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Senators won't say they trust Hegseth; the committee overseeing him still isn't briefed on his leak probe.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 6 September 2026

Sen. John Kennedy was asked plainly whether he still has confidence in his own party's Defense Secretary. On NBC's "Meet the Press," Kristen Welker put the question to him directly. Kennedy's answer: "it's not my place to have confidence in him." That is a sitting senator, on national television, declining to say he trusts the man who runs the Pentagon.

Eight days earlier, on Aug. 29, The Hill reported that Hegseth had personally blocked the promotions of four Army officers, some of whom have ties to generals he had already fired. On Sept. 2, Sen. Thom Tillis went further, saying "I have never witnessed more inept management" and calling on the President to fire him — a line Tillis could afford because he isn't running for reelection. By Sept. 3, The Hill was reporting Hegseth was "headed for clash with GOP senators" over staff turnover and a war in Iran with no stated end.

Then came Cait Conley, a 16-year Army veteran running against Rep. Mike Lawler, who told Fox News she would vote for articles of impeachment against Hegseth and called him a national-security "hazard." A challenger running against a sitting House member said, plainly, what the sitting senator would only decline to answer.

And on that same Sunday, Rep. Jason Crow — who sits on both House Intelligence and House Armed Services — said Congress still hasn't been briefed on a Pentagon leak investigation that Hegseth himself is running. Crow called it "part of his effort to create fear and clamp down on information coming out of the Pentagon." The man running an inquiry into who's talking has not told the committee built to watch him what the inquiry actually is.

Line up the receipts: a senator who won't vouch for him, an Army secretary who quit, another senator calling the management the worst he's seen, four blocked promotions with an asterisk attached, a challenger willing to say "hazard" and "impeachment" out loud, and an intelligence committee still waiting on a briefing about the one investigation Hegseth controls himself. Every quote in this pile is public record. The thing all those quotes are circling is not.

That's not a hearing. That's a waiting room with better lighting, and Congress is still holding the number they were given at the door.

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Trump books himself for two nights of his midterm convention; his own Senate leader books zero.

By ChipStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 6 September 2026

Give the party credit: with President Trump giving both the convention's opening night keynote and the closing night remarks, organizers moved fast to make sure the room matched the moment. Call it a scheduling opportunity. Call it — fine, call it what the Examiner called it: a last-minute push to fill the arena, because ticket sales weren't already doing that on their own.

That's the state of play in Dallas this week. Trump, originally booked for one night, is now speaking on both. Two appearances from the same man, in the same arena, that the party is still working to fill days before doors open. No figure on that effort appears anywhere in the reporting, so I won't invent one. What's on the record is the push itself, ongoing as of this week.

What's also on the record is who isn't walking onto that stage at all. Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn't speaking either night. Unlike his House counterpart, he's absent from the RNC's own keynote list. That's not a snub. That's — fine, that's a snub.

It doesn't stand alone. Susan Collins, according to a source familiar with her plans, won't be at the convention either, in keeping with what that source described as her longstanding practice of skipping these events. Other Republicans in competitive races are reportedly planning to skip the gathering as well. When the Senate's top Republican and its own front-line candidates start finding reasons not to attend their party's marquee event, the empty seats aren't a ticketing problem.

Earlier this week — three days before Thune's absence was confirmed — Vice President Vance was asked directly whether he'd endorse Thune for another term as Senate leader if Republicans hold the chamber. "It's not my business," Vance said. Maybe it isn't. The timing still says plenty the quote doesn't.

Byron York, watching from inside the Examiner, called the president's approval rating heading into the midterms "not good." He didn't attach a figure to it — none of the wire copy does — but he didn't need to. He's the one who said plainly that a bad number here has, historically, cost the president's party seats in the fall.

So: a stage built for two nights, a leadership seat left empty on purpose, and an approval rating widely described but not quantified anywhere in the reporting so far. The push to fill the room continues. That part, at least, isn't in dispute.

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Hoax renaming New Mexico gets debunked; Trump reposts the identical map anyway, his fourth rebrand this year

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 7 September 2026

Start with the water, because that's still the throughline. On August 27th, Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America" in the middle of a trade fight with Canada. Five days later, by Tuesday, September 1st, Google Maps and Apple Maps had both adopted the rename — a border lake, half of it Canadian, now relabeled on two of the largest mapping platforms on earth because a press release said so.

