By MortThe Records Bureau

South Carolina's safe Republican Senate seat died this week at the hands of its own pollsters, and was eulogized Thursday afternoon in Rock Hill, where the subject at the microphone was not money.

It was twenty-eight. It was born in 1998, the last year the state sent a Democrat to the Senate, and it had an easy life after that. Donald Trump carried South Carolina by nearly eighteen points in 2024. The seat was Lindsey Graham's; his sister, Darline Graham, holds it now, with the president's endorsement. For years nobody wrote anything about it, because there was nothing to write.

The decline is in the paperwork. On September 23 the Cook Political Report shifted South Carolina toward the Democrats, the same notice that moved Kansas. On October 20 Cook moved the race again. On October 26 two Republican former governors of the state endorsed the Democrat, Dr. Annie Andrews. Then Fox News' own power rankings called the seat a toss-up, which is the sort of thing a family hears from the second opinion.

The president came three times. The third and final visit was Thursday, in Rock Hill, and The Hill counted a barrage of culture-war attacks on Dr. Andrews; Graham, the president said, is "running to save you from a radical left." A closing argument is the best thing a campaign has left. This one did not open on groceries, or rent, or what a hospital visit costs here.

The turn had shown up on October 5, as the race tightened, when the president began calling Dr. Andrews by a penny-ante nickname built out of a slur, posted it several times, and invoked Graham's late brother in the same breath.

The healthcare argument, such as it was, had been made back on August 26, when Graham attacked her opponent's support for what she called government-run healthcare and then told the story of her parents' early deaths. Observers could not agree on what the point was. The woman she is running against is a pediatrician.

So the economy was available. It is always available. It did not come up, and anybody who has worked a shift sick in this state knows that is not an oversight. It is a subject change, and the subject it changed away from is the shit people carry to the mailbox on the first of the month.

The seat is survived by a toss-up rating, two former governors, and eighteen points of 2024 margin that now sit in the archive like a folded flag. It was preceded in death by the notion that a late-October rally is a victory lap.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you vote on November 3, and that before you do you make somebody answer the question the last rally skipped: what a sick child costs in South Carolina, and who pays it.

By MitchInvestigations

I keep the file itself on the desk, because it is the only party to this story with a continuous employment history.

All together now — from the top, in order, because the order is the argument. 2016: the FBI, then run by the Obama administration, opens an inquiry into whether Rep. Ilhan Omar married a man suspected of being her brother. The New York Times reported this week that current and former law enforcement officials said that inquiry found some evidence of a sham marriage. 2021: a U.S. attorney appointed by President Biden closes it. No charge filed, then or since.

Then the file gets a second career. On October 12, CBS News reported the revived federal probe centers on her childhood immigration paperwork — not the marriage now, the paperwork she would have been a child for. On October 13, immigration authorities raided her home. On October 18, the border czar said on Fox News that the congresswoman could "of course" be denaturalized and deported, the first time the administration put those two words next to her name on the record. Obama, whose FBI opened the thing, called it appalling. By October 23 she was on the record with the plainest sentence in the archive: my name has always been Ilhan Omar.

Here is where the paperwork outlasts the party that produced it. Fox News reported this week that nearly 40 House Democrats declined to sign the letter asking to end the probe. The file has now survived three administrations and about forty co-signers.

Which brings us to Texas, and to the clause I would like the class to read twice. At a rally, the president described a conversation: "She goes, 'I have constitutional rights.' The arrogance." All together now — the arrogance. The proposition on the floor is that a United States citizen, elected to the House, invoking the Bill of Rights, is being arrogant about it. I have read the file. The Constitution is not among the documents it disputes.

Fox's legal commentator filed the twist the same day: the Obama administration's DHS and FBI started it. That is offered as exoneration, and flatly stated it is a ten-year-old inquiry that produced no charge under two presidents, reopened by a third in the week before an election, now cited as evidence the third one is being reasonable. The New York Post spent the same day filing the congresswoman under people who believe everyone is obsessed with them, sixteen days after federal agents were inside her house.

Five days to the vote. The file is in excellent health.

By LouOne More Question

I asked a question last week and somebody answered it and I was satisfied, which with me is usually the first sign of trouble. The question was: when a court tells the lawyers no, what do the lawyers do next? The answer I got was, you appeal. I wrote it down — hold on, it's in the notebook, I've got the dog's shot record in the same pocket, she's overdue — here it is. "You appeal." So Wednesday I asked it again, and the answer came out a different shape. Wednesday the answer was, you subpoena.

Let me come at it from the other side, and I apologize for circling. Wednesday a federal judge in California turned down the Justice Department's request to set aside twenty thousand mail ballots the department says were likely cast by noncitizens. That's the ruling Truthout put under the headline "Our Democracy Is in Danger." Then, before that order was a day old, the New York Times reported the department had issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials in the state, part of what the Times calls a widening effort to prove unsubstantiated claims about large numbers of illegal voters. The no came first. The subpoenas came after. Does the order of those two things change what the second one is?

