On July 15, Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk laid out a proposed $5 billion city budget for fiscal year 2023. While introducing the mammoth 971-page document, Cronk said: “We are always mindful of our impact on the pocketbooks of Austinites. At the same time, we firmly believe that effective city government is critical to the...
Praise God for Elisjsha Dicken, the young man who stopped the attempted shooting at an Indiana mall by exercising his Second Amendment rights. Across America, there are likely countless heroes like him whose stories we’ve never heard precisely because they succeeded — honorable, responsible men and women who do what it takes to stop senseless violence...
Last week, President Joe Biden announced that climate change is a “code red for humanity,” which will likely exacerbate a very current phenomenon spreading among young people ages 16-25: eco-anxiety. Like some fads, eco-anxiety is trendy, contagious and, in some heartbreaking cases, deadly serious. On this year’s Earth Day, a man named Wynn Bruce set...
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.”—President Joe Biden. President Biden’s remarks on the climate “emergency” are yet another example of the radical progressive strategy to pose agenda items as undeniable crises that warrant fundamental change to our nation. What Biden and congressional Democrats do not account for was...
If you’re not familiar with higher education accreditation, you may want to get up to speed. Accreditation is rapidly shaping up to be one of the most important front lines in the never-ending battle between reformers and the establishment. The latest confrontation concerns the Biden administration’s effort to subvert recent reforms in Florida. But first, a little...
The Lone Star State has entered the dance floor on one of the most important issues in the past decade for our state: school choice. It’s only natural in Texas for that dance to look like the Texas two-step, with two slow steps and two fast steps. Texas has taken the slow steps toward improving...
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...