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.