Iowa Nonprofit Director Gets 18 Months for $426K Fraud Scheme. Jodi Dyan Spargur-Tate, 55, of Colfax, Iowa, was sentenced August 25, 2026, to 18 months in federal prison for stealing $426,837.11 from Children and Families of Iowa. Read the job title first. Program Director. Youth programs. Adult programs. Dislocated-worker programs. The mission on paper was to help people who were out of work get back on their feet. The money came from the U.S. Department of Labor. The people who were supposed to benefit were Iowans facing real barriers to a paycheck. She had that job from 2015 to 2022. Nearly seven years. Prosecutors say that during those years she submitted hundreds of false reimbursement requests. Fake invoices. Fake receipts. She also diverted more than 100 payments from the nonprofit to herself and family members. Cell phone bills. Housing costs. Personal expenses dressed up as program costs. That is not a paperwork error. That is a habit. A January 2025 state audit had already put numbers on it. Iowa Auditor Rob Sand’s office flagged $426,837.11 in improper disbursements and another $9,342.81 in unsupported ones. The federal case that followed used the $426,837.11 figure as restitution. Same pile of money. Different building. U.S. Attorney David C. Waterman of the Southern District of Iowa announced the sentence. The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General and the Des Moines Police Department investigated it. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Lubben prosecuted it. Spargur-Tate had already pleaded guilty to theft earlier this year. DOL Inspector General Anthony P. D’Esposito did not dress it up. He said she stole Department of Labor funds intended to help Americans secure meaningful employment and used the money for personal gain. He said her actions undermined programs built for people who actually needed work. Then the line that should be stamped on every grant file in the country: federal grants are not an opportunity for personal enrichment. The sentence is 18 months in federal prison, full restitution of $426,837.11, and three years of supervised release after she gets out. There is no parole in the federal system. Eighteen months for seven years of skimming a workforce program is not a message that the system is fierce. It is a message that the system finally noticed. The people who needed the training still did not get those dollars. Taxpayers still paid the phones and the rent. The nonprofit still had a director who could move money for years before anyone stopped the invoices. This is how grant fraud works when oversight is a brochure. A trusted title. A federal account. Receipts nobody checks. A mission that sounds too good to audit. If a program cannot show who got trained, who got hired, and where every dollar went, it is not a charity. It is a target. Spargur-Tate is one case. The model is bigger than Iowa. Follow the grants. Follow the invoices. Follow the family bills that somehow landed on a Department of Labor line item. The money was never hers. It was never the nonprofit’s to convert into rent. It belonged to people trying to find work. Eighteen months is a start. The rest of these programs still need the same treatment.

While Democrats Threaten to Pack the Supreme Court, RINOs Still Only Want to Fight the GOP Jim Clyburn did not slip. He did not get boxed in. He volunteered the plan. On Meet the Press Sunday, Kristen Welker asked the former House Democratic whip whether he supports adding four seats to the Supreme Court, the same expansion Kamala Harris has already put on the table. Clyburn said yes. “I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress, and we ought to expand. Thirteen is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court.” A baker’s dozen. He said it like he was ordering rolls. That number is not a civics coincidence. There are 13 federal circuits. Democrats have been floating 13 justices for years because it sounds tidy. What it actually does is simpler. The Court stays at nine until they get a president and a Congress. Then they add four seats, fill them in a hurry, and the conservative majority that survived confirmation fights, elections, and retirement math is diluted on purpose. Harris has already called for 13. Clyburn just joined her on national television. Hakeem Jeffries has already treated Court expansion as a live option. This is no longer a campus resolution. It is the backup plan for 2028 if they cannot win the judiciary under the rules that exist. Clyburn told you why. He said the current Court “decided to reverse course and take this country back.” He wants justices who will restore the Warren Court’s reading of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and keep it there. He called his own 1991 testimony for Clarence Thomas a mistake. He said he had hoped Thomas would follow the “modern underpinnings” of the Constitution and that Thomas had not. Strip the language down. The Constitution is sacred when it produces the policy. When the text and the history go the other way, the remedy is not an argument. The remedy is more votes in black robes. That is court packing. Franklin Roosevelt tried it in 1937 and even a Democratic Congress would not give it to him. The country understood the threat. Change the number of justices to change the answers. Do it once and every future majority will do it again. The Court stops being a court. It becomes a second legislature that never faces voters. They are saying this out loud two years before the next presidential race. They are saying it while they also talk about killing the filibuster and turning D.C. and Puerto Rico into Senate seats. It is one project. If the map and the text do not deliver, change the machinery. And too many Republicans are still treating the main fight as an intramural one. Primary blood feuds. Consultants protecting their lane. Slow-walking Senate races that decide whether a future Democratic trifecta ever gets the votes to pass this. One party is advertising that it will rewrite a co-equal branch. Parts of the other party are still more eager to punish their own side than to keep nine justices where the Constitution and statute left them. Court packing does not require a convention. It requires a bill, a majority, and a president willing to sign it. Clyburn just told NBC he wants that bill. Harris already said she is open to it. Believe them. If the Court is “too conservative,” win elections and appoint the next vacancy. That is the system. Adding four chairs because you lost the last three confirmations is not constitutionalism. It is sore-loser government. 2026 decides the Congress that stands in the way. 2028 decides the signature. RINOs who would rather fight the GOP than treat this as the emergency Clyburn just confirmed are doing the Democrats’ work for them. Nine justices. Not a baker’s dozen. Not a stacked bench. Not a Court that exists only until the next party gets tired of the score.

