Source: The Daily Economy
by Jeffery L Degner
‘Voters demanded the 1996 welfare reform law that limited eligibility and emphasized work. Since then, executive agencies have used their discretion to quietly loosen those rules.” (09/01/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/congress-reformed-welfare-bureaucrats-regrew-it-anyway/
Source: Fox News Forum
by EJ Antoni
“Listening to most of the media and Canada’s prime minister, you’d think the U.S. and its northern neighbor were in a full-blown trade war after new tariffs were announced days ago. Au contraire: Anyone who checks the numbers can see this is merely a skirmish. On Aug. 22, the administration’s Section 338 tariffs took effect, at 50% on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, or about 5% of what Canada sells the U.S. Ottawa’s answer, effective Sept. 8, will be varying tariffs on roughly $20 billion of American exports to Canada, about 6% of what Canada buys from the U.S. While tariffs on $40 billion aren’t chump change, they’re a small portion of the roughly $900 billion in products and services that are exchanged across the U.S.-Canadian border annually.” (09/01/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/fears-canadian-trade-war-overblown-skirmish
Source: euronews [EU]
“The White House has published the terms of its Venezuela oil deal, naming the private company at its centre and confirming Washington’s majority control of more than 65 billion barrels, as President Trump vowed the US would be taking ‘all’ of it. … Venezuela’s interim authorities have granted NABEP 100-year concessions over 17 fields with the agreement signed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The Venezuelan reserves dwarf America’s own, as the 65 billion barrels covered by the concessions compare with roughly 46 billion across US territory. Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday, US President Donald Trump called the reserves ‘unbelievable value that was sitting dormant’ and added that the US is ‘going to be taking all of that. We’re going to be taking that oil out.'” (09/01/26)
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“The Politics of AI Data Centers – Suddenly a Big Deal?.” (09/01/26)
Source: The Hill
by Harlan Ullman
“Presidents do not like hearing bad news. CIA Director John Ratcliffe went to Moscow to brief Russian counterparts on the U.S. assessment of the state of the war in Ukraine. The news could not have been good. Even if Ukraine is not winning the war, its costs to Russia in blood and treasure have been extraordinary. Now, Russia’s energy infrastructure is being increasingly shut down. Suppose Russian President Vladimir Putin reversed the favor, sending Foreign Intelligence Service head Sergey Naryshkin to brief President Trump on America’s ‘excursion’ into Iran. Imagine how that would go down if Naryshkin relayed the reality? Trump would be apoplectic. … Neither Trump nor Putin respond well to negative feedback. Few presidents do.” (09/01/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/6062270-presidents-rejecting-bad-news/
Source: Washington Monthly
by Christoph Irmscher
“Imagine you hear a speech in which a ruler, reflecting on his first months in office, boasts that he has secured the borders, imposed tariffs, purged the civil service of corruption, eliminated Marxism, and protected Christianity. You might reasonably assume it was delivered in Washington sometime in the past year. In fact, Adolf Hitler delivered it on March 23, 1933, before the newly constituted Reichstag in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House.” (09/01/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/09/01/the-swastika-and-the-red-hat/
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff
“The $18 billion settlement between Meta Platforms and 48 states announced last week involves a good deal of money as well as technological tweaks to limit the exposure of users under 18 years of age to 24/7 social media feeds. Supporters see it as a major step forward; critics, as the Monitor reported Thursday, say it doesn’t go far enough. Those differing responses, paradoxically, hint at an underlying confluence of viewpoints – that safeguarding the growth and development of children and teenagers is not a one-and-done deal, left to individual court cases or settlements. Rather, balancing the economic drive of private innovation against its potential excesses is a whole-of-society effort.” (08/31/26)
Source: New York Times
“A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a ‘secretive, rushed’ effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the ‘risky and haphazard’ implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a ‘catastrophic failure’ in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1. ‘Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,’ the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.” (09/01/26)
Source: The Hill
‘Robby Soave delivers his radar on the president’s online defense of data centers and his warning about allowing China to surpass the U.S. in the race to lead AI development.” (09/01/26)
Source: Persuasion
by Eboo Patel
“I attended my first gay wedding in 1995. It was not on purpose. I was on a summer road trip, supported by a $500 travel grant from the University of Illinois, exploring identity-based intentional communities. Because I had so little money, the only groups I could study were the ones who offered free lodging, which generally meant pitching a tent on their lawn. The nice people at the Idyll Dandy Acres community outside of Nashville were happy to oblige. ‘We’re Radical Fairies,’ they told my friend Jeff and me. ‘Everyone is welcome here.’ The happy couple were camped next to us, two women from Britain. On the first morning, they threatened to break my acoustic guitar after I played ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ for the fifth time. Then they invited me to their wedding. Was I really going to say no?” (09/01/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-i-learned-on-the-open-road