By ChipStaff Writer

The Government Accountability Office's Wednesday report makes a modest ask: when an ICE officer draws a weapon, the body camera should turn on by itself. ICE's answer, filed in the same report, is no. The agency would rather the officer decide, case by case, whether the camera runs. That is a defensible system, if you assume the camera gets turned on in the first place.

In September, an ICE officer shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man, through the window of his car while he was working a DoorDash delivery in Austin. The officer had been issued a body camera. The officer was not wearing it. Officials said afterward they weren't sure why.

A second officer at the scene did have a camera running, and it caught part of the shooting — part, because a camera that is off when the trigger is pulled only records whatever someone remembers to switch on afterward. Two shootings, two cities, the same missing footage both times.

These are the cameras the GAO was reviewing when it wrote its recommendation: equipment bought with historic levels of funding funneled to the immigration agency, issued to officers in the field, and, in both shootings on the public record so far, not actually on when the officer fired. Both shootings happened before the GAO's report was finished. The fix under review was built for exactly that gap — a camera that switches on by itself the moment a weapon comes out, so the decision doesn't depend on anyone remembering, or wanting, to flip the switch. ICE's review of that fix, completed this week, was to turn it down.

ICE's position is that officer discretion should stay in charge of when the camera runs. Put plainly: the discretion that already failed twice this fall, in two different shootings, in two different cities, is the discretion the agency is choosing to keep. That isn't a defense of the policy. That's a description of it.

So the rule stands exactly as it stood before either shooting: the camera comes on when an officer decides it should. In Austin, no one decided. In New York, no one decided. The recommendation written to take that decision out of anyone's hands is the one ICE just turned down.

By RuthThe Money Desk

The campaign press release went out Wednesday with a number: $64 million in the third quarter. By Thursday every outlet from the Daily Caller to NBC News was using the word "record," because it is one — the most any Senate candidate has raised in a single quarter this cycle. The campaign's own accounting adds the detail that matters: ninety-seven cents of every dollar came in at $100 or less.

Ken Paxton, the man standing between Talarico and the seat, raised $18 million over the same three months. That is less than a third of what his opponent brought in, and it is already Paxton's high-water mark — double the $9 million he raised the quarter before. He is accelerating. He is still losing the arithmetic by a factor of more than three.

Run the larger ledger and the quarter gets stranger. The campaign says it has raised $134 million since Talarico announced his candidacy last year. Subtract this quarter's $64 million, and the three quarters before it — the ones that built the campaign from nothing — brought in roughly $70 million combined. One quarter, by itself, came within six million dollars of matching everything the campaign had raised in all the quarters before it. The fundraising is not decelerating toward the finish; it is compounding.

Then came the other number nobody put in a press release: zero. By the weekend the rumor had an audio clip attached, allegedly an Ohio facility employee confirming a discharge. By Sunday night it had collapsed — in mere hours, the lifespan a false story gets when the only thing standing between it and the public record is a phone call to the man's own campaign, which will tell a reporter, accurately, that the candidate has the flu.

Ninety-seven percent of a record quarter came in small enough to be lunch money. The rumor built to bury it didn't survive the weekend.

By MortThe Records Bureau

The Missouri Legislature enacted a congressional map in 2022. In 2025 it enacted a new one. That recitation is not mine. It is the U.S. Supreme Court's own, set down unsigned and flat this September, the way a clerk reads a ledger aloud at a wake.

The state's highest court had directed Missouri to use the older map. In September the U.S. Supreme Court left that order in place. Hours later, on September 8, a federal judge ruled that Missouri should use the new map, the one that favors Republicans, for now. One state, two maps, three courts, one afternoon, and two instructions a county clerk could not follow at the same time.

On September 25 the Court ruled against the new map again — the third knockdown, by Common Dreams' count. It was not a Court in a mood to refuse anybody that Friday. The same day, it greenlit the administration's voter purge database.

Then this morning's wire, from ProPublica: frustrated by losses in the courts, Missouri Republicans want to change how the state's top judges are selected.

So we gather. Died this week in Jefferson City, after three short illnesses, the practice of answering a court loss by going back to the drawing table. It was born in the plainest arithmetic there is: you lose, you read the opinion, you fix the part the opinion says is broken, you file again. It was a dull little habit. It kept the fight about the map.

Filing again is what it had already done twice. Instead the subject changed, from what the judges held to how the judges arrive. There is no scandal in that, and no mystery; it is a proposal, which is to say paperwork, and paperwork is how most of this shit actually gets done. We are told the courts are a check on the mapmakers. This week the mapmakers took an interest in the staffing.

It was preceded in death by the assumption that a party out of arguments runs out of moves. It leaves behind every voter in Missouri whose district number now depends less on a pen than on a personnel process.

In lieu of flowers, find out this week how the judges in your own state are chosen, and say the answer out loud to somebody who does not know it yet.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk

You are looking for the lie among the three. There is none. Tuesday, with Russian missiles inbound, Ukraine's Starlink missile tracker failed, and Musk said any restriction on Starshield would come from the United States government. Wednesday he said Zelensky should "go". Today Ukraine reports access improved and the speed ceiling still disrupting its "missions" — a ceiling, do note, not a cut. The terminals belong to others. The Pentagon funds them, SpaceX manages them, and what Ukraine has is the use of another party's property at sufferance, which is possession the owner has not yet troubled to end. Someone will say the throttle has been explained. It has been ... attributed. Three times, differently, by the one man at the switch. Washington has threatened to stop passing air-strike warnings if Ukraine keeps striking Russian refineries, which Trump blames for diesel prices. Six dead in Kyiv. Six hundred thousand in the dark.