“The United States Mint released 250,000 $1 coins Wednesday featuring President Trump’s likeness to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary. … The coin was greenlighted in March after controversy arose stemming from a federal law that previously prohibited living people from being depicted on U.S. currency. But a law Trump signed during his first term — called the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 — included new language regarding the semiquincentennial commemoration coins. The Trump administration also told Newsweek it does not need congressional approval for the coin — citing a history of coins with the likeness of the sitting president such as a 150th anniversary coin with former President Calvin Coolidge as one example in a legal filing.” (09/02/26)
“Rome gave out free grain to its citizens. It began as emergency relief in a time of shortage. It ended as a permanent entitlement, defended by riot whenever a consul tried to touch it. By the late Republic nobody could remember why it existed. It simply had to continue, because it always had. Britain’s welfare state has followed the same arc. It began, in the years after the war, as a safety net for genuine hardship. It has become, for a growing number of claimants, a permanent address. … There is a different principle available, and it has been tested abroad for long enough now to draw conclusions. Help should be temporary by design. Not grudging, not punitive, but genuinely time-limited, aimed at restoring independence rather than administering it away.” (09/02/26)
“I’ve been an economics professor for almost 30 years, but I don’t think I’ve ever before seen anything like the table below. I knew that claims that ‘58% of Americans can’t afford a $1,000 car repair’ were laughable clickbait. I knew that — measured by income — the middle class is disappearing… by becoming upper-middle class. But only recently did I start to fully appreciate the chasm between populist pessimism and actual data on Americans’ net worth.” (09/02/26)
“Prominent Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a charge of collusion with foreign entities, a national security [sic] crime [sic] that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Wong, 29, rose to international prominence as a teenage democracy activist in Hong Kong, one of a group of youngsters whose protest efforts have now effectively been outlawed by a sweeping National Security [sic] Law that Beijing imposed on the Asian financial hub in 2020. … Wong is already in jail serving an existing sentence on an earlier national security [sic] charge of conspiracy to commit subversion after he was among a group of democratic activists who participated in an unofficial primary election in 2020. His current sentence is scheduled to end in January next year.” (09/02/26)
“‘It’s not every day that Michigan’s bureaucracy violates state and federal law while disenfranchising more than 700,000 Michigan voters,’ opens the legal brief filed in the Michigan Supreme Court last Thursday by Americans for Citizen Voting – Michigan. ‘But that’s exactly what happened [last] week.’ The group (which I chair) has worked for the last year to place the Citizen Only Voting Amendment on Michigan’s November ballot. It makes two basic reforms: requires the Secretary of State to check the voter rolls, identifying and removing noncitizens in a fair process, and requires photo identification to cast a ballot.” (09/02/26)
“Marlboro-maker Altria on Wednesday sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, seeking to force the agency to overhaul a product review process that tobacco companies say has stifled their growth in the key U.S. market, a legal filing showed. Under U.S. law, the FDA must review new tobacco products before they can be sold, assessing whether they provide a net public health benefit, such as helping smokers quit. But the system has been plagued by a huge backlog of applications and a booming illegal market of products sold without FDA authorisation. Altria’s lawsuit marks the latest industry challenge to a regime that has become one of the biggest obstacles facing tobacco companies in the $22 billion U.S. market. It follows an extensive lobbying campaign targeting President Donald Trump.” (09/02/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“If we are ever to get our country back on the right track, it is imperative that we never forget that the U.S. national-security state and its foreign policy of interventionism are responsible for the wars in Ukraine and Iran. Let’s start with Iran. It’s obviously tempting to simply blame President Trump for launching his undeclared war of aggression against Iran. But the root cause of what has become a tar baby for Trump goes back a lot further — to the CIA’s coup in Iran in 1953 — a coup that destroyed Iran’s experiment with democracy.” (09/02/26)
