In Florida, deputies gave the mother of one teenager they were surveilling a $2,500 fine because she had five chickens in her backyard. They arrested another target’s father after peering through a window in his house and noticing a 17-year-old friend of his son’s smoking a cigarette. Law enforcement agencies have long been searching for...
After Texas state Rep. Jared Patterson announced his support for banning minor’s use of social media, the partisan media was quick to denounce his efforts and, in the case of the Dallas Observer, declare that Texas lawmakers will have to pry social media out of children’s “cold, dead hands.” Well Dallas Observer, that’s exactly what...
Two former Trump administration officials have taken to the Wall Street Journal to defend the practices of pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who negotiate drug prices with the manufacturers on behalf of the insurers. The authors are perplexed as to why fellow Republicans would be concerned about these middlemen using their leverage to extract “rebates”...
It might seem like hyperbole to say that securing data privacy in the Lone Star State is a matter of life and death. But it can often have tragic consequences. For example, two years ago in New Jersey, a lawyer angry at a judge for postponing a ruling on his case obtained the judge’s sensitive...
Austin is in throes of a pronounced affordability crisis, with the area recently ranked as “one of the least affordable cities in U.S. for minimum-wage renters.” Even still, the crisis isn’t stopping Austin-area governments from raising taxes. Last week, Austin’s city manager unveiled a new budget $5 billion budget that includes “a $500 million increase...
Two of the latest researchers on the homelessness scene claim that addiction and mental illness are not the cause of homelessness, rather, they claim the people sleeping on the streets and in the parks merely lack affordable housing. Having spent 13 years running on the front lines running one of California’s largest programs for homeless...
Last Tuesday, in an extraordinary display of verbal efficiency, Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono managed to pack an astonishing number of errors into just four short sentences. During a Judiciary Committee hearing on the legal ramifications of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on abortion, Senator Hirono remarked: “Originalism, the Justices who take that approach go all...
Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, yet policymakers are scrambling to explain the series of missed warning signs and communication failures that led to the Fourth of July mass shooting in Highland Park. Much like 9/11, when law enforcement agencies had information prior to that tragedy but failed to cohesively communicate, mass...
Austin ISD’s student enrollment has been hemorrhaging for years. But that hasn’t stopped the uber-progressive district from spending every dollar it can gets its hands on nor does it appear to be standing in the way of a borrowing binge. Earlier this week, Austin ISD announced that it was eyeing a big, new bond package...
Several days ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pledged that “a very large property tax cut” is coming next session. Today, the public got a sense of what is possible. According to Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s newly-updated Certification Revenue Estimate (CRE), the Texas Legislature is expected to have as much as a $27 billion budget surplus...
When I saw a June 30, Texas Tribune a story headlined: “State education board members push back on proposal to use “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery,” it was immediately clear that it was riddled with inaccuracies, misinformation and blatant left wing propaganda, but it was such non-news that it hardly seemed worth the effort to...
Only a bolt of lightning or a dose of radiation can awaken zombies in the movies; the same isn’t true for an economic zombie. In the latter’s case, it took many years—especially the last two years—of deficit-spending fueling excessive money printing to get this day of reckoning for the U.S. economy with frequent mentions of...