“If you get stopped at an airport security checkpoint with $100 or more in cash, Transportation Security Administration agents can fleece you. TSA has stripped more than 10,000 travelers of their money since 2014, but the supposed ‘criminals’ are almost never charged after their cash is taken. A class-action federal court case could finally end this outrage.” (02/17/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Graham Piro
“Texas Tech leaders have somehow convinced themselves that race and gender are not legitimate topics to discuss in a psychology class. That’s absurd on its face: You can’t teach human behavior while treating basic dimensions of human identity as off-limits. Will Crescioni, a lecturer in Texas Tech’s Department of Psychological Sciences, submitted his course materials for his honors-level psychology course the same day the Texas Tech system issued a memo ordering universities to review courses and ensure faculty do not ‘promote or otherwise inculcate’ certain ideas related to race and gender. Just over a month later — and only two days before the semester began — his course was scrapped. His offense? Refusing to alter his course content.” (02/17/26)
“A New Mexico state representative has again filed a constitutional amendment that would allow three or more contiguous counties in the State to vote to secede if at least 15% of the counties’ electorate sign a petition to put the question on the ballot and then there is a simple majority vote. While no one expects the bill to even get out of committee, it shows that secession from States is still considered a valid and desirable action in many States.” (02/17/26)
“As Americans struggle with how to effectively confront an autocratic leader and his billionaire backers as they brazenly dismantle democracy and the rule of law, they might well look to a southern state where an unlikely movement managed to defeat the extreme-right agenda of a governor who followed a similar path. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as the aphorism goes. Consider this: A newly-elected executive appoints a powerful donor and plutocrat to dismantle government root and branch, mounts broad-based attacks on education, social safety net programs, and collective bargaining, and pushes income tax cuts that benefit corporations and the wealthy. Lawmakers quickly fall in line. The aggressive agenda seems set to succeed with remarkable speed, grinding all opposition into the ground with a sense of inevitability.” (02/17/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Jennifer Pinsof
“As ICE and other federal agencies continue their assault on civil liberties, local leaders are stepping up to protect their communities. This includes pushing back against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, which are tools of mass surveillance that can be weaponized against immigrants, political dissidents and other targets. In recent weeks, Mountain View, Los Altos Hills, Santa Cruz, East Palo Alto and Santa Clara County have begun reconsidering their ALPR programs. San Jose should join them. This dangerous technology poses an unacceptable risk to the safety of immigrants and other vulnerable populations.” (02/17/26)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Caleb S Fuller & Scott Burns
“At the end of January, President Trump penned a triumphant op-ed declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ for the signature economic policy of his second term: tariffs. Unfortunately, his entire victory lap revolved around phony numbers, cherry-picked facts, and a strawman caricature of his critics’ arguments. Trump began by claiming all the ‘so-called experts’ predicted his tariffs would trigger ‘a global economic meltdown.’ Instead, he boasts, they’ve ushered in ‘an American economic miracle.’ He’s wrong on both counts.” (02/17/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Wendy McElroy
“Rosa Parks’s death on October 24, 2005, was met with tributes from across America and around the world to memorialize the impressive role she played in the Civil Rights Movement. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a crowded Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Instead, the 42-year-old black woman defied Jim Crow segregation laws and local customs …. Parks’s ensuing arrest for disorderly conduct rallied the city and state’s black community, which staged a one-day bus boycott by blacks on December 5. It was almost 100 percent effective, and its amazing success sparked the much larger 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted over 300 days, and from which Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as the primary leader of the movement. … A woman named Claudette Colvin died on January 13, 2026, to far less acclaim than Parks received two decades earlier.” (02/17/26)
“The Munich Security Conference is underway, and both American and European politicians have taken the opportunity to lament the end of the old ‘rules-based’ order. The problem is that the order to which they refer never truly existed. With a quarter century of the new millennium behind us, we have an opportune time to reflect upon the international system that has defined this new period. The decades between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the present day bore witness to several important and unprecedented military interventions that give shape and structure to this new world order. Perhaps the most pivotal of these episodes was the United States-led attack on Yugoslavia in the last months of the twentieth century.” (02/17/26)
“Much of President Donald Trump’s economic policy rests on the idea that the United States doesn’t need global trade in order to prosper. A sizable portion of the rest of the world might be ready to put that sentiment to the test. Canada, Mexico, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and 11 wealthy nations across the Indo-Pacific region are taking the first steps toward a globe-spanning trade deal that would encompass nearly 40 nations and over 1.5 billion people …. Though it is a long way from a done deal, the attempt to link most of the world’s largest non-U.S., non-China economies into a single economic bloc is perhaps the most significant sign that the rest of the world is preparing for a future where America is no longer pushing for open markets and free trade. But it is not the only sign.” (02/17/26)
“You probably use a computer — in fact, you’re probably reading this column on a computer. For 72% of you, that computer is the ubiquitous ‘standard’ Windows PC or laptop. For 20% of you, it’s a Mac. The other 8% of you oddballs mostly use Linux or (Linux-based) ChromeOS. I know the 92% of you who use Windows or macOS get tired of the cool kids telling you this, but it should be the other way around. Almost everyone should be using Linux almost all the time. Instead of leading off with the technical reasons why, though, I want to hit you with the political, and personal financial, reasons for making the switch.” (02/17/26)
