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The uninsured problem in Texas is worse than you thought, at least according to a new study.

There are nearly three million low-income women in Texas, and 52 percent of them lack health insurance.That’s the stunning finding of a recent study of women’s health insurance coverage by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the California-based nonprofit that specializes in health care policy studies.

The report includes a state-by-state breakdown, and the numbers for Texas aren’t pretty. It’s no secret that many Texans lack health insurance. For years, the state has boasted the highest uninsured rate in the nation.  But the Kaiser figures are especially alarming.

Women in Texas are more likely than men to be uninsured. Twenty-eight percent of women in Texas lack health insurance. That’s the highest rate in the country and far above the national average of 18 percent. (About a quarter of all Texans are uninsured. If 28 percent of women are uninsured, it means the rate for men must be far lower.)For poor women, the prospects are even worse. The 52 percent of low-income Texas women without health coverage is the highest rate in the country. No other state even tops 45 percent.

The Kaiser has similar reports going back 10 years. While skimming the numbers, I noticed that while the percentage of Texas women without insurance has always been high, the numbers spiked by about 5 percent after 2003. That was the year the Legislature passed a bare-bones budget that cut hundreds of thousands of Texans off Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Hard to know if that’s the cause, but it’s an interested correlation.

The bottom line is this: Uninsured women lead less health lives. They postpone getting treatment and are much less likely to received preventive care such as mammograms and Pap tests. National health care reform might change all this. Under the plans that Congress is debating, nearly all low-income women would be covered by Medicaid. Many other women would receive government subsidies to buy insurance.

In Texas, that would help millions of poor women.

On Nov. 3, voters–or at least the small number that make it to the polls–will choose whether to enshrine Texas’ populist open beaches law in the state Constitution.

Proposition 9, one of 11 proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot, would guarantee the public’s right to access and use Texas beaches from Sabine Pass to South Padre Island. Many developers, beachside homeowners, and private property rights activists have never liked the 50-year-old Texas Open Beaches Act, periodically challenging it at the Legislature and in court. A libertarian legal organization is the latest to bring suit against the General Land Office in an effort to gut the law.

Proponents of Prop 9 say the measure would elevate the public’s right to the beaches and make such assaults harder. “This is the next logical step to protect what we have,” says A.R. “Babe” Schwartz, a former state senator from Galveston who co-authored the Open Beaches Act. “It is an absolute protection; it’s a brick wall.”

Talk about jumping the gun. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A Message To Our Readers,A Macy’s advertisement in today’s Inquirer incorrectly offered Phillies 2009 World Championship merchandise. The Inquirer deeply regrets this error. Macy’s is a great corporate citizen, supporter of this region and our sports teams. We apologize for this error and any inconvenience this caused.

This one strikes close to home for the Contrarian — a native Philadelphian and die-hard Phillies fan who’s been crying in his coffee this morning after last night’s unpleasantness.

But — being a contrarian and a die-hard — I’m still holding out hope that the Phils can win the World Series in seven games.

And if they don’t, I’ll blame the ad department at Macy’s for creating a jinx.

I got a sinking feeling on Oct. 18 when I read that El Paso’s online Newspaper Tree is taking a hiatus. “NPT staff, me and [reporter] David Crowder, took vacation time starting a few weeks ago,” wrote editor Sito Negron. “Unfortunately, that vacation has turned into an indefinite furlough.”

Newspaper Tree won a loyal following with original analysis, reportage on local public corruption, and a willingness to allow different perspectives. If you wanted to know what was really going on in El Paso—with local debates over revisiting drug policy, for instance, or harassment of gay couples in public—you went to NPT. Then you read the comments on the articles and op-eds. Readers were unusually thoughtful and engaged—and often contributed to understanding the stories better.

The NPT raised its level last year when it hired veteran investigative reporter David Crowder, who had worked for three decades at the El Paso Times. But the economy took its toll on the news journal’s owner, El Paso Media Group. The group has stopped funding Newspaper Tree. But Negron says he’s confident the site will be back. “What we’ve been doing has been very well received in the community,” he says, “and since we made the announcement we were going on hiatus, we’ve been contacted with some interesting options to keep NPT going.”

Negron says NPT has never made money. Going nonprofit might be the most viable option now, Negron says. Perhaps NPT can be supported by the community. It’s the tactic being taken by many newspapers and magazines these days. (The Observer has been nonprofit since 1994.)

Negron, 42, has been in journalism for at least two decades “and just about done it all,” he says. Now he has two kids to feed and no salary. But he waxes optimistic. He’s seen the need for tough local reporting and an open airing of community debates reflected in the response to Newspaper Tree.

“Journalism is super-healthy,” he says. “We used to bitch about the corporate media, and then there was an explosion of alternative weeklies, and there’s magazines like The Texas Observer and Mother Jones,” he says, along with sites like NPT. “There are multiple threads of journalism now.”

Multiple threads, but unfortunately none of them is spun out of gold.

Anyone who believes the criminal justice system in Texas is functioning properly should be locked in a room and forced to listen to Cory Session talk about his half-brother.

His name was Tim Cole. He was a Texas Tech University student falsely convicted in 1986 of rape. Tainted police lineup procedures led the victim to misidentify Cole as her attacker. He spent 13 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He didn’t live to see his name cleared. In 1999, Cole died in prison of complications from asthma.

On Oct. 13, some of the leading criminal justice experts in the state—including lawyers, judges, and policymakers—gathered for the first meeting of the Tim Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions. It was ostensibly an organizational meeting. But the first order of business was Session. Sitting next to other members of Cole’s family at a long conference table, Session described Cole as a college student trying to live the American dream. “This was my brother,” Session said through tears. “This was my mother’s son. He never met my children. He never married.”

Session suggested that flags on all state government buildings be lowered to half-staff on Dec. 2—the date Cole died in prison—to acknowledge everyone who’s been wrongly convicted.

“Tim died in prison while being oppressed,” Session said. “Let’s not let it happen again. … If it can happen to Tim, it can happen to anyone.”

Last year, after DNA testing proved his innocence, Cole became the first person exonerated posthumously in Texas. His story made national news and prodded the Legislature to enact two bills in Cole’s name (one increased compensation for the wrongly convicted; the other created the panel). The panel is to deliver recommendations to the Legislature in January 2011.

Much of the first meeting revolved around reforms that didn’t pass the Legislature this year, including a bill to fix police lineup procedures. Had the bill been law in 1985, it might have saved Tim Cole.

Many panelists agreed broadly on the causes of wrongful convictions. There isn’t much left to study on the topic, and some panelists argued the committee should focus its energy on a political strategy to pass the reforms.

“We don’t need to study it anymore,” said Barry Macha, the Wichita County district attorney and the panel’s representative from the Texas District & County Attorneys Association. “We know what the problems are. We know what the solutions are. We just need to pass it.”

Macha said DAs support many of the reform bills, including those addressing lineups, videotaped confessions, and better access to the courthouse for wrongly convicted prisoners.

Others at the table disagreed. Rep. Pete Gallego, the Alpine Democrat who chairs the criminal justice committee in the state House, said the compromise versions of the reform bills this past session were weak. “It’s easy to support weak stuff,” he said. Gallego argued that the panel should debate the details and make specific recommendations.

The open question is whether the inquiry named after Tim Cole can lead the way to reform. Or will it be another blue ribbon panel that produces another well-intended report that ends up in a drawer?