how it wanted it, and to ignore any wrongdoing the soldiers, deployed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón, may have committed against the townspeople in the border state of Chihuahua. But the reporter for the Diario del Noroeste, a small affiliate of the major daily paper in Ciudad Juárez, kept writing about soldiers robbing citizens. He believes it almost cost him his life. Now living in Doña Ana County, N.M., he fears ever returning to his native Mexico, where he lived modestly in the small town of Ascensión with his 15-year-old son.

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SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS: With narrow lanes and soft, weedy shoulders dropping steeply to the water, U.S. 190's Steinhagen Lake crossing is bound to send an adrenaline jolt through all but the most blase motorists. The roadside shards of exploded tires speak of danger as eloquently as a skull beside a desert waterhole.

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DALLAS MORNING NEWS: Proposed cuts in community-based care for the elderly, the disabled and the mentally ill would increase wait times for services and eventually impose higher costs on the state and many counties, protesters warned Wednesday. Speakers at a Capitol rally said more Texans could stay in their homes if they received services for physical frailty, mental illness and intellectual disabilities. Recently proposed cuts, however, threaten programs that promote independent living – and endanger people's lives, several people said.

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DALLAS MORNING NEWS: Elaborate government rules, flashing highway signs that urge carpooling, and even police raids on shops accused of selling phony inspection stickers are all part of the war on unbreathable air in North Texas. New research, however, says a simple personal decision that has received almost no public credit might be a powerful weapon for protecting people from smog.

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FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM: A contractor involved in a deadly explosion of a natural gas pipeline in Johnson County on June 7 said Wednesday that it will challenge a Texas Railroad Commission report that found that it violated state rules. C&H Power Line Construction Co., based in Dewey, Okla., "is going to contest the [proposed] fine and language" in the report, Fred Haag, chief operations officer, said in an e-mail to the Star-Telegram. "We feel we did everything correctly."

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FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM: Gov. Rick Perry's office is proposing a $29.7 million cut in its premier jobs creation program, the Texas Enterprise Fund, as part of a supplemental plan to reduce the office's operations by 10 percent over the next two years as the state confronts a huge budget shortfall. The plan would reduce spending in the governor's office, which employs more than 200 people, as well as 10 state programs managed by the governor, including the enterprise fund. The optional 10 percent reduction would slash $69.6 million from total proposed expenditures of $696.4 million for the 2012-13 fiscal biennium.

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FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM: Four local cities and 90 other Texas employers are among nearly 2,000 entities nationwide to land federal subsidies to help with healthcare costs for early retirees, though Texas is among the states suing the federal government over the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law. Fort Worth, Arlington, North Richland Hills and Grapevine are among the cities, state governments, businesses and labor unions to qualify for the Affordable Care Act program, which plans to distribute $5 billion to help pave the way for health insurance changes in 2014, White House officials announced this week.

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips and his family were sued Tuesday over a tragedy, described in Sunday's column, in which a 17-year-old girl became drunk at a party last year at the Phillips home and died in a car wreck after Mrs. Phillips ordered everyone to leave. But if the incident had happened four years earlier, the Phillips could not have been sued.

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE: The Harris County deputies union has sued Sheriff Adrian Garcia for forcing deputies to work mandatory overtime, but the union president acknowledged they really want the Commissioners Court to lift a hiring freeze and fill nearly 400 vacant jail and patrol positions. Union President Robert Goerlitz said deputies sued because they are being "wore out" by chronic mandatory overtime, although he acknowledged the practice began long before Garcia took office. Goer­litz said he would have sued the Commissioners Court, which approves the sheriff's budget, but the Texas law addressing deputies overtime prevents it.

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Houston Community College has spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars on an investigation into possibly improper business deals involving current and former trustees, but taxpayers are unable to see any findings from the probe. The college district has said that no written report exists despite the investigators doing more than 700 hours of work, according to invoices HCC released to the Houston Chronicle this week in response to a request made under the Texas Public Information Act.

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE: In an attempt to ensure that public school districts aren’t disguising high school dropouts, the Texas Education Agency is conducting an audit of students who withdrew under the auspice of home schooling. TEA officials wouldn’t reveal details of the audit — other than to say that the state is contacting a random sampling of families to validate that they intended to home-school when they left middle or high school.

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Good news, Houston: Many of us are getting raises next year, and they're going to be higher than what workers are getting in other parts of the U.S. Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm that surveys large companies each year about compensation and benefits, reports that Houston employers plan to boost wages by an average of 3.3 percent next year for salaried workers and 3.2 percent for hourly workers.

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Earl has intensified over night into a very powerful 145 mph hurricane and forecasters believe the storm should now slowly weaken due to increasing wind shear and decreasing sea surface temperatures as it tracks north. Fortunately it still appears the storm will not make a direct hit on the United States, but it will come close to the Carolinas and Massachusetts, especially the latter. Here are the overnight (00Z) runs for the major dynamical models:

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AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN: MetroRail fares would fall in January, and seniors and people with disabilities would lose their free Capital Metro bus rides under the proposed $228.1 million budget for the transit's agency 2010-11 fiscal year. Some rail riders, those who take shorter "one-zone" rides, would see their costs drop 50 percent or more. Those who take longer trips between the outlying stations on the 32-mile line and Central Austin would see about an 8 percent cheaper fare.

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AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN: Austin-based American Physicians Service Group Inc. said Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired by an Alabama company for about $250 million in cash.

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AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN: The Texas comptroller's office will hold a second appliance rebate program to divvy up $10 million that remains unclaimed from the initial program, which was marred by a chaotic launch. When all the applications were processed, less than 55 percent of the $23 million in federal money had been claimed, the state said.

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AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN: "No more cuts! Raise our taxes!" That unusual chant was heard Wednesday afternoon outside the Capitol, where about 150 advocates for Texans with disabilities rallied to draw attention to proposed state health and human services budget cuts that they say would be devastating.

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AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN: The concept seems like a simple fix to an age-old problem: Politicians put their financial holdings into a blind trust so they don't know what is there, avoiding potential conflicts of interest that might make headlines. Several Texas governors have had them: Bill Clements. George W. Bush. Rick Perry.

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AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN: The doctor and his "students" peered at 13-year-old Jon-Michael Kirksey of Lago Vista, observed his bandaged, broken wrist and, like sleuths, evaluated the evidence before them. Starting at the patient's head and working down to his toes, Jim Allday, chief clinical supervisor for STAR Flight , examined the patient at Dell Children's Medical Center on Wednesday under the watchful eye of Dr. Pat Crocker, chief of emergency medicine. The patient was real, and although his injuries did not appear severe, someday the students' training might save some other child's life.

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