The count. One independent tracker records 135 confirmed golf days in the first 598 days of the second term, about one day in every 4.4, the latest at Bedminster on September 7 1. Obama's 333 rounds took eight years 2. The same tracker, using a Government Accountability Office figure of $3.4 million per trip to Mar-a-Lago, estimates about $78.2 million for 23 Florida trips 1.
And the course. In July 2025 he flew to Scotland, visiting Turnberry and Aberdeenshire, where his family business's new course opened to the public on August 13 3. The promise was no time for golf. The tracker has the time, down to the day.
The promise, from a rally in August 2016: "I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me" 1. It sat beside a standard he set for others; in October 2014 he wrote: "Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf" 2.
The fair defense of the golf is that presidents golf, and they golf a lot. CBS's Mark Knoller counted 333 rounds for Barack Obama over eight years 3. A president on a course is still a president, with the phone in the cart. By that measure, golf is a presidential tradition, and this president is keeping it. A mulligan is a do-over you award yourself, and the question is only how many.
“I wrote down the promise in 2016: "I'm not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me." Then the tweet from 2014 about his predecessor, "with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S." Then I asked my brother-in-law, who golfs, to help me with a tracker somebody keeps online: a hundred thirty-five days in five hundred ninety-eight. He said that's a better schedule than he's got, and he's retired. Sorry, you've got a tee time, I'll be quick. The man who said he wouldn't have time — where did the time come from?”— Lou
🍺
“"I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me." Somebody's keeping count: a hundred thirty-five golf days in five hundred ninety-eight, one day in four and a half. And in 2014 he was tweeting that Obama spent a day playing golf "with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S." A mulligan is a do-over you give yourself. He gave himself the whole promise.”
“The president does his best thinking on the course, which means the golf days are working days and the working days are, if anything, the days off, so by that math he's been on the job about a hundred thirty-five days more than his critics.”
Measles elimination, certified by the United States government in the year 2000, is dead in Pennsylvania. It was twenty-six years old. The cause, by the state's own count, is six.
It was already failing by October 4, when officials in Harrisburg said it was "only a matter of time" before the disease spread past its epicenter — a county that, like most in the Commonwealth, has no health department of its own — citing a fifth death already confirmed among 943 cases across 39 counties. The next day the case count passed 1,000 outright, the largest outbreak Pennsylvania has recorded in more than three decades; the same dispatch noted that New York had declared its own state of emergency about measles rates there. On Friday, October 9, Pennsylvania recorded its sixth death.
By Wednesday the count stood at 1,222 cases, up from the 1,004 confirmed twelve days before. …
A coalition of nonprofit groups and labor unions filed an emergency petition on Friday aimed at blocking the Federal Communications Commission's recent repeal of a decades-old rule that limited consolidation among television broadcasters, a move that would allow media conglomerates to seize even more control over local news stations. The…
State has confirmed six measles-related deaths and county at center of outbreak lacks its own health department The county at the center of Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak is at a clear disadvantage because, local officials say, it lacks its own health department and it will now get special assistance from the Centers for Disease Control…
Today's dish is a bill the host already signed and then declined to pay. On the nineteenth of September, Congress's Russia sanctions law — the one bearing the name of the senator who championed it before he died in July — took its first signature. On Friday evening, the day before that law was due to take effect, a second signature waived nearly all of it, sanctions and tariffs together.
This did not begin on Friday. On the tenth of October, Zelensky criticised a separate deal letting Russian diesel back onto world markets; the same day, Trump told reporters Zelensky 'could have settled this war many times' and that Ukraine should 'get a new leader.' On the eleventh, seven senators on the Foreign Relations Committee answered that Congress had banned Russian energy imports in 2022 to stop American money financing the war.
Clive Settled. …
"I'll meet with Putin. I'll meet with Zelensky... And within 24 hours, that war will be settled" - Trump, CNN town hall, 10 May 2023. CNN counted 53 separate occasions he promised it. CNN fact check, 25 April 2025 (all 53 instances)
Invited to the European leaders' summit in Brussels on Friday, Volodymyr Zelensky, weakened by what he called the 'betrayal' of Donald Trump, asked his allies for an additional €70 billion in aid for the year 2027.
President Trump on Saturday pushed back on criticism from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian diesel amid the Russia-Ukraine war. The president told reporters outside the White House that Zelensky “could have settled this war many times,” but “chose not to.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decried President Trump’s late-night decision to waive sanctions and tariffs against Russia days before they were set to take effect under a new law. “At a time when the Russians have carried out such a massive attack on our energy sector, a decision was unfortunately made in America to completely…
Several GOP lawmakers criticized President Trump’s move to exempt Russia from the sanctions bill he signed law last month, with Sen. Thom Tillis (R- N.C.) calling the move "beyond irresponsible." Trump signed an executive order Friday evening to waive sanctions against Russia in a legislative package that was meant to put pressure on the…
A bipartisan group of seven lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee condemned President Trump’s recent deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which would lift sanctions on Russia and permit the flow of its oil into the global economy. “Congress explicitly banned Russian energy imports in 2022 to prevent American dollars…
"I'll meet with Putin. I'll meet with Zelensky... And within 24 hours, that war will be settled" - Trump, CNN town hall, 10 May 2023. CNN counted 53 separate occasions he promised it CNN fact check, 25 April 2025 (all 53 instances)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bashed President Donald Trump’s deal with Russia to supply millions of tons of diesel fuel to global markets, giving arguably his most direct and biting criticism of Trump so far. Trump announced the deal on Friday in a post on Truth Social after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin…
I've got a receipt in my coat pocket, from the garage by the courthouse, four dollars, dated Tuesday, and I don't remember parking there at all. That's the thing about a receipt — it tells you exactly what happened whether you remember it or not. I was looking for my reading glasses and found this instead, and it got me thinking about paperwork, which is a bad habit of mine, thinking about paperwork.
