record the 2010 Nevada U.S. Senate campaign for posterity, they may find themselves writing about, of all places, Rancho High School in North Las Vegas as the turning point in the race. It was there on Friday Republican challenger Sharron Angle might have finally spoken the words even she can\'t walk away from.

Whatever happened in Room 513, a small lecture hall in cavernous Rancho High School, it was, by any standard, one heckuva civics lesson. The exchange Friday between Sharron Angle, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate, and about 130 largely Hispanic students in the standing-room-only room was, by turns, surprising, evasive and enraging, according to students who were there.

PHOENIX -- Legislators in more than a dozen states across the nation are launching efforts to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, with Arizona to be ground zero. Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said Tuesday the failure of Congress to statutorily \"clarify\" the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to those born in this country, makes it necessary for states to take the lead.

The Tea Party Senate hopeful is in the middle of a new controversy after telling a group of Latino high school students that some of them looked Asian. Angle, speaking at Rancho High School, was responding to students asking the candidate to explain recent ads she has run attacking her opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, over illegal immigration.

AUSTIN, Texas—A federal program that scans local jails for illegal immigrants is being expanded across the state, the latest front in the nation\'s battle over immigration policy. In the past two weeks, Texas became the first border state to fully deploy the Department of Homeland Security program, which is scheduled to be rolled out to all U.S. counties by 2013. The program automatically routes prisoners\' fingerprints to the department, which tries to determine whether they are allowed to be in the U.S.

The race for Kansas secretary of state comes down to one question: Is voter fraud a pressing problem in Kansas, tied to illegal immigration and corrupt politics, or is it largely a myth used to drum up votes? Republican candidate Kris Kobach believes the former. Kobach said new voting rules and aggressive investigations of voting irregularities are necessary to safeguard Kansas elections. Potentially thousands of illegal immigrants — or even legal residents who aren’t citizens — are voting in Kansas, he argues.

MESA, Arizona — Primary election day found Senator Russell Pearce with droplets of sweat rolling down his forehead behind his orange, round-rimmed sunglasses. He tried to rub them away from his eyes like someone waking up from an afternoon nap. Pearce wasn’t sweating because of the political pressure; he would go on to win his uncontested and long-held Arizona seat with 96.56 percent of the vote.

The way Joseph E. Joseph tells it, he was just doing his civic duty. On his way home from work one evening in 1992, he came across a group of volunteers in Brooklyn registering people to vote. Mr. Joseph, a legal permanent resident who had immigrated from St. Kitts eight years earlier, decided it was time to sign up. He cast a ballot in that year’s presidential election, he said, and in every one since.

The takeover of the Republican Party by the Tea Party movement has channeled fear into a formidable force. However, even Bush Administration mastermind Karl Rove has questioned the wisdom of narrowing the Republican Party to a sliver of the populace. By pandering to such a small segment of voters, generally older and white, there is a real chance the Tea Party candidates of today will become similar to the Ralph Nader Green Party of a decade ago – strong enough to stir things up, but ultimately too narrow to sustain

LAS VEGAS -- U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle defended a series of campaign advertisements that use images of sullen, dark-skinned men and a map of Mexico to blast rival Sen. Harry Reid\'s immigration record. Angle, a tea party favorite who has rallied for stricter border enforcement, played down her usual conservative rhetoric in a brief discussion with a Hispanic high school group Friday in Las Vegas. The students asked her to explain her repeated use of TV spots denounced by national pro-immigrant and Hispanic organizations as race-baiting attacks.

Meg Whitman, an accomplished business executive with the very consumer friendly “Ebay” name attached to her own, was leading slightly in the fight to be California’s next Governor. It was still a tight race, yes, but Democratic gubernatorial nominee (and the guy who was California Governor when I was in 5th grade) Jerry Brown, a perennial government employee, was struggling to find a compelling message amid the anti-Obama backlash.

It’s awkward to ask a housekeeper, nanny or gardener if he or she is in the country legally. Even more so if the person is employed by a third party — i.e., a homebuilder or landscaping company — that provides a product or service to you.

Together again . . . Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, is getting the old team back together for his next state immigration-law effort. Kansas attorney and Secretary of State candidate Kris Kobach this week confirmed that he is working with Pearce to write a bill that would develop a state law to change the way children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants are granted citizenship. Kobach helped Pearce write Senate Bill 1070.

Sharron Angle’s attempt to backpedal from a campaign commercial that got her roundly blasted for negative portrayals of Hispanics is earning her a fresh round of knocks this weekend. At a forum with the Las Vegas’ Rancho High School Hispanic Student Union on Friday afternoon, Angle was asked about a commercial she aired about Harry Reid’s immigration record. In it, she used stock images of menacing-looking Latino men to drum up fear about illegal migrants crossing the border.

The hot phrase for analysts of the 2010 midterm elections is \"enthusiasm gap\" - the level of eagerness to participate that one segment of voters has compared to another. Across the board this year, polls show that Republicans are more energized than Democrats are. But few groups are being watched as closely for signs of voting enthusiasm as Hispanic voters.

For decades, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and other private-prison companies have been active members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a powerful lobby based in Washington, D.C., responsible for numerous laws that have put millions of people behind bars.