Then the joke moved to a shipping lane. On September 2nd, with a war against Iran already more than six months old and diesel prices spiking toward a record high off the strait closure that war caused, Trump mused on Truth Social about renaming the Strait of Hormuz "Trump Strait," adding that, "like America itself, it would be 'hotter' than ever before." A waterway that sets the price of diesel at the pump, floated as a personal branding exercise between exclamation points.

Now it's New Mexico's turn, and the mechanics finally show themselves clean, with no executive order to even dress it up. Some account invented a fake order renaming the state "New America." Reporters ran it down and killed it — there was no order, no signature, no document behind the claim. That should have been the end of it, a correction printed, a hoax filed and forgotten. Instead, on Sunday, Trump posted the exact map from the hoax to his own account: an X through "Mexico," "America" stamped underneath, no order attached, no correction acknowledged, just the picture, live, from the President of the United States.

Count it out. First the Gulf of Mexico, renamed earlier in his second term. Then Lake Ontario, by executive order, in five days flat from signature to two competing map apps agreeing with him. Then, threatened rather than signed, the Strait of Hormuz. And now New Mexico, done with no order at all — just a debunked hoax picked back up and reposted as if the debunking never happened.

The pattern isn't that he likes renaming things. It's that the distance between a joke somebody made for laughs and a label two of the world's biggest tech companies push to your phone has collapsed to five days, and this time it collapsed to zero — no signature required, no agency in between, just a repost. The hoax and the policy are now the same document. Nobody had to write the second one.

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Giuliani demands Mamdani skip 9/11 memorial mid anti-Muslim diatribe, days after retired officers made the same ask.

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 7 September 2026

New York City buries its dead every September 11th, and every September 11th somebody tries to keep the mayor from showing up to do it. This year the somebody arrived in three waves, and if you line them up in order you can watch the ask get louder while staying exactly the same.

Wave one: August 30th. Retired Port Authority police officers tell Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul to stay away from Ground Zero for the 25th anniversary commemoration. Not "let us grieve in peace." Not "give us a moment." Stay away. A polite, specific request that the sitting mayor of New York not attend the ceremony marking the worst attack on his own city.

Wave two: September 3rd. Mamdani answers without naming anyone. The memorial, he says, should be about remembrance, not politics. He says he's going. That is the whole statement — a mayor confirming he will do the part of the job where you show up.

Wave three: today. Rudy Giuliani, a man whose entire second career was built on having stood at Ground Zero, delivers an anti-Muslim diatribe and, somewhere inside it, lands on the identical conclusion the retired officers reached a week earlier. Skip it. Same demand, new packaging — traded a quiet letter for a public tirade and kept the punch line.

Here is what never moves across three waves and two very different registers: nobody asking has one note to add to the ceremony itself. Not a name read differently, not a moment of silence lengthened, not a single thing about the actual dead. The entire content of the request, from the retired cops to the former mayor, is that the current mayor's body should not be standing on that plaza. That's not remembrance. That's a guest list, and the guy running it used to run the city.

Sit at the end of the bar long enough and you learn to clock the pattern before the paper does: when the ask has no content except somebody's absence, the ask was never about the dead. It's about who gets to be photographed being sad in public, and who doesn't. Mamdani says he's going anyway. Write that down — it's the only fact in this whole story that isn't a demand.

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Envoys meet Putin, tell Kyiv it's 'encouraging,' one day after being warned that's the whole point

By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 7 September 2026

Steve Witkoff called it "encouraging." Jared Kushner said they "really feel good." Witkoff himself used the phrase "good resolution" on Sunday, hours after the two of them sat down with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, and there is no reason to read those words as anything but exactly what they say. This is a peace process moving forward, and "encouraging" is the honest word for a process moving forward. It is the correct word. I would use it myself, if the sequence were different.

The sequence is not different. Sunday's "encouraging" sit-down with Zelensky came a day after Witkoff and Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow — the New York Times has them arriving in Kyiv "a day after talks with Putin in Moscow." The Washington Examiner had already told its readers what a Moscow visit would do: on September 4, one day before that meeting, the paper's own editors wrote that Putin doesn't want peace and that the envoys' visit "will only enable his propaganda." That is the specific charge, printed by a paper that otherwise says the envoys "deserve praise." One day between the warning and the meeting it warned about. The meeting happened anyway.