Because somewhere there's a piece of paper from a long time ago — childhood paperwork, I believe, filled out by a man for his daughter — the kind every family fills out once and forgets the minute the stamp goes on it. His daughter grew up, ran for Congress, Minnesota, first Somali American to do it. And on the 12th of this month, federal agents went into her Washington home over that same old form. I wrote the date down. The 12th.
Now, you'd figure a raid like that starts and ends with the one piece of paper. …
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed - while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
Federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar's Washington, D.C., home Monday morning. Sources tell CBS News a yearslong probe into Omar involves immigration paperwork that was completed by her late father when she was a child.
On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington, D.C., home of Congressmember Ilhan Omar. Omar has faced years of racist targeting from President Trump over her ethnicity and immigrant background. She immigrated to the United States as a refugee from Somalia when she was a child.
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed - while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
Minnesota lawmaker’s attorneys asked for return of seized items and the preservation of any recordings of search Ilhan Omar ’s attorneys have asked the US Department of Justice to return property that federal agents removed days earlier from her home during a search. The lawyers for the Minnesota Democrat contended that the seizure as…
Following years of threats from President Donald Trump and other Republicans to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman's Washington, DC home was raided on Monday morning by agents with the Department of Homeland Security. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has confirmed that the raid was carried out as part of a judicially…
Federal authorities issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas in inquiry into potential immigration fraud US politics live – latest updates Federal authorities investigating the Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar seized the Democratic lawmaker’s phone and have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to some of her…
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) released a fundraising email focused on the federal investigation for which agents raided her home on Monday. “Stand with Ilhan Omar,”
§
The serials
Long stories in short chapters: the walk from a receipt in your hand to the ledger it lands in.
Commencing in these pages
THE HOUSE IS A PARK
“The house costs $15.5 million a year to run and $600 million this year to add a room; Congress voted on the first number.” — from the editor’s desk
Chapter One opens on a spray-on truck-bed liner, the option the dealer adds for a few hundred dollars over the sticker, a black skin that bonds to the steel and never comes off
§
Also in today’s edition
NFL activates its exempt list for a second arrest this season, with punishment from the first still pending.the receipts: 2 stories
Which raises the obvious football question: if a player can be cleared to suit up while the charges sit open on the docket, what exactly is the exempt list protecting — the roster, the schedule, or Sunday's broadcast window this reporter is contractually obligated to fill.
Eighty-seven million dollars is the size of the gap Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto wants closed. The gap sits inside a nonprofit called LAFLA, a group backed by mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. The money came from the city's "Mansion Tax" and was meant to build housing. The audit demand, reported October 16, does not say where the money went. It says the city does not know.
Start with the number itself. That qualifier is the first entry in the ledger: the city is not disputing a specific sum, it is disputing a ceiling. Eighty-seven million is the most the gap could be, which means the actual figure, whatever it turns out to be, has not been produced by anyone yet. An audit exists to find that number. As of this filing, no audit has finished.
How can Nithya Raman run the city of LA if one of her pet projects is missing $87 million? That’s a question voters will be asking after the city attorney’s latest bombshell report.
I went to the post office to mail the renewal for my car registration — the form with the box that wants a return address — and I didn't have a label, so I stood at the counter trying to remember my own zip code like a man accused of something. I got the stamp. On the way out, the rack by the door had this morning's paper folded open to a page that had nothing to do with my car.
That page, from the New York Post, today, said a congressman from California got an envelope mailed from New York with a return address linked to something called the DSA, and powder inside, the kind the FBI is now checking alongside the Postal Inspection Service and Capitol Police. A return address linked to a group isn't the same as one belonging to it. The paper didn't say the group sent it. It said the address was linked, and I'd rather leave that word where the paper left it.
Federal investigators said they are looking into suspicious letters containing unknown substances that were mailed to state election officials and congressional offices.
The FBI, US Postal Inspection Service and Capitol Police are investigating letters, some of which have been intercepted before reaching their destination.
Several lawmakers said Friday their offices across the country had received suspicious mailings following reports earlier this week of letters containing unknown substances at U.S. election offices. Sens.
Ballots in each state's comparable statewide primary contests, certified state by state - not party registration, and not a November prediction. Top-two states (CA, WA, AK) have no party ballots to count; unopposed-side states are counted as cast. Ten states await certification and join as their canvasses land.
Everything the headlines were drawn from: 176 items from 44 outlets, gathered through the day, every right or mainstream headline answered or rebuked before it renders. RSS.
The hens, a man counts in spring. The fox counted in winter.