TRADE WAR !!!: Canada announced retaliatory tariffs as high as 50 percent on hundreds of American products, following the collapse of trade talks that triggered punishing tariffs levied by the Trump administration.

  Canada says it will collect tariffs of 50, 25, and 15 percent on about 700 American products beginning September 8^th, including a doubling of tariffs on American steel and aluminum to 50 percent. The goods on Canada’s tariff list range from kitchen rolls of aluminum foil to locomotive engines and steel bridges, much of them mirroring the exports and their $20 billion value being tariffed by Trump.

  In an online snit Trump declared that, “Canada has been ‘Ripping Off’ the U.S.A. for decades.” He also wrote that, “I deal with many countries, and Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable.” Not Russia, China, Israel, or North Korea … but Canada. Trump posted about  “my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” who we point out is building missiles capable of reaching California.

  Continuing his America First tirade, Trump also said, “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

  It’s not the “United States” considering that, it’s Trump.

  Former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland writes in The NY Times that all this is “about whether Canada is willing to go from being an ally and a partner, in a relationship governed by treaties and rules, to being a vassal, subject to Washington fiat — like the Venezuela of Delcy Rodríguez, only with snowdrifts and hockey.”

ALWAYS LOVE YOU: Country music star Dolly Parton with the big blonde wigs and bigger personality, died yesterday in Nashville at age 80. She died after “a brief battle with cancer,” her representatives said.

  The funny and outspoken Parton known for her “Dollyisms” was a trailblazer for women in country music and made the entire genre more mainstream. Her songs reflected her background of poverty and loss with injections of hope and love.

  Her top hits included, “Jolene” (1974), “Here You Come Again” (1977), and her ballad “I Will Always Love You”, which topped the charts in 1974 and again in 1982.

  One of her most popular songs was “Coat of Many Colors”:

So with patches on my britches

And holes in both my shoes,

In my coat of many colors

I hurried off to school

Just to find the others laughing

And making fun of me

In my coat of many colors

My Mama made for me

  Parton was a generous and public spirited philanthropist. She established her Dollywood theme park to bring jobs to her impoverished Tennessee county and gave a stipend to every local kid who graduated from high school. Her Imagination Library gave free books to children from birth to age 5.

  She once told The NY Times that, “Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”

INFINITE SCROLL: 

— In a hearing about restoring Donald Trump’s name to the façade of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, lawyers for the Trump administration told a federal judge that if the building is not restored it might need to be demolished.

  After a judge ordered Trump’s name above President Kennedy’s to be removed, the center’s board voted to inscribe the building with a recognition of Trump leading a $250 million renovation. “Without those efforts, the center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” the filing said, “with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”

— With an endorsement from Donald Trump, Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, won the Republican nomination for senator from South Carolina. She has no political experience but she’s already serving out her brother’s term.

POKE IN THE EYE: In a demonstration of how far standards have fallen at CBS News, morning host Nate Burleson posted on Instagram an endorsement and advertisement for a $400,000 Cadillac. Journalists don’t do commercials but Burleson is only acting as a reporter. He also doubles as a professional football analyst and host of the game show “Hollywood Squares.”

  This is the same network that fired three correspondents at “60 Minutes” for defending professional standards.

THE SPIN RACK: An enormous flash flood swept through villages in Nepal along the border with China. The government says as many as 400 travelers are missing. — At least 47 people were killed and more than 50 others kidnapped in a gang attack on a community near Haiti’s capital earlier this week, the United Nations said. The gangs are looking to control the community of Kenscoff because it then lets them surround and control the upscale community of Pétion-Ville and alternate routes connecting Haiti’s capital to its southern region — A swarm of jellyfish that got into the seawater cooling a French nuclear power plant knocked out 32 gigawatts of electricity. — A man was detained yesterday near the US Capitol and the Supreme Court building after police saw him  with a guillotine in the back of his pickup truck. He was cited for illegal parking but the cops say they’ll get to the bottom of this or heads will roll. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, the founder of Duquesne Capital, admits that his essay published by the Wall Street Journal questioning the Trump administration’s handling of the bond market was written with artificial intelligence.

 “I’m not embarrassed by it,” Druckenmiller said when challenged by the news website NOTUS. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”