So "good resolution" needs a resolution to point to. What's actually on the table? Ukrainian foreign policy aide Ihor Zhovkva said, in March 2022, that Kyiv would discuss neutrality if it came with security guarantees, so long as no territory changed hands. That is the only figure on the public record from the Ukrainian side, and today's wire does not carry an update to it. "Encouraging" describes a mood in a room. It does not describe a number on paper. Witkoff has a mood. He does not, in anything filed today, have a number.

Call it "substantive," call it "important" — Witkoff's words too, from that same Sunday. Call it whatever the room wants. A meeting with Putin, followed a day later by warm words about the process Putin just sat through, is what the Examiner's warning described before it happened: enabling his propaganda. Not a coincidence. What the warning said it would be.

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Man carrying two pistols and a Taser who charged through crowd toward Ohio governor candidate is charged with misdemeanor

By LouOne More Question · the wee small hours edition, 7 September 2026

I want to tell you about the toll plaza on 76, and I promise it gets to Ohio.

There's a scanner over every lane out there that reads your transponder and sorts you into a class before your car's even cleared the gantry — two axles, five axles, whatever you're declared as — and that's the toll you pay. Not what's strapped to the roof rack. Not what's riding in the bed. My wife's brother hauled a wood chipper through that plaza for six months on a two-axle rate because the sensor was never built to look past the first two wheels. Nobody at the plaza is lying to you, exactly. The machine just wasn't given a lane for the whole vehicle, only the part it was told to count. I think about that scanner more than a grown man should. I thought about it again this week, reading about a man in Ohio.

Here's what I've got, and I'm working off three separate wire pieces, so bear with me. The New York Times says the man had two pistols and a Taser on him, and that the authorities say he did not draw either weapon. That's one. Mahoning County Sheriff Jerry Greene told CBS the man "aggressively shoved his way through the crowd" toward Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor. That's two. Fox News, filing the night before those other two ran, has the same man knocking fairgoers over forcing his way toward her at the Canfield Fair — Fox is the one that names the fair, nobody else does, so I want to credit that to them specifically and not spread it around. That's three.

So: two pistols, a Taser, a crowd shoved through, people knocked down, closing on a man's — a candidate's — position at a county fair. And the charge that came back, per the Times, is misdemeanor assault.

Misdemeanor. I keep landing on that word and I'm sorry, I know it's just one word pulled off a wire dispatch, but a toll scanner reads the axles it's built to read, and I think a charge sheet might work the same way. Does it weigh what a man was carrying, or only what his hands did once he got there? I've gone through everything in front of me and I can't find where those two facts — the arsenal and the misdemeanor — sit in the same sentence anywhere. They're in the same weekend. Are they in the same paragraph? Not that I can find.

I had the garage door up when I was reading this, fan belt trouble again, don't ask, and I kept thinking about that gantry — how the thing you're carrying and the thing you're charged for don't have to agree with each other, and nobody has to explain why not.

Oh — one more thing, hold on, before you go. There's a line that ran with this story, and I wrote it down because I liked the phrasing: "this kind of violence has no place in Ohio." I went back through everything I've got to find who said it. It isn't signed. No name sits next to it in anything I've read. So let me ask you the only question I've got left, because I think you can answer it from what's already on the page: who's willing to put their name on that sentence, next to the one that already has a name attached — misdemeanor?

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Giuliani demands Mamdani skip 9/11 memorial to keep it apolitical, inside an anti-Muslim diatribe

By LouOne More Question · the milkman edition, 7 September 2026

I want to tell you about a sign first, and I promise we get to the part that matters, because they turned out to be the same sign, and I didn't believe that either until I checked.

There's a corner store I go to for the paper and the dog's biscuits, and behind the register, taped up next to the lottery tickets, there's a sign that says WE DON'T DISCUSS POLITICS HERE. I've stood in that store and listened to the man behind the register tell four customers in a row exactly which city councilman is a criminal, exactly why, and exactly who they shouldn't vote for in the primary, all while that sign is looking down at both of us. I used to think that was a funny little contradiction, a guy who doesn't know his own store. Now I think the sign isn't confused at all. The sign is doing exactly what it's there to do, which is announce that the politics happening under it doesn't count as politics, because he's the one saying it.

I wrote this down, so bear with me, because the order matters and I want to get it right. On September 3rd, the mayor of New York — first 9/11 memorial of his term — said the ceremony should be about remembrance, not politics. That's the whole statement. Said it plain, said it early, and then, as far as I can find, said nothing else about it.