Michigan Democrats Forced Data Centers Into Towns That Said No Saline Township voted no. Twice. A farm community of about 2,300 people told Oracle, OpenAI, and Related Digital they did not want a 1.4-gigawatt hyperscale campus on 575 acres of farmland. The township board rejected the rezoning 4-1. Two days later the developers sued. The town’s annual budget is barely more than $1 million. They settled. Construction started anyway. Governor Gretchen Whitmer showed up at the June 1 groundbreaking with Sam Altman and Oracle’s CEO. She called it the largest investment in Michigan history. Residents called it a slap in the face. One Democratic congressional candidate put it plainly: Saline did everything in its power to stop the project, then a wealthy developer threatened to bankrupt the township in court and forced it through. That is not local control. That is a veto with a lawsuit attached. Michigan did not get one project. It got a stampede. Reporting through mid-2026 put at least 13 data centers in planning across the state. A statewide project count updated in late August now lists more than 30 AI-related data center proposals that have surfaced since 2024. Trackers put Michigan’s active pipeline at 58 sites when you add operating, under-construction, and announced facilities. Three of the new hyperscale builds are already in the ground in Saline alone. More than 50 Michigan cities and townships answered the only way they could. They passed local moratoriums. Some tallies now put that number above 60, the most of any state. Flint. Kalamazoo. Ypsilanti. Washington Township. Meridian. The list keeps growing. Whitmer’s answer was just as clear. She said she would veto a statewide pause. Her office called any bill that “prevents us from growing the economy” an automatic non-starter. The Michigan Public Service Commission, filled with her appointees, gave DTE a fast-track, ex parte blessing on the Saline power contracts. Attorney General Dana Nessel asked for a full contested case so ratepayers would not get stuck with the grid upgrades. The commission rushed it through anyway. So here is the Michigan model. Town says no. Developer sues. Governor cuts the ribbon. Utility gets a shortcut. Families are told to trust that their electric bill will not move. Republicans in this state finally started saying the obvious. Mike Rogers called for a pause. Tom Barrett ran on standing up to tax breaks for the industry. Communities that already voted no should not have to go broke in court to keep a farm a farm. If a project is such a gift, it should survive a town vote without a lawsuit. Michigan Democrats did not wait for consent. They counted the projects, protected the pipeline, and told towns that “no” was just the first meeting.

America’s Obesity Problem Over the Years In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. Severe obesity was under 1 percent. Childhood obesity was about 5 percent. That was a country that still cooked at home, walked more, and had not yet turned breakfast into a science experiment. By the late 1970s the adult rate was still around 15 percent. Then the climb started and did not stop. 1988–1994: about 23 percent 1999–2000: about 31 percent 2007–2008: about 34 percent 2017–2018: 42.4 percent, the measured peak Severe obesity went from almost unheard of to nearly 1 in 10 adults. Childhood obesity more than tripled to over 21 percent. By the early 2020s, 4 in 10 adults met the clinical definition. Add overweight and you are talking about most of the country. This did not happen because Americans suddenly lost willpower in 1985. The food changed. Seed oils and ultra-processed calories took over the aisle. Portion sizes exploded. Kids sat in front of screens. Schools served slop and called it lunch. We spent $4 trillion a year on “health care” and watched chronic disease eat 90 percent of that bill. Obesity is not a vanity stat. It is diabetes, heart disease, joint failure, and a shorter life. The first break in the line showed up after 2022. Gallup’s survey rate fell from a high of 39.9 percent in 2022 to 36.4 percent in 2026. CDC’s exam-based NHANES figure eased from 42.4 percent to 40.3 percent in 2021–2023. That is not a miracle. About 1 in 9 adults now take a GLP-1 drug for weight loss. The drop is real. It is also bought, for now, with a weekly injection. A pill or a shot is not the same as a culture that eats real food, moves, and stops poisoning kids with sugar water. If the only way the chart bends is a $1,000 medication, the country has not fixed the problem. It has rented a pause. Forty years of getting fatter was a policy failure dressed up as personal failure. The first decline in a generation is a start. It is not the finish. The goal is not a slightly lower BMI on a government slide. The goal is an America that does not need a peptide to walk up the stairs.

