Last July, 8-year-old Lalani Walton had just returned to Temple, Texas after a road trip with her family. They got home, unpacked their things, and her stepmother promised to take her out for a swim once Lalani cleaned her room. Tired from the trip, her stepmother rested her head and took a quick nap. When...
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas got it right on Monday when the court heard arguments about affirmative action. “I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times and I don’t have a clue what it means,” said Thomas during oral arguments. “It seems to mean everything for everyone.” So what does “diversity” mean to...
After early voting ended on Friday night, Texas voting data guru Derek Ryan issued his final report of who voted, compiling all the information available from the Texas Secretary of State, Two telling points emerged for us to ponder while we wait for the polls to close tomorrow night. First, the number of voters who...
“The death of one man is a great tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” We don’t really know who first said this, but it’s often fittingly attributed to Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in history. Due to the Soviet Union’s shoddy bookkeeping and dubious censuses, we’ll never know Stalin’s...
Conversations around Sherri Bukovskey’s kitchen table are much like yours. A dental hygienist from Maine, Sherri remembers the days not long ago when she could keep her home toasty warm in the wintertime for half the price it would cost today. She remembers when no one in her neighborhood would even consider foregoing medication in...
There’s a political tactic called “inoculation” that came into mainstream parlance in the Bill Clinton era—it’s a kind of pre-emptive strike designed to protect against expected attacks and allegations. Going down to the wire to Election Day on Nov. 8, Texas Democrats have begun an inoculation strategy, deploying their strongest resource, the Texas press, to...
President Joe Biden’s border policies have led to monthly records of illegal immigrants crossing our southern border and being shipped, most often by the federal government, to different cities across the nation. In fact, some 2.2 million people have taken advantage of Biden’s aversion to enforcing immigration law, meaning the nation is on track to see close...
A highly controversial article in The Atlantic has issued a call for a “pandemic amnesty,” in which the public is presumably supposed to forget about the lives destroyed, the fortunes lost, and the freedoms smashed due to the excesses of emergency governance. The article’s concluding point sums up the surprising ask: “The standard saying is...
Not all heroes wear capes—some simply skip a meeting or two. That’s how two Harris County commissioners blocked an onrushing property tax hike that would have cost taxpayers there an additional $245.2 million. By breaking quorum, Commissioners Tom Ramsey and Jack Cagle denied the Harris County Commissioners Court the supermajority it needed for a tax...
How many people entered the U.S. illegally in fiscal year 2022? More than 2.76 million, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB). That’s roughly equivalent to the population of Chicago. That number does not include the legal immigrants that CBP inspected, nor does it include the millions of individuals that CBP interacts with...
In 2019, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 477 into law in an attempt to improve debt transparency (something sorely needed given our fiscal condition). One of the new law’s chief features is the creation of a Voter Information Document (VID), an educational tool that taxpayers can use to learn about newly-proposed debt measures. In...
Mexico’s military remains silent more than a month after the massive leak of documents from the Defence Secretariat, which was hacked by activist group Guacamaya. Defence Secretary Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval refused to appear at before the national defence committee in the lower house of Congress to explain the hack, then sat silently in the...