Trump announces big oil plan with Venezuela

NBC News -  President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had reached an agreement with Venezuela to take control of the country’s 65 billion barrels of oil reserves, a move he said would more than double America’s reserves.  The announcement comes months after the U.S. military carried out an operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump is also facing increasing pressure ahead of the midterm elections, as gas prices remain high and the war in Iran approaches its six-month mark.

The uncertain role of Kamala Harris

The Hill -  Democratic candidates in competitive election races are taking different tacks this cycle over how close to affiliate themselves with former Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s lent her support to many of them but whose loss in the 2024 election has made her a more polarizing figure.

Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek (D) told reporters this week he didn’t want Harris to campaign for him as he pursues a Senate seat this cycle — a sentiment Iowa gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand, the state’s auditor, also shared about Harris and former President Biden.

Former Rep. Mary Peltola’s (D-Alaska) Senate campaign also voiced frustration after Harris’s PAC issued a fundraising email for the red-state Democrat earlier this month.

But not all Democrats are keeping Harris at arm’s length.

The former vice president joined a Women for Ossoff call set up by Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Ga.) reelection campaign. She also made a fundraising appeal on his Facebook page.

And Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said he was “grateful” to have Harris’s support after she endorsed him following his primary.

While the different tactics likely reflect the political realities of red and purple states, they’ve also raised questions about Harris’s political viability as she mulls a second presidential run.

Trump’s DHS is using an obscure law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions

Just a spam

Just a spam - If you got a confusing invitation to a Sam Smith event, ignore it. It's a spam.

Meanwhile....

ABC -  A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity run by his wife and was later used for political purposes.

ABC News - A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity run by his wife and was later used for political purposes.

Mail in voting

The Hill - A federal judge has again blocked the Trump administration from going forward with its new mail-in voting restrictions from the president’s executive order, pausing the move for at least two weeks. That would extend beyond when the first states start sending out mail-in ballots for the midterms.

RF Kennedy Jr

The Guardian - A senior Democratic senator has called for a criminal investigation into Robert F Kennedy Jr after reporting by the Guardian that indicated he lied during Senate confirmation hearings last year. Ron Wyden said in a statement: “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress.”

What did Kennedy purportedly lie about? A Guardian analysis of newly obtained documents found that the US health secretary had lied when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

ICE

MS NOW -  Last night MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell highlighted the case of Liam Tadeo, a five-year-old boy detained with his father by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas on August 16 as they were on their way to a soccer game and taken to the Dilley detention camp. Representative Greg Casar explained how ICE now routinely uses children as leverage to make parents turn themselves in or self-deport. And sure enough in this case, reports an ABC affiliate in Arizona, the father agreed for himself and Liam to be deported. The Marshall Project estimates that ICE has detained more than 6,000 children so far in Trump’s second term.

48 American scholars taking Canadian jobs

NY Times - Twenty-one universities in Canada announced on Thursday the hiring of dozens of researchers to join their top academic ranks, poaching the majority of the recruits from the United States. Of the incoming 64 researchers, 48 will leave American campuses including Harvard, Yale and M.I.T., and the remainder are from Europe, Asia and Australia.

Turmoil in American academia, precipitated by a crackdown on prestigious universities by the Trump administration and attacks on scientific research groups, has allowed Canada a rare opportunity to lure some of those schools’ top minds north.

Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence.

Legal exceptions: 10 states with unique regulations

Middle East

MS NOW - When President Donald Trump launched his war of aggression on Iran earlier this year, he suggested it could end in as little as “two or three days.” The toppling of Iran’s government, he predicted, might take a little longer: within “four to five weeks.”

As of today, the U.S. has been at war against Iran for six months. And there is no end in sight. The White House says it’s not even on speaking terms with Iran after an always-shaky ceasefire collapsed last month.

Trump’s quagmire in Iran is one of the most shameful acts of his presidency. He has failed at what he haughtily presumed would be an easy victory — and left Iran strategically stronger and the world worse off than when he started. And what makes it doubly tragic is how much of this catastrophe was foreseeable. At the heart of his failure was a total incuriosity about the plausibility and the likely consequences of the “little excursion” he decided to embark upon.

