President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News reminded me of a famous legal case that I teach my journalism students each semester at Boise State University.

It’s known as the Zenger trial.

The case was in 1735, nearly 300 years ago, before the United States was even a country.

Then-New York Gov. William Cosby charged the New-York ...Read more

For a moment on April 9, the average U.S. tariff rate leapt to 32%, making American consumers the highest tariffed people in the world. For the next 90 days, the average U.S. tariff rate will be about 25%, which will leave Americans paying more than the citizens of any other industrialized nation, putting us in the company of Sudan and Djibouti....Read more

$521 billion. That’s the estimate the federal government itself put forward of annual fraud levels. That’s enough money to rebuild every crumbling bridge and school in the country — all squandered due to government incompetence.

In fiscal year 2024, just 16 agencies reported improper payment estimates that totaled $162 billion — money ...Read more

In the shifting sands of American politics, the Democratic Party stands at a pivotal moment. Frequently cast as the party of “Yes,” Democrats have embraced a host of progressive causes — abortion rights, expansive immigration policies, and LGBTQ+ inclusion, to name a few.

This tendency often places them on the minority side of issues ...Read more

Is the end nigh for the nation’s most embarrassing infrastructure boondoggle? Taxpayers can only hope.

California’s high-speed rail line from hell — intended to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco — remains buried in cost overruns, bureaucratic inertia and wishful thinking. Sold to state voters in 2008 as the transportation of a ...Read more

Elon Musk’s misadventures with DOGE might be the ultimate example of a powerful flaw in how we think about leaders. That’s our tendency to believe skills and accomplishments are portable, that someone who excels in one venue will be just as impressive in others. I call this exceptional — if imaginary — superpower “omnigenius.”

In ...Read more

In a major legal blow to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, a federal judge this week blocked a plan to strip protections from more than half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — many of whom now live in South Florida under what’s known as the CHNV program.

The court order landed just in time ...Read more

Elon Musk recently cut his forecast for savings from the Department of Government Efficiency, which he once predicted would reach $2 trillion, to only $150 billion this year. This amounts to 2% of federal outlays — and even that is overstated, because it ignores the productivity the government will lose from its ban on working from home.

The ...Read more

What is the U.S. without its federal Department of Education? The potential answers worry parents, educators, students and policy experts after President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the agency.

The intended — and unintended — consequences of the order will be felt for generations. High on the list of effects, because of ...Read more

“Active shooter on campus.” Those chilling words again. This time, the attack happened on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, just miles from the state Capitol where lawmakers are in meetings for their annual session.

Multiple people were injured, and two people have died, according to police. The suspected shooter is ...Read more

Masked guards march the captives in, holding their heads pressed down to waist level. They are forced to kneel while guards shout at them and shave their heads before they are stripped down to shorts. Their overcrowded and squalid cells, meant to hold about 80 men, are often crammed with nearly twice as many. Only two toilets per cell, no ...Read more

Is the U.S. facing a constitutional crisis? The answer, unequivocally and emphatically, is yes. But it also could get much worse.

In less than 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken an astounding array of unconstitutional actions to consolidate power and to stifle dissent. He has asserted the ability to eliminate federal agencies created by...Read more

Of course Google has an unlawful monopoly on online ads, as a federal judge found Thursday, just like a different federal judge found last year that Google has an unlawful monopoly on online searching; everyone knows that “googling” means online search.

A market economy only works if there is competition and choice and Google’s monopolist...Read more

How do you know Joe Biden is out of the White House?

Because Democrats care about the economy.

Specifically, they care about hammering President Donald Trump about the economy, and his tariff rollout/rollback’s effect on it. They are tickled pink to point fingers across the aisle.

Politico cited interviews with more than a dozen Democratic ...Read more

America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.

That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.

From the sophisticated in ...Read more

Lawfare makes for strange bedfellows.

As part of his tightening grip on power, and his assault on 200-plus years of checks and balances, President Donald Trump has bludgeoned some of the nation's leading law firms into shameful submission, extracting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free legal work for his pet causes.

More ...Read more

Amid the historic and sweeping cuts to federal agencies and programs being carried out by the Trump administration, one truth has been overlooked: If we’re serious about cutting waste and protecting public funds, we must confront climate change head-on.

2024 was a disaster for the planet and its people. According to NASA, it was the warmest ...Read more

Where there’s a will, there’s a way to commit fraud and waste money.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has unearthed far too much evidence of this in DC and beyond. His latest findings are eye-opening.

As the New York Post reported, DOGE claimed an initial review found that since 2020, 9,700 people whose birth ...Read more

The White House made it clear during a visit from Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, that it plans to let Kilmar Abrego Garcia rot in the brutal prison to which — as the administration has admitted in court — he was deported by mistake.

The spectacle in the Oval Office on Monday was chilling. President Donald Trump warmly greeted ...Read more