What Sharia Really Is And Why Some People Want It Over the Constitution Sharia is not a vibe. It is not “be nice and pray.” In classical Islam it is the path their God laid down for life. The sources are the Quran, the Prophet’s example (Sunnah), scholarly consensus, and analogical reasoning. Out of that comes fiqh: the human attempt to turn those sources into rules. For millions of Muslims that means prayer, fasting, charity, no alcohol, and private family agreements. That can live under the First Amendment the same way canon law and halakha do, as long as it stays personal and does not override civil law. That is not the whole story. When Islamists talk about Sharia as a governing document, they mean a complete system. Sayyid Qutb wrote that Sharia is not limited to legal injunctions. It includes administration, the system, and its modes. “Everything legislated by their God for ordering man’s life.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s own motto says it without a translator: Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Classical criminal Sharia is not a metaphor. Hudud penalties include amputation for certain theft, flogging for fornication and drinking, stoning for adultery in some schools, and death for apostasy. Family law is patriarchal: unequal inheritance, male guardianship, testimony rules that do not treat men and women as equals. None of that is compatible with the Bill of Rights, equal protection, or a secular criminal code. They have said they want that system here. The Brotherhood’s 1991 Explanatory Memorandum, entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation case, described a “civilization-jihadist process” of settlement in North America whose work is to “eliminate and destroy the Western civilization from within.” Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of the most prominent American preachers of his generation, said in 1992 that if Muslims were clever politically they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. “If eight million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us.” In 2011 he told a conference not to talk about Sharia yet because “we are not there yet.” Hizb ut-Tahrir held a U.S. conference in 2009. Asked whether they would get rid of the Constitution for Sharia, a speaker said that if the United States were part of the Muslim world, Muslims here would be happy to see Sharia applied. The Constitution, he said, would be gone. CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was reported in 1998 as saying Islam is not in America to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant, and that the Quran should be the highest authority in America. CAIR denies the quote. The newspaper printed it. The pattern around it did not need one sentence. That is the split the country is not allowed to name. Personal faith is protected. A political project that treats the Constitution as a temporary obstacle is not a religion story. It is a sovereignty story. You cannot have two supreme laws. Either the people make the law through representatives under a Constitution that treats every citizen as equal, or a clerical reading of seventh-century texts sits above Congress, courts, and women. Europe already learned what “parallel legal systems” look like when no-go policing and sharia councils start doing the state’s job. American Muslims who live under the Constitution and reject political Sharia are not the problem. The men who say wait until we are stronger, then replace the system, are telling you the destination. Believe them. The First Amendment protects worship. It does not require America to import a constitution that abolishes the First Amendment.

Democrats know their brand is poison in red America. So they changed the label. They can’t win Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, or Idaho as Democrats. Voters already rejected that product. So now they run the same politics as “independents” and in some places they even try to sneak onto the ballot as Republicans. This is not a coincidence. It’s a strategy. In Nebraska, the Democrat who won the Senate primary spent almost nothing, then quit so “independent” Dan Osborn could face Pete Ricketts one-on-one. The state Democratic Party endorsed him. He raises money on ActBlue. Undercover audio caught him admitting he can’t tell voters he wants to abolish ICE or back men in girls’ sports because he needs Republican votes. That’s not independence. That’s a costume. Same play elsewhere: Montana: “Independent” Seth Bodnar, ActBlue, Tester machine, Obama-world help. South Dakota: Democrat drops out so former Democrat Brian Bengs can run as an independent against Mike Rounds. Idaho: Democrat exits so former Democratic legislator Todd Achilles can run as an independent against Jim Risch. That’s the model: clear the field, hide the party name, keep the donors, keep the platform, hope rural voters don’t look under the hood. Some go even further. In North Carolina, Kate Barr, a lifelong Democrat and self-described progressive, filed in a Republican primary and openly called herself a “fake Republican.” In Ohio, another Democrat tried to crash a GOP primary after talking about “infiltrating Republican spaces” to “get a foot in the door.” That’s not persuasion. That’s identity theft. Bernie Sanders and Angus King already showed how this ends in the Senate: “Independent” on the ballot, Democrat in the cloakroom. If they believed in their agenda, they’d run on it under their own name. They don’t. They hide the D, keep the money, and hope you vote for the wrapper instead of what’s inside. A Democrat in an independent jersey is still a Democrat. A Democrat in a Republican jersey is still a Democrat. Read the donors. Read the dropouts. Listen to the audio. Then vote accordingly.