Sam Smith – Once again this story fails to mention that it is Congress and not the president who gets to declare war. As US News explains, “The Constitution is pretty clear on the subject of which branch of government gets to decide when the United States is at war. It’s Congress. Only Congress has the power to formally declare war.”

Todd Blanche

"We will not prosecute the abusers named in the Epstein files or reveal their names to the public." - Todd Blanche, US Attorney General

Nation’s Largest Reservoirs Are Drying Up

NY Times-  Lakes Powell and Mead, the nation’s largest reservoirs, are drying up, sending a Colorado River system that provides water and electricity for millions of people into a state of crisis with no end in sight.

Water levels in Lake Powell, along the Utah-Arizona border, fell to a record low on Saturday. Lake Mead, the larger of the two and farthest downstream on the Colorado River, dropped to its lowest recorded point a week earlier.

The combined reservoir system, an essential water source for cities and farms across Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, has not held so little water since 1957, before Lake Powell was filled. That was long before climate change brought three decades of drought, the worst dry spell for the Southwest in at least 1,200 years, scientists said.

Federal and state officials and communities across the region have taken emergency steps to try to head off catastrophe. They shifted water from a smaller reservoir to try to save Powell and have called for water conservation, though those requests are mostly voluntary so far.

Donald Trump

Project on Government Oversight - President Donald Trump added $1.4 billion to his personal wealth last year from cryptocurrency ventures: businesses he launched just before taking office - and in an industry he has aggressively shielded from enforcement and personally promoted. 

Far from probing the president's self-dealing, his administration is enabling it. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which should be investigating this, appears to be sidestepping a glaringly conflicted deal with AI Financial Corporation (formerly Alt5 Sigma) that netted the president and his family an estimated $500 million. 

For years now, POGO has raised the alarm about the glaring loophole in ethics law that creates an exemption for criminal conflicts of interest for presidents and vice presidents. We've urged the closure of this loophole, lest it be abused by powerful officials who put their bottom line above their duty to the public - exactly the infuriating abuse we are seeing right now. 

What's even more infuriating: When questioned about his self-dealing, President Trump said he "found out that nobody cared." He couldn't be more wrong. 

NBC News -  President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid his repeated threats and taunts in an escalating trade war with Canada.   Trump made a similar move last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Interior Department and Google Maps complied with that directive, while the rest of the world largely has not. “The Americans can call it whatever they want to call it,” a Canadian maritime attorney told NBC News this week. “It is Lake Ontario.”

Trump downplays Moscow visit by CIA

The Guardian - Donald Trump has downplayed a visit to Moscow by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, as "semi-routine" after he turned up in the Russian capital unannounced. The White House, CIA, Pentagon and the US air force all declined to comment on the visit, which was confirmed on Wednesday by a Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov.

Interviewed by the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Trump said "He's there, you know, very sort of semi-routine. I hate to disappoint people. We would like to see the war with Ukraine end. We're working very hard to get that war ended, and frankly, they both want to see it ended at this point."

Middle East

Bold Front News - Washington’s new Iran plan promises the “toughest sanctions in history,” escalating full-blown economic warfare without sending U.S. troops into battle. Treasury signaled sweeping sanctions to choke Iran’s revenue and pressure its backers. Recent actions targeted oil shipping, insurers, and financiers tied to Iran’s military.

Iran vows to resist and calls sanctions an American “addiction”. Experts say sanctions hit the economy hard but rarely change core behavior.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States will impose the “toughest sanctions in history” on Iran. He framed the push as a way to increase pressure while avoiding large new military operations. The plan centers on broader designations, tougher secondary sanctions, and efforts to cut off shippers, insurers, and banks that enable Iran’s oil trade and weapons programs. This move tells allies and rivals that Washington will use financial power to punish Tehran and anyone who helps it.

The happiest cities of 2026

Business economics

The Guardian - The average CEO of the US’s 100 largest, lowest-paying corporations earned 614 times more than their average worker last year, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS’s latest executive excess report analyzed compensation at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay. Between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation increased 41.4%, unadjusted for inflation, twice as much as the median worker pay increased at these firms during the same period, at 20.7%. The average CEO compensation among low-wage 100 corporations was $17.5m in 2025, compared to median worker pay of $36,571.

