News

This shit is not normal: a census plan uncounts the people the 14th Amendment says count.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the coffee break edition, 9 September 2026

The chief slides the blueprint across the table: a proposal, reported today, to redraw congressional maps by leaving certain residents off the ledger that draws them. The plan would strip the census of its race question and exclude millions of U.S. residents from a count that the 14th Amendment says must include the "whole number of persons in each state" — not the whole number of persons with the right paperwork.

The planner doesn't have to draft a new tool for this job. The clause is already sitting in the box, plain language, still doing the math it was built to do: persons, not citizens, not voters, not anyone's preferred subset of either. This administration is testing it head-on, treating a settled sentence like an open question a memo can answer differently.

The tinkerer starts laying out parts the crew has handled before, because the mechanism repeats. On September 3rd, a Tarrant County election commissioner watched Republican colleagues vote to shut nearly a third of the county's polling sites, down to 224 polling sites for 1.3 million voters, and called it what it was on the record: a modern-day poll tax. Different lock, same tool — narrow who gets counted, narrow who gets to show up and be counted, and let the map drawn from the first number decide who has a say over the second.

The muscle doesn't wreck people; the muscle wrecks arguments, and this one comes apart on its own source document. "Whole number of persons" carries no asterisk for status in the text the crew is holding. A clause written to stop states from padding power by undercounting anyone is being read as if it authorized the opposite.

The pilot flies the pattern out to where it already got tested. By September 6th, the same administration's push to choke off mail-in ballots was, by the Washington Post's own account, "running out of options" that "don't involve significant upheaval" — because states had already started mailing ballots before the order could catch them.

Three separate jobs this month, one preexisting document already sitting where the crew found it, doing exactly what it says it does.

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Lawyer asks Trump to resolve the case he already declared her guilty of

By LouOne More Question · the noon edition, 9 September 2026

The same guy calls her guilty on camera before the jury even finishes, then when the jury can't agree, his own people say the trial was rigged — rigged against who, exactly, if he already decided? That's the con: heads he's right, tails the court's crooked, and nobody has to explain the eleven-to-one either way. Three kids are dead, their mother's still un-convicted five days after the President pronounced her guilty on national television, and now her lawyer's asking that same President to fix it — that's not a justice system, that's a landlord you have to beg for permission to leave.

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Acton campaign's request to stop filming left only the accused's own video, sparing the accused felony charges.

By ChipStaff Writer · the noon edition, 9 September 2026

By CHIP

On Sunday at the Canfield Fair, an armed individual lunged at Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, injuring multiple people — that is not spin, that is the campaign's own account, issued that day by communications director Addie Bullock. It is a serious thing to say happened to a gubernatorial candidate at a fair stop. The man was arrested. Ohioans were right to take that word seriously, and the campaign was right to lean on it in every statement that followed, because that is what you do when you say you were attacked: you say so, and you keep saying so, and you don't need — well, you would think you would not need anything more than your own word for it.

Except somewhere in that Sunday crowd, bystanders with phones out were allegedly asked by the campaign to stop recording. That is an unusual thing for the party that says it was attacked to ask of the witnesses. I do not love the optics of it, I will say that much, but an unusual ask is not proof of anything, and I want to be careful not to read intent into a request that — actually, it is hard not to read intent into a request that leaves you as the only source for your own story.

Which is more or less what happened. By Wednesday the prosecutor had reviewed the evidence — not campaign statements, not secondhand accounts of a lunge, but the only video of the Canfield Fair incident that exists, because the crowd did what it had allegedly been asked. That footage belonged to the accused, shot on the accused's own device, of the entire encounter the campaign had described as a lunge that injured multiple people. It is the reason the felony charges never landed. The accused avoided them entirely, on the strength of the one tape the campaign's own request should have made impossible.

So here is where I am supposed to tell you the tape backs up Dr. Acton's account, that the lunge holds up, that the injuries speak for themselves even where the charges did not. I have looked at what that footage did to this case. It cleared the accused of the exact charges the campaign's language was built to secure. I can defend the statement. I cannot defend the tape.

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Trump's own ambassador says terrorism, Israeli generals say ethnic cleansing, Congress's ban request goes nowhere.

