MO: City councilman recalled after supporting corporate welfare for data center

Source: KMBC 9 News

“Voters in Independence have successfully recalled a councilman after his vote to approve a multibillion-dollar data center. District 1 Councilman John Perkins was recalled during a special election on Tuesday, with unofficial final results showing over 68 percent of voters in the district supported the recall. … Perkins, in March, voted to approve a proposed data center on 400 acres near Missouri 78 and Little Blue Parkway. He was one of five who voted to support the data center. … McKenna Cobb, who filed the recall petition, criticized the council’s decision to approve significant tax incentives for the project. ‘There’s hours of public testimony and they still vote in favor of billions of dollars in tax incentives,’ Cobb said.” [editor’s note: They left the corporate welfare part for the end of the story; it wasn’t just an “anti-data-center” thing – TLK] (09/01/26)

https://www.kmbc.com/article/independence-john-perkins-recall-data-center-election/73586616

Congress Reformed Welfare. Bureaucrats Regrew It Anyway

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/

Fears of a Canadian trade war are overblown; so far, it’s more of a skirmish

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

Trump vows US will take “all” of Venezuela’s oil as deal details emerge

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)

https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/09/01/trump-vows-us-will-take-all-of-venezuelas-oil-as-deal-details-emerge

Putin and Trump refuse to accept the realities of their wars

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/

The Swastika and the Red Hat

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/

Reform of social media, click by click

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)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0831/Reform-of-social-media-click-by-click

Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Election-Rigging Scheme

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)

https://archive.is/jFcDQ