Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott wasted little time after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was cutting off Medicaid funding for the Women's Health Program. He filed suit the next day.

It was Abbott's second lawsuit against the federal government last week. The first suit challenges the Voting Rights Act used to reject Texas' new voter ID law. Abbott posted on his Twitter account "Don't think I let the day go by without another lawsuit against the Federal Gov't. One coming any minute."

The lawsuit argues, according to the Austin American-Statesman, that the federal government is "seeking to commandeer and coerce the states' lawmaking processes" by forcing the state into giving taxpayer money to elective abortion providers.

Natural gas futures prices inched north of $2.30 per 1,000 cubic feet for the first time in several days, but it underscores the pessimism by some utility companies in the economics of building new nuclear, alterative energy, and new coal power plants. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported late last week that coal's share of power generation fell below 40 percent for the first time since 1978 during November and December of 2011. According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, NRG's CEO David Crane observed, "It's killed off new coal and now it's killing off new nuclear."

Yesterday I blogged about the surface transportation authorization bill approved by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, which despite its deficiencies has won mostly praise, particularly for the bipartisan nature in which it was conceived. But a last-minute change in the Senate bill is drawing the ire of some state officials who believe it could hinder their efforts to use private financing to help get more transportation projects built at a time when funding from other sources is drying up.

The numbers tell the story: 483 million people are on Facebook every day, there are 50 million daily Twitter users and one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second. Using social media and Web-based interaction tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is no longer a choice for public officials who want to remain relevant. Yet taking the Internet plunge can be daunting to say the least. Much has been made of ever-changing privacy policies and everyone has heard at least one nightmare story of a Facebook post or tweet gone awry.