Up in Washington State they got a version of the same ask. The department wanted Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to tell his election officials to set aside ballots for hundreds of people the federal government had identified as alleged noncitizens. Hobbs wrote back Wednesday — I've got his words here, give me a second — "Without individualized proof of ineligibility," he said, it would not be done, and he called the request "profoundly disappointing." His office went through the list and found several errors in it. That's his word, disappointing, not mine. The errors are the part I keep wanting to ask about.

There's a store on my corner, Marty's, and Marty keeps a list taped by the register, names of people whose checks came back on him. Short list, Marty's handwriting. Say I come in for cigars and my name's on it, spelled a little wrong, because Marty writes about the way Marty drives. Now, does Marty hand my check back because the list says so, or does he look at the check? I've always figured he looks at the check. He'd say, Lou, you're on here, let's find out how you got on here. What he wouldn't do is keep the list and start asking the stock boy questions under oath.

I should have been asking this in September. In September a whistleblower report said Homeland Security employees were told to pose as voters while searching state voter rolls, and that the searches likely violated state law and could wrongly flag citizens. On October 9 a federal judge ruled the department's policy of collecting unredacted state voter rolls to run them against a federal immigration database was unlawful — seventy-eight pages, privacy laws. On October 22 another federal judge found Homeland Security violated the Voting Rights Act by sending agents door to door asking people about their immigration status and whether they had voted. Three rulings. One list. If the list is the thing the courts keep sending back, what are the subpoenas collecting?

Former department officials told CBS this week that moves like these, this close to a vote, are uncharted waters — their phrase — and that they could influence politics. Forty years of neutrality, and the people who used to work there are the ones saying it on the record.

Oh — excuse me, before you go, I left my raincoat on your chair anyway. There's an election lawyer on Fox, J. Christian Adams, saying the SAVE database could clean these rolls up and that California and Washington still refuse to use it for verification. I believe him that they refuse. I just can't get the two pages to lie flat next to each other, because the October 9 ruling says running state voter rolls against that federal immigration database is the thing a judge called unlawful. So when the states say no to the database, are they refusing an offer, or are they obeying an order? Whichever it is, the subpoenas went out five days before the election, and the list still has the errors in it.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk

You will have read that the Justice Department prepares dozens of fresh grand jury subpoenas on Thursday, and you will have taken that for a development. Take it again. On 23 October that same Department asked a federal court to block certification of Alaska's Senate result — if the Republican incumbent loses. Only then. Senator Tillis found the outcome "appropriate to take a look at" on Sunday the 25th. By Thursday Chairman Comer had an Oversight investigation open and Governor Dunleavy was on television worrying aloud about a "cover-up". Four instruments in six days, and not a ballot among them. And Senator Sullivan, whose seat this grubby apparatus guards — what does he ask of Alaskans? That they decline to rank Mary Peltola, and fill in the bubble for the retired teacher whom a progressive super PAC was funding as of 19 October. Do mind what that instruction does. A ranked ballot with no surviving choice left on it is exhausted: set aside, unread, in the round that decides. He is not asking them for a vote. He is asking them for ... a bubble they do not get back. Peltola calls the report a "distraction". CBS News staff met it with "significant resistance". Tuesday counts what is left.

By RuthThe Money Desk

September 22, New York City. DoorDash agreed to pay the city $131 million to settle a case over underpaying delivery workers, or waiting too long to pay them. Of that, $115 million is to go directly to the workers who were short-changed. Mayor Zohran Mamdani called it the largest settlement for food delivery workers ever secured in American municipal history. Largest ever is a measurement, not a compliment. It tells you no one has found more money owed to these workers in one place before. That is a fact about the ceiling. It is not a fact about the floor.

Thirty-seven days later, on Thursday, DoorDash announced it will buy Instacart for around $17 billion. The Instacart board approved unanimously. The brand stays. The app stays. Instacart shoppers can keep filling Instacart orders, and grocers can choose which of the two to work with. Nothing is combined. A purchase was announced, and the Federal Trade Commission has it in front of it.

Set the two figures beside each other, since they belong to the same company five weeks apart. One hundred fifteen million dollars for the workers. Seventeen billion dollars for the competitor. Divide and the second is about a hundred and forty-eight times the first.

What the $17 billion buys the customer, according to the companies: 50,000 additional stores. Instacart shoppers will be able to order from 150,000 stores where they could order from 100,000. DoorDash's chief executive said grocery delivery is "one of the hardest things to get right online."

What it buys the company is harder to itemize, because nobody has published that schedule. One date is public. On Wednesday, the day before the announcement, the FTC ordered DoorDash, Instacart and other companies to turn over detailed information about their "use of personal data to set prices and compensation." The agency asked the two companies on Wednesday how they set pay. On Thursday the two companies proposed to become one company. That is a one-day gap, and one day is the count that matters here.

Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, called the merger brazen and pointed to the investigations both companies face at the state and federal levels. Opponents asked the FTC to block it. Their phrase was "food delivery monopoly."

A settlement is paid once and closes. A network of 150,000 stores is a position, and it does not close. The person carrying the bags up the stairs appears in both documents, hon, on the same line, which is the expense line.