Alaska's name problem

TNR - The top four vote-getters in Alaska’s nonpartisan primaries make it to the general election. The fourth is yet to be determined. But what we already know about the race is likely causing headaches in the campaign headquarters of incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan. Election officials confirmed this week that Dan J. Sullivan, a fellow Republican and retired teacher, had qualified for the general election. … Sullivan did get a boost last weekend with an endorsement from a former Anchorage mayor. His name? Dan A. Sullivan.

ICE

Intercept - Anti-ICE activists involved with a protest last July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas are facing a combined 560+ years in prison. They’re the very first convictions under NSPM-7, Donald Trump’s presidential directive targeting left-wing activists as likely domestic terrorists.  Some of the Prairieland defendants did little more than wear all-black clothing to the protest. One didn’t even attend the protest and got 30 years for merely moving a box of leftist zines.  But this fight isn’t over. Several Prairieland defendants are appealing their convictions

Donald Trump

MS NOW - President Donald Trump will not be on the ballot in November’s midterm elections. But in a recent White House strategy meeting, he reportedly decided that as Election Day approaches, he’d like to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting himself. The tone-deaf strategy serves as yet another example of how Trump’s self-adulation is frequently the source of his biggest strategic mistakes.

According to The Atlantic, citing “three people familiar with the meeting,” Trump gathered his political advisers to figure out how he should spend the $400 million in funds available to his super political action committee, MAGA Inc. He reportedly settled on trying to “lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself” and ordered “a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.” Trump apparently wants ad makers to “mine his own on-camera statements” for these ads, and focus on his tax breaks, the stock market’s rise and his failed war on fentanyl, among other things.

This reported ad spend decision underscores Trump’s conviction that he alone can carry Republicans to victory at the polls this fall. Last week at a rally for Sen. Darline Graham Nordone, R-S.C., Trump pleaded to the audience, “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”

The real cost of data centers

Hartmann Report - Polling by Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans are against having an AI data center in their community, and that number includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. They get it that the much-ballyhooed “cloud” is actually a gigantic collection of massive industrial buildings that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water, produce both air and noise pollution, and more often than not jack up local utility bills and buy off corrupt local politicians to get tax abatements.

The Department of Energy says that data centers sucked up 4.4 percent of all the electricity generated in America in 2023; by 2028, DOE says, that number could be 12 percent, or about an eighth of all the power produced in our country. And once the buildings go up, the number of jobs created is negligible.

Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other tech giants often negotiate special “bulk” electricity rates behind closed doors, sticking homeowners and local small businesses with the cost of expanding the grid and power plant capacity.

Researchers at Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative documented how these data center costs are rapidly being shifted from the companies to the public. For example, Meta/Facebook is planning a new data center in Louisiana that would suck up about twice as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans, and require around $3 billion to build out the gas-fired generator capacity it’ll need.

Word

Obama: “We’ve handed enormous power to a fool who is making U.S. policy friendlier to our adversaries like North Korea and Russia, while turning his back on longtime allies like Canada.”

If you got a strange mail message from us, it was a spam

Bringing history and humanities together

Sam Smith - I have just  learned that the DC History Center and DC Humanities Council will be creating a new merger between past and present. This attracted my attention because my wife, Kathy, and I both were involved with these groups decades ago, she dealing with history and me the humanities. 

As I wrote in 1979, "I have to confess something. I have strayed from the civic abstinence I promised on these pages a while back. I have once again joined a committee. But it's just a small committee and I think I can handle it. If not, drive me home and I'll never do it again. Promise. The committee is called the DC Community Humanities Council. Fifty states and Puerto Rico have such committees - and the funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities that follow in their wake - but DC, through a combination of federal inertia and local indifference, has been years late to the gate.”

I went on:

So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future and not just exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.

Democrats vs. the Supreme Court

The Hill - Democratic governors are expressing their dissatisfaction with the Supreme Court's Monday decision to lift a lower court's block on the Trump administration's executive order restricting mail-in ballot voting. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill criticized the move as a "terrible decision" in a social media post. 