By SalStaff Writer · the noon edition, 9 September 2026

Watch the order of operations here — the guy Trump appointed gets to call it terrorism free of charge, the generals get to call it ethnic cleansing free of charge, and the only ask that gets fought over is the one with a price tag on it, the ban on the actual goods. That's not an accident, that's the tell: words are cheap and Washington's fine handing them out, it's the money — the produce, the wine, the trade — that has a lobby standing behind it. Three of our closest allies already found the register button. We're still arguing about whether the ambassador was supposed to say that out loud.

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BDS co-founder says UK settlement ban doesn't go far enough; Trump administration says it goes too far

By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 9 September 2026

You ban the stolen goods but let the guy still fencing them keep his loading dock — that's not an oversight, that's the business model. Three countries write the check on this one and ours writes the angry tweet. Follow the produce aisle far enough and it leads straight to fifteen land confiscation orders in a single month, which is the part nobody in Washington wants read into the record.

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Clancy jurors told to ignore outside expertise, describe using outside expertise to break holdout

By LouOne More Question · the matinee edition, 9 September 2026

I didn't sleep. Not really. My wife noticed around one in the morning that I was still on my back staring at the ceiling fan, and she said, Lou, leave it alone, whatever it is, just leave it. I told her I would. I did not leave it alone.

What kept me up was one word. I'll get to it. First I have to find the page.

I wrote some things down this week, the way I do, and now of course I can't find where — hold on — here. On September 3rd, Judge William Sullivan read the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case what's called the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, after they told him for the second time they were deadlocked. CBS News called it "a last resort pushing the jurors to reach a verdict." The next day, Clancy's own lawyers asked the Massachusetts high court to make the judge boot the holdout juror, or at least question him. Why him and not the other eleven? Because, according to the foreperson's note, he wasn't following the judge's instructions on reasonable doubt.

Here's my word. Expertise. That's what the instructions are supposed to keep out of the room, isn't it — twelve people deciding a case on what got shown and said in that courtroom, and not on whatever any one of them already happened to know walking in? I wrote that down too, more or less, because it read like the kind of thing that shouldn't need writing down.

I've got a torque wrench in my garage with a manufacturer's spec sticker still stuck to the handle. Twenty-two years I've owned that wrench. How many times have I actually read the sticker instead of just going by feel — by what twenty-two years of turning bolts already taught me? Not many. Did I get the bolt right anyway? Probably. Is going by feel the same thing as being told to follow the spec and quietly not doing it? I ask myself that at the workbench more than I'd like to admit.

On the ninth, after the mistrial, some of the jurors sat for interviews. NBC 10 talked to several of the women who'd voted to acquit. One of them described — I've got it here — leaning on their own experience to try to bring the one holdout around. Their own experience. Not the exhibits. Not the testimony. What they already knew, walking in. So did the instructions say to leave that at the door? They did. Did they leave it at the door? By their own account, on camera, after the fact — they did not.

I closed the notebook. I was about ready to call it a night, finally, my wife half-asleep with the lamp still on because she knows me. That's when the fella two stools down at the corner store, buying his coffee same as me next morning, says, excuse me, before you go — did you catch the other quote, the one where a juror said most of them were able to get over it? Get over the three children, she meant. I told him I'd read that one too.

I'm sorry to circle back a third time tonight, I know I've been going in circles around this same word, but is that what they used on the last name on the list — their own experience — or is there a plainer word for it, the one I said at the start of the night and am apparently still stuck on: expertise?

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RNC's 'same page' convention opens with a fake Epstein-files redirect and half its headliners missing.

By ChipStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 9 September 2026

Republicans arrived in Dallas this week for what the RNC calls the party's first-ever midterm convention, and the pitch, laid out by Washington Examiner reporter Ramsey Touchberry, was simple: this is the event that gets everyone "on the same page." Two days, one arena, President Trump giving the keynote to close night one after moving himself onto the schedule by Truth Social post, promising "the Greatest RALLY of them all." Organizers spent the last week before doors opened still working the phones to offload unsold seats. That's the pitch, and it holds up right until Sept. 4, five days before the same-page speech, when a site calling itself "2026 RNC Midterm Convention" — gopdallas2026.com — started sending visitors who clicked through not to a schedule but to the Department of Justice's page for the Jeffrey Epstein files. The site wasn't the RNC's. It was posing as the RNC's, which is worse, because nobody had to write that joke — the URL already knew where to point people. Call it a prankster with a domain name. Sure. Fine. It doesn't explain why the redirect went there and not somewhere else.

