The city of Lubbock recently signaled that it may soon raise taxes, despite mounting economic and inflationary pressures on the family budget. On Tuesday, KCBD reported that: “The city is considering a property tax rate increase of nearly one-and-a-half cents…That means residents would [sic] bay an additional $110 in property taxes next year.” A tax...
I was watching Taylor Sheridan’s new series “Lioness” recently, and I was surprised that a specific scene was actually aired—not because it was shocking, but because it was true. A hot extraction for a CIA operative in a rural south Texas town was going down, and when it was accomplished, one agent expressed his fear...
La Joya ISD Superintendent Gisela Saenz resigned her position in the spring, after she supported a plan that would close two elementary schools and lay off 120 employees—this after LJISD used more than $20 million in public funds to buy an entire water park, including tube slides and a lazy river. The troubled school district—which...
“We knew it was coming,” Francisco Nuñez says. Housing is in such high demand in Austin right now that Nunez wonders if he can afford to stay in the city. In 2020, Austin gained an average of 180 new residents a day, causing a shortage of homes and driving up home prices dramatically. This demand,...
Carolina Yoc is 15 years old; she entered the United States alone to live with a relative she did not know. Once inside the border, she was moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, she spends her nights working in a factory with other young workers, stuffing plastic bags of cereal into passing yellow cartons. She...
Earlier this year, a concerned student at Binghamton University, a public university in New York, challenged the propriety of the school’s partnership with the China-funded Confucius Institute on its campus. Last month, the university published an imperious rebuff to the inquiry. “The campus is confident that the concerns you raise in your email do not...
As wildfires continue to burn in Canada, air quality in New York City got so bad recently that spending the day outdoors would be the equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes. Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently had the worst air quality in the country. Mask-wearing has resumed in full not because of COVID-19, but because the...
California courts would be required to consider race when issuing a sentence California, that bellwether of the absurd, is about to do it again. The same legislature that rejected legislation to add human trafficking of a minor for purposes of a commercial sex act to the state’s list of “serious” felonies – until public outrage prompted...
In Texas politics, lies travel like one-day express mail from Austin to the rest of the state, while truth often lumbers behind on the back of a slow horse. You’ve probably read the news about the horrors House Bill 2127 soon could inflict upon the Lone Star State: “water breaks banned,” “hairstyle discrimination,” which have...
Student loan forgiveness is a topic that isn’t going away. Progressives want all student loan debt forgiven, and the Biden administration has been trying to deliver. In fact, the Biden team has been the most aggressive administration on student loan forgiveness in history. But it’s not clear to me whether the administration is winning or...
“HEB has a better tracking of their produce than DFPS does of children in their care.” U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack made that statement in a 2020 hearing for the decades-long M.D. v. Abbott child welfare court case. In 2015, she found that ongoing problems with the Texas foster care system amounted to a...
It’s that time again when city officials all across the Lone Star State begin to consider where to set next year’s tax rate (the fiscal year for most political subdivisions begins Oct. 1 of every calendar year). The tax rate adoption process is one area in which city officials have tremendous discretion—which means that if...