"States run elections, not Donald Trump," she wrote. "I will do everything I can to protect New Jerseyans' right to vote - by mail and in person."

Twenty-three Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia sued the administration shortly after President Trump directed federal agencies to create "state citizenship lists" of eligible voters and instructed the U.S. Postal Service not to mail ballots on behalf of anyone who did not appear on the list. 

The court's conservative justices found in an emergency opinion that the states sued too early and that the administration could proceed with planning for restrictions on mail-in ballot voting while a lower court weighs the legality of these new guidelines. 

The three justices in the court's liberal minority said they would have kept the lower court's hold in place, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calling the majority's ruling a "Kafkaesque nightmare."

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whose state attorney general's office led the lawsuit against the Trump administration's executive order, slammed the high court's decision.  "The Supreme Court just let the Trump Admin move ahead (for now) with its plan to disenfranchise voters across the country," Newsom wrote on social media. "California will be suing again to block these Orwellian rules from being implemented."

The US-Canadian tariff fight

NPR - The $20 billion in tariffed goods won't significantly impact the U.S. economy, NPR's Stephan Bisaha tells Up First. Canada is likely to feel the strain a little more. But if the trade war continues to intensify and goods like American cars and Canadian oil enter the mix, it would have a bigger effect. Bisaha adds that the $20 million figure is no coincidence; it's also the value of Canadian goods the U.S. will impose tariffs on. Despite the minimal effect on the U.S. economy, the year and a half of fluctuating tariffs has caused considerable uncertainty for U.S. businesses.

The Guardian - Paper products are among the hardest-hit sectors, with Canada threatening to put tariffs of between 25% and 50% on “toilet paper or face tissue stock” from 8 September in retaliation for a 50% hike from Washington DC.

Though American toilet paper and tissues are often made domestically, they heavily rely on lumber-rich Canada for raw materials. Procter & Gamble, the owner of Charmin toilet paper, said last year that it would have to increase prices amid tariffs that were in place at the time.

The US imported $328m worth of toilet paper from Canada in 2024, according to the World Bank, making it by far the largest exporter of the product to the US. Retailers including Costco source much of their paper products from the country.

The US accounts for more than 20% of global tissue consumption despite having only 4% of the world’s population. The average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper per year, making them No 1 for No 2s globally, just ahead of Germans, each using an average of 134 rolls annually.

It’s not just paper products that could rise in price. The trade war highlights the deep economic ties shared between the two countries as consumers continue to worry about inflation on both sides of the border.  US tariffs are specifically affecting Canadian liquor, including popular whiskey brands Crown Royal and Canadian Club, which are currently under a 50% tariff.

9 Reasons to Eat More Watermelon This Summer

Bill Gates hits artificial intelliegence

NY Times -  Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is loudly warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be “the world’s top priority.”

In an hourlong interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line.

“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. “They’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones — like A.I.’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons — that it once said would warrant more caution.

The Supreme Court

Alternet -   President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden are treated very differently by the Supreme Court — and that double standard is hurting the American people, at least according to the editorial board of a prominent newspaper.

“When Mr. Biden was president, the court quickly acted to halt several policies it considered illegal, including his second attempt at student-loan forgiveness,” wrote The New York Times' editorial board on Tuesday. “When faced with blatant defiance of the law from Mr. Trump, however, the court’s Republican-appointed majority sometimes takes its time or demurs. In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s policies do damage.”

Earlier in the article they described how the Supreme Court has already rejected Trump’s tariffs, characterizing them as illegal because they lacked congressional authorization, but that the president has continued to levy them despite not receiving legislative approval on future occasions.

“President Trump’s repeated attempts to impose tariffs have become an encapsulation of his second term,” the Times wrote. “They have hurt the American economy and his own popularity. They also range from legally dubious to blatantly illegal.”

They continued, “With Mr. Trump now engaging in a trade war with Canada — which has decided to stand up to his bullying — we want to step back and explain both the economic and the legal damage from his tariffs. We also urge Congress and the courts to take action and stop this madness. The tariffs offer a signature opportunity for the other two branches of the federal government to insist that Mr. Trump abide by the Constitution and stop punishing American workers and consumers.”