Then there's the roster. Attorney General Todd Blanche is speaking — a decision former Attorney General Eric Holder called "unprecedented" and "disgraceful" — the sitting head of the same DOJ whose Epstein files page the fake site rerouted to, at the podium the RNC is billing as unifying. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is not speaking; he was left off the keynote list his own party released. Sen. Susan Collins isn't attending at all — "it's long been her practice," a source told the Examiner, which is a polite way of saying she checked the invitation and passed. The Hill and CBS both filed stories this week on the battleground candidates skipping it entirely, two months before an election where Republicans are defending the House. So the convention still gets everyone on the same page — except the majority leader, who wasn't asked to say so, and the senator who wasn't there to hear it, and that's not a fracture, that's just scheduling. Two of the party's most senior members had somewhere else to be during their own unity rally.

A Washington Examiner writer who's covered every GOP convention since 2004 called this one a "grift — not a convention," and wrote that no matter how often the RNC repeats the word, "it is not true." The keynote list is public record. So is the redirect log. Both check out.

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Netanyahu threatens suit over the Oct. 7 warning claim his wife is already being sued for making.

By LouOne More Question · the matinee edition, 9 September 2026

I didn't sleep Tuesday night. My wife told me to leave it alone — it's the Middle East, Lou, it's going to still be the Middle East in the morning whether you stare at the ceiling or not — and she was right, and I left it alone for about ten minutes, and then I got up and went out to sit in the car.

Didn't go anywhere. Fan belt's been complaining since July and I wasn't in the mood to hear it complain in the dark too. I just sat in the driveway with the dome light on, thinking about a letter.

Here's the letter. Haaretz runs a story Tuesday saying the Prime Minister of Israel was warned before October 7th — not vaguely, specifically: Yahya Sinwar telling an intermediary trusted by both Hamas and Israeli intelligence, in September of 2023, that an "earthquake" was coming. Three senior foreign sources, the paper says. Wednesday, the Prime Minister sends Haaretz a warning letter of his own — he intends to sue them for printing it. Haaretz says, in so many words, we stand by it.

A government not wanting to be told it had the warning and didn't stop the earthquake — I could have gone back inside on that alone.

What kept me in the driveway is the other lawsuit. There's a second person in that house being sued right now, this month, over the identical accusation — that leadership knew, in advance, and let it happen anyway. Except this time it isn't a newspaper saying it. It's Sara Netanyahu, the Prime Minister's wife, telling Channel 14 that the opposition leader — Yair Golan — had foreknowledge of October 7th and sat on it. And she's the one now facing a libel suit for saying it.

Same house. Same accusation, near enough — somebody up top knew something and didn't stop it. When a paper says it about the husband, the husband threatens to sue the paper. When the wife says it about the opponent, somebody sues the wife. I kept thinking about the toll plaza out on the turnpike, the one with two lanes for the same stretch of road — cash lane, fast lane, same road, same exit at the other end, different price depending which lane you were standing in when you went through. Same fact, sitting in that house like a car that can only find one of the two lanes.

I'm not going to sit here at two in the morning and tell you what any of that adds up to. I don't know what it adds up to. I know two lawsuits came out of one household over one kind of claim, and I know I keep circling back to when the first one happened.

Before you go — one thing, and I'm sorry, I already made you sit through this once tonight, but it's the last time I'll say it. Both lawsuits — the one against the paper, and the one against his wife — are about somebody being warned before October 7th and not acting on it. Haaretz's warning is dated to that same month back in 2023. Hers turned into a lawsuit dated to the start of this month, three years later. Was there a warning worth suing over in that house, or wasn't there — because right now they're suing in both directions over the same month I already used once tonight: September.

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