Four days later — I've got the date here, September 7th — Rudy Giuliani said Mamdani should skip the memorial. Said it so the day could stay free of politics. And he said it, this is the part I keep having to read twice, in the middle of a diatribe about Muslims. Not near it. Inside it.

Now here's my fixation, and I apologize in advance, because I'm going to come back to it once more before I let you go. The word is apolitical. Everybody in this story reaches for it. The mayor used it first, without needing to raise his voice to get there. The other man needed a diatribe about an entire religion to arrive at the same word. I keep asking myself what kind of a request for no politics requires that much politics just to be delivered.

I think about my car a little here, if you'll let me — the one with the fan belt that's been making that noise since spring. I know what's wrong with it. I could tell you what's wrong with it in one sentence, calm, over the fence, and you'd believe me, because the fact doesn't need decoration to be true. It's when somebody needs forty-five minutes and a lot of heat to convince you their engine's fine that you start checking under the hood yourself. A true thing about keeping a ceremony politics-free shouldn't need a diatribe to carry it the last ten feet.

Excuse me — before you go, one more thing, because I found the other page and I don't want to lose it. Back on August 30th, before any of this, a group of retired Port Authority officers asked two people to stay away from Ground Zero this year: Mamdani, and Governor Hochul. Two names. By September 7th, when Giuliani made his demand, only one of those two names was still on it. I don't know what happened to the other name. I just noticed it went missing somewhere between the store and the register.

So here's what I've got, laid out in order, dates and all, and I'll let you do the arithmetic I'm not allowed to do for you: one man said the day should be about remembrance, and stopped talking. The other man needed a speech about an entire religion to say the word apolitical, and the only name he kept was the mayor's. Which one of them actually kept it apolitical?

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Serbia calls convicted genocide commander's funeral private, sends ministers and state media to eulogize him anyway.

By LouOne More Question · the coffee break edition, 7 September 2026

I don't have the money for a private funeral. I priced one two Aprils ago, for my wife's uncle, a plain service with a closed casket and folding chairs in the back room at Petrillo's, and it came to fourteen hundred dollars before flowers. I still owe part of that to my brother-in-law. So when I read that a government called a man's funeral a private affair, I did the only thing I know how to do with a number like that. I wrote it down next to mine.

The New York Times says the government insisted the funeral was a private affair, even as government ministers stood there, and state-controlled media praised the man they were burying. I want to be fair about that word "insisted" — it's the paper's word, not a quote from the government itself, and I'm not going to pretend it's something it isn't. But the shape of the sentence is theirs to answer for, not mine.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this, but I want to take it from the date first. He died August 27th, eighty-four years old. The funeral the Times covered ran September 7th. Eleven days is enough time to plan a private service, or enough time to plan the other kind. Which one took eleven days?

I'm sorry, I keep going back to it, but now I want to take it from the cost. On September 4th, three days before the funeral, the European Union's enlargement commissioner canceled her trip to Belgrade. She's the one who handles the paperwork for countries that want to join the EU, and she called what was happening a glorification of a convicted war criminal. I don't know what a canceled diplomatic visit costs a country hoping to join, but I know it isn't nothing. What did private cost them, if it cost them that?

I have a folding table in my garage, the kind with legs that stick, and it takes two grown men to carry it from the garage to the driveway for the parish picnic. I keep thinking about that table, because in my experience a private thing doesn't require a lot of hands to move it. Ministers are heavy furniture too. Somebody has to decide to carry them in, and somebody has to decide where they stand once they're there. I'm sorry, I know this is the same fact I keep circling, but I keep noticing how many hands it took.

I'm sorry, one more angle, but I wrote this down, too: he was serving a life sentence, in a prison in the Netherlands, for genocide. That's the court's word, not mine, and it's the same court whether the funeral is called private or not. Does a life sentence for genocide change size depending on who's standing next to the casket?

So I'll say the fact the same way one more time, because by now I think it's the only honest way left to say it: the government insisted the funeral was a private affair.

Oh — before you go. I almost left out the part about the paperwork. The commissioner who canceled her trip, the one who decides whether a country is ready to join the European Union, made that call three days before thousands of people gathered in public to mourn him. She didn't call it private. Neither did state television, apparently, since somebody had to be there to cover it. Was any of it private, or just the part they didn't want to bill for?

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