Source: Associated Press
“A federal judge on Thursday halted — at least for now — attempts to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting. The move stalled the directive for a second time only about a week before the first mail ballots are due to be sent out for the rapidly approaching midterm elections. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani blocked the government from implementing the order for two weeks. The case could soon be appealed back to the Supreme Court, days after the justices handed down a procedural decision that allowed the the administration to move ahead. … The high court’s conservative majority did not rule on the legality of Trump’s executive order, instead saying Talwani had acted too soon. Now the administration has issued a formal rule governing whether the U.S. Postal Service will deliver states’ mail ballots, effectively restarting the legal fight.” (08/27/26)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-voting-mail-ballots-democrats-lawsuits-15cf1ec7dcdb8211bf6b624b75a7f4ab
Source: Independent Institute
by Pierre Lemieux
“The trade war between the United States and Canada—or, more exactly, between Donald Trump, who declared it, and Canadian politicians, who try to limit the damage though using the same logic as Trump’s—provides a good opportunity to reflect on how trade and freedom work. It is not a brilliant idea for the Canadian government to impose a tariff on Canadians who purchase American appliances, for example, in order to retaliate against the American ruler who has imposed a tariff on Americans importing Canadian whisky. … Instead of retaliation—imposing a border tax on Canadians because Trump has imposed one on Americans—[prime minister Mark Carney] could make a declaration of unilateral free trade along the following lines …” (08/27/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/08/27/the-trade-declaration-carney-should-make/
Source: Underthrow
“Why Can’t You Switch Your Government?” (08/27/26)
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/why-cant-you-switch-your-government
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Norway’s King Harald V has died at the age of 89, after he was taken to hospital last week for treatment for a rare blood condition. The palace in Oslo said he passed away peacefully at 06:35 local time (04:35GMT) on Friday at the national hospital in Oslo. The royal flag on the roof of the palace has been lowered to half-mast. In the 24 hours leading up to his death, members of the royal family had visited the king, and crowds had laid flowers at the palace. Harald was Norway’s first king born in Norway since the 14th Century. He has been succeeded by his son Haakon, 53, who will hold an extraordinary council of state with the government later on Friday.” (08/28/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clykn5p5172o
Source: The American Conservative
by Doug Bandow
“For the Trump administration to complain about foreign interference in America’s war of choice is manifestly absurd. No country interferes in the affairs of other nations more often. No government is more presumptuous in its demands. No nation more frequently uses force against other states. Russian and Chinese intervention in the Iran war is unfortunate—Americans likely have died and certainly have been injured as a result. Yet the administration shares responsibility for the resulting harm. … American policymakers long have viewed themselves as virtuous vestal virgins, entitled, even required, to purify the terrible world around them. Alas, no one else views the solons of Washington in such terms, and for good reason: They have repeatedly failed, often disastrously.” (08/27/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-to-stop-chinese-russian-support-for-irans-war-efforts/
Source: Reuters
“Russia warned on Thursday that it could strike British military targets inside and outside Ukraine in response to Ukrainian attacks on targets inside Russia using long-range British cruise missiles. The warning, delivered by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova at a news briefing in Moscow, has been made before but without such rhetorical force or urgency. … ‘We have repeatedly warned that any British military installations and equipment in Ukraine and beyond its borders could be targeted in response to Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory carried out using British weapons,’ Zakharova said. … Western analysts said the strength of Moscow’s warning reflected Russian fury over Britain’s decision — made public on Monday — to allow Kyiv access to classified technology to start its own production of Storm Shadow cruise missiles, capable of carrying out strikes deep within Russia.” (08/27/26)
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-could-strike-uk-military-targets-response-ukrainian-strikes-using-2026-08-27/
Source: The Hill
by Benjamin Powell
“New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced this summer that he will open city-owned grocery stores in the coming years. Meanwhile, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently announced that the federal government will take a nearly $1 billion equity stake in seven semiconductor companies. There is a common name for these policies: creeping socialism. … President Trump’s criticism of Mamdani is consistent with his pledge in his 2019 State of the Union address that ‘America will never be a socialist country.’ But his own administration’s actions are even less consistent with that pledge than Mamdani’s grocery stores.” (08/27/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/6051425-rejecting-left-right-socialism/
Source: The Guardian [UK]
“A Florida grand jury has found that the administration of the governor, Ron DeSantis, ‘misappropriated’ $10m in taxpayer money from a Medicaid settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity with ties to DeSantis’s wife, before the money was reportedly ‘funneled’ into ‘two political action committees’. In the grand jury report, which remains sealed but was obtained and published by CBS News Miami on Wednesday, the grand jurors wrote that ‘we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities’ but said that they found ‘insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally’. … The grand jurors wrote that no witness admitted or identified who directed the money to go to Hope Florida and noted that testimony also revealed that [attorney general James] Uthmeier’s political action committee, Keep Florida Clean, was the ‘prime recipient of the majority’ of the $10m.” (08/27/26)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/florida-grand-jury-desantis-administration-misappropriated-funds-medicaid
Source: Law & Liberty
by John O McGinnis
“The Gilded Age was convicted by its name before its history was ever written. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined that appellation in their political satire by the same name. Their point was clear—the American era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the opposite of a golden age. Instead, it was a time when a thin layer of glitter concealed corruption, useless speculation, and harmful self-interest. The name stuck, permitting Twain’s summary judgment to masquerade as neutral historical judgment. … It is a relief then to have Julian Fellowes’s series, The Gilded Age …. [it] shows that the era produced many public benefits and that the rich were substantially responsible for the dynamism that led not only to economic prosperity but also to broader social inclusion, even if they were hardly always innocent or admirable.” (08/27/26)
https://lawliberty.org/gilded-or-golden/
Source: The Verge
“On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed in March in a California district court, accused the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against Anthropic for setting ‘red lines,’ or unacceptable military use cases of its AI technology. ‘The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,’ Judge Rita F. Lin, a district judge in the northern district of California, wrote in the ruling.” (08/27/26)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/985947/anthropic-supply-chain-risk-lawsuit-judge-ruling
