Monday Morning Read

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Subscribe to WeeklyPost and you’ll get Jim Heaney’s recommended reading – and a summary of Investigative Post’s reporting from the previous week –  in your inbox Sunday mornings.

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Chris Collins – remember him, the convicted felon who relocated to Florida and was later pardoned by Donald Trump? – is making noise about running for Congress in the Sunshine State. Or perhaps he’s simply making noise. Collins recently went on an anti-gay rant in which he lectured about ethics and morality. This, from a disgraced, and disgraceful, felon.

Terry Pegula is looking for more ways to get even richer. (And that’s not counting his success in getting taxpayers to build his football team a new stadium.)

It appears there’s been some funny business going on in the Erie County Clerk’s office involving the handling of money and documents. Sandy Tan of The Buffalo News reports that problems, and a lack of oversight, are nothing new.

Our friend Mark Scheer at the Niagara Gazette reports on the latest economic development scheme in the Cataract City, otherwise known as a natural wonder and manmade disaster.

Ken Kruly’s latest edition of Politics and Other Stuff is chock full of news and insights.

Old news worth repeating, via The Wall Street Journal: Tesla’s plant in South Buffalo has failed to deliver. (There’s little to nothing in the story we haven’t previously reported.)

Freedom of Information laws enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal were intended to improve public access to government records and data. Too often these days, politicians and bureaucrats (mis)use it to delay the release of information the public and press are entitled to. (New York State and the City of Buffalo are especially bad.) The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, wrote about how Newfoundland and Labrador are doing right by the public by adding teeth to its FOI laws. We in New York should take note.

How low can Donald Trump go? He recently posted on his social media platform what he said was Barack Obama’s home address. A gunman soon showed up in the neighborhood, looking for what he said was a “good angle on a shot.” The suspect was a Jan. 6 rioter. You know, Trump’s kind of guy.

Buy your tickets to our benefit concert featuring Tom Toles

Politico published an insightful interview with the author of American Whitelash,  which documents this nation’s history of violence carried out by white supremacists. Said author Wesley Lowery: “This book is an attempt to put human faces on the relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history, to put flesh and bone on our discussion of white supremacist terror.”

July 3 was the hottest day in the earth’s recorded history. No, wait, July 4 was the hottest. The week as a whole was record shattering.

Here’s a feel-good baseball story. Two of them, actually, involving the restoration of one of the few Negro leagues stadiums still standing in Paterson, New Jersey, and perhaps the future site of a Yankees-Mets “Field of Dreams” game. Another good baseball read: Satchel Paige’s major league debut, 75 years ago. As a 42-year old “rookie,” he went 6 and 1 and helped Cleveland win a World Series.

Jim Heaney