“Three TSA officers at Miami International Airport were arrested last week for allegedly stealing from airline passengers,” Fox News reports. “While some of the officers attempted to distract passengers as they went through screenings, the others would rifle through passengers’ belongings in search of money.” The TSA trio “managed to steal $600 from a single passenger’s wallet.” Such theft by government employees is not a new development. 

“The Great Grift.” That’s the name investigative reporters Richard Lardner, Jennifer McDermott, and Aaron Kessler have given history’s largest, most widespread, and so far, successful fraud against U.S. taxpayers.

One thing Lang Martinez said he learned after living on the streets of Ventura County, California , was that being homeless was worse than being in prison.

Six major flaws in the current draft of the K-12 mathematics instructional framework should lead the California State Board of Education to reject it and start over. The board is having a final hearing on the framework on Wednesday, July 12.

No better, more reliable forecaster of the US business cycle has existed in recent decades than the initial shape of the US Treasury yield curve, and since last October, it’s been signaling another US recession that’s likely to begin in 2024. This is important because recessions have been associated with bear markets in stocks and bull markets in bonds. Moreover, if a recession arrives early in 2024 it may affect the US elections in November.

For a federal agency tasked and trusted with deciding whether the latest medical goods and procedures should be on the market, the FDA seems hopelessly behind the times. But a recent reversal of a forty-year ban is a step in the right direction.

Angel Studios may be setting a new standard for social impact filmmaking. I knew the studio’s new movie, Sound of Freedom, was a winner when I first tried to buy tickets online: The first three showings on July 4th, release day, were nearly sold out. Indeed, its marketing campaign may be one of the best examples of social media film marketing filmmaking in recent history. (I found out about the movie through my Facebook feed.)

The Supreme Court has determined President Biden’s student loan relief scheme is unconstitutional. Because of that ruling, millions of student loan borrowers will resume making monthly payments on their debt in October.

“Supreme Court guts affirmative action in college admissions,” headlined Politico on June 29. In effect, affirmative action means racial preferences. Few, if any, reports recalled that California eliminated racial preferences 27 years ago, not by a court decision but by a vote of the people. 

Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, in pertinent part, declares that “[n]o State . . . shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.” At its most basic level, the Equal Protection Clause requires that state and local governments treat similarly situated individuals the same. Indeed, coming out of Reconstruction, one can fairly say that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate racial discrimination. Unfortunately, the early Supreme Court opinions (e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)) ignored this core purpose. They allowed states to provide separate accommodations and facilities for blacks and whites as long as they were “equal.” But when benefits and burdens are doled out based on race, such equality is impracticable, if not impossible. The Court should have followed the wisdom of Justice John Marshall Harlan, who pleaded in Plessy that “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race is . . . inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” Unfortunately, the Court allowed separate but equal to reign until Brown v. Board of Education (1954).