DEBATE

Remember when we were told those giant orange buoys would secure the border? Texas remembers. So does the Rio Grande. For days now, South Texans have watched surreal images of enormous orange floating barriers, some weighing nearly a ton, drifting helplessly down the Rio Grande, piling against international bridges, disrupting commercial traffic, forcing emergency declarations, and turning one of the busiest trade corridors in North America into an obstacle course. What was m

Forget whatever diarrhea cyclosporiasis is producing. America faces a more dire epidemic right now, and this one spreads through Instagram grids instead of contaminated produce: the ChatGPT flyer. Scroll through any small-business social media page in July 2026 and the symptoms show up within seconds. The font leans slightly, brushed across the top like a swoosh pulled from a font pack nobody requested. Little rounded boxes flank the text, each holding a tiny icon of a fork,

A post on Threads has gone viral: immigration is paperwork law, and nobody should die over paperwork. No caveats can soften that sentence, and none are needed. It sets a moral floor that predates any statute. The floor has needed restating all year, in different states, under different agencies. An ICE officer fatally shot a man on Canal Street in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Houston in July, prompting LULAC to demand release of all body cam, dash cam, and bystander

The 2026 midterms are still months away, yet Washington is already behaving like it's the night before Election Day. The consultants are consulting. The pollsters are polling. The fundraising emails are multiplying faster than mosquitoes after a South Texas rain. And governing? Well... they'll circle back to that after the campaign. House Republicans are pushing an early government funding vote, a move that supporters call strategic and critics call political theater. The tru

The theological effect was immediate and durable. A woman with a claim to independent religious authority became instead a symbol of redeemed sin, forgiven rather than empowered. Historian Susan Haskins called the matter "settled" for nearly fourteen hundred years, and the settlement held remarkably well for something built on a mistake.

Bishop Robert Barron says he hates the tribalism eating Catholic social media, the scapegoating mobs, the little liberal and conservative teams throwing punches at each other online. He has a point. Anyone who has spent ten minutes in Catholic Twitter knows exactly what he means. But the timing of that complaint, arriving after a year in which Barron himself became one of the more polarizing figures in American Catholicism, deserves a second look. Fifteen years ago, then-Fath

Susan Collins picked an interesting week to defend an agency's honor. On Tuesday, a day after an ICE officer shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero through his windshield in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his three-year-old daughter, the senator told reporters ICE could improve but deserved defending against its harshest opponents. Guerrero wasn't the target of the operation, and he was driving to work when the agent fired. He lived in the country legally. "There's no doubt that ICE nee

Professor Daniel Z. Epstein joins a list of Trump lawyers who have lost their standing for representing him. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams barred him from practicing in the Southern District of Florida for one year. She also referred a second Trump attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for possible discipline. Both sanctions come from Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, a case filed by a sitting president against agencies led by his own app

Lindsey Graham died Saturday night, hours after flying back from Kyiv, and South Carolina's junior senator forever will be remembered for whichever version of himself made the deeper dent. There were two. Only one mattered by the time the aortic dissection took him.

Operation Slowdown returns to Texas roads from July 18 through August 2. The Rio Grande Valley will see additional state troopers and local patrol units on the road during this period, along with expanded radar enforcement. TxDOT partners with law enforcement agencies across Texas to increase speed limit enforcement during this two-week window. Officers will spend extra time on the roads and issue citations to drivers who exceed posted limits. Local agencies access this enfor

Federal antitrust law has existed since the late 1800s because unchecked corporate power gouges consumers. The DOJ's Antitrust Division enforces that law, blocking mergers that crush competition and prosecuting price-fixing schemes that pad corporate margins at everyone else's expense. Under Attorney General Todd Blanche, that enforcement has quietly collapsed, and the collapse has a name attached to it. Gail Slater ran the Antitrust Division for nearly a year before she resi

Taylor Swift wrote "The Man" specifically to imagine how differently the world would treat her ambition if she moved through it as a man instead of a woman. Margaret Atwood built an entire novel, The Handmaid's Tale, around the same mechanics, tracing a patriarchal state that controls women's bodies through law and religious authority, and that novel has since generated a television adaptation running for six seasons. Greta Gerwig took a different approach with Barbie, using

Patrick Byrne built a reputation on claiming inside knowledge of conspiracies few people ever verified. On Friday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled his biggest claim yet, an $800 million bribery scheme between Hunter Biden and Iran, never happened. The ruling cost Byrne $1.7 million. U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson, a Reagan appointee, entered a default judgment against Byrne after years of litigation. The case traces back to a 2023 interview in which Byrne claimed Hun

President Trump flew home from the NATO summit in Ankara on two different planes on July 8. He left Turkey on an old Boeing VC-25A, the same baby-blue jet that has ferried presidents since 1990. The new Qatari-gifted jet flew ahead to Britain, where Trump switched back for the final leg to Washington. Trump attributed the choice to sentiment. "For old time's sake, we'll be taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey," he posted on Truth Social. The New York Times reported th

Somewhere along the way, America stopped arguing over whether pineapple belongs on pizza and graduated to something far more absurd. Now we're fighting over cookies. Not whether they're soft or crunchy. Not chocolate chip versus oatmeal raisin. Political cookies. Welcome to 2026! The latest confection to spark national outrage comes courtesy of Hive Bakery in Flower Mound, Texas, where owner Haley Popp has once again found herself in the middle of America's never-ending cultu

Odds Increase Again for Historic Super El Niño by Fall El Niño behaves like a temperamental child, and the tantrums cross oceans, hitting every continent downstream. The name comes from Spanish-speaking fishermen who noticed warm currents arriving each year near Christmas and called the pattern for the Christ child, a reference for a system with the power to upend weather across the world. When El Niño escalates, the disruption escalates alongside, and this year's version sta

Mission Regional Medical Center faces a state investigation over allegations that it marketed birth tourism packages to foreign nationals. Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter Tuesday afternoon ordering the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to investigate the Mission hospital over reports that it advertised "birth packages" abroad. The directive targets whether the hospital profited from offering birth packages to South Texas and refers the matter directly to HHSC. Abb

For many Texans living in rural counties, statewide offices often feel distant from everyday life. Yet one of the least-discussed statewide positions is the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, which oversees programs that directly affect food security, rural development, school nutrition, water conservation, and the economic future of small farming communities. That is why Democratic nominee Clayton Tucker has drawn attention from rural advocates. A fifth-generation Texas ranc

McConnell Still Chairs the Rules Committee From His Hospital Bed Mitch McConnell has been well enough to discuss Iran, Ukraine, national security, and a Supreme Court ruling on campaign spending from his hospital bed. He has not been well enough to do it in person, on video, or in front of anyone outside his own staff and a handful of allies who have relayed the conversations secondhand. The Kentucky Republican, 84, entered the hospital on the morning of June 14. His office h

LULAC Disputes ICE Account of Fatal Houston Shooting Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was picking up his construction crew before 7 a.m. on Tuesday, when an ICE agent shot him on Canal Street in Houston's Magnolia Park. He died at Ben Taub Hospital with CPR already underway in the ambulance. Federal officials say he tried to run over an officer. His family says he spent thirty-five years in this country building homes for other people. Ronaldo Salgado, one of Salgado Araujo's sons, con