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White House loses gerrymander fight to its own Supreme Court pick, answers with video games.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 11 September 2026

They lost the map to their own guy on the Court and the response wasn't a fix, it was a website update — that's not chaos, that's a company deciding the product doesn't have to work if the ad still runs. Hundreds of DHS agents got staffed onto a fraud they can't find while a state's voters can't find their own district, and somewhere in that gap is where the actual election gets decided. When the lines don't matter but the arcade does, you're not watching a government, you're watching a launch schedule.

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9/11 families demand mayor stay away; he attends, then spends the week visiting firehouses instead.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 11 September 2026

On September 7th, ABC News reported that Mayor Zohran Mamdani intended to attend New York City's 9/11 remembrance ceremony despite "mounting criticism" from some victims' family members. That criticism had a name and an address: the next day, a group of those families hand-delivered a petition to City Hall asking him to stay away from the ceremony altogether, calling his attendance "disrespectful."

A petition that specific tells you what it's actually asking for: not a change in tone, not a shorter visit — a mayor's physical absence from a memorial, measured in a body missing from a room rather than a word missing from a speech.

He went anyway. The New York Times reported this week that in the weeks since, Mamdani has been visiting firehouses around the city, working to point the public's attention at the victims and away from himself — while, in the paper's own framing, facing Islamophobia tied to the anniversary itself.

That's the whole sequence, in the order it happened: told to stay home, he showed up; asked to make himself the center of it, he spent the week at firehouses instead. A mayor handed an easy excuse to skip the hardest week on the city's calendar chose the firehouses instead of the exit.

None of this required a statement about bigotry. It required a schedule — a list of firehouses, a list of dates, a decision about where a mayor spends a Tuesday in September. The petition wanted him gone from the ceremony; the record shows him at the firehouses instead.

A 25th-anniversary petition asking a sitting mayor to stay away from a memorial is itself a receipt. It went to City Hall in writing, on a specific date, asking for a specific absence. That document sits on the record next to a second one: a news report, filed days later, describing where he actually spent that week.

Two documents, one week: a petition asking a mayor to disappear from a memorial, and a news report placing him at firehouses instead. Both are dated. Both are public.

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Son of 9/11 victim asks exploiters to stop; they spend the week using it on UCLA instead.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 11 September 2026

The kid whose father got killed on 9/11 stood at Ground Zero and asked the professional mourners to knock it off, and four days later the New York Post found a law school panel to be furious about instead. That's not an accident, that's the business model — the grief pays out on a September schedule, and somebody's paycheck depends on the account staying open. Follow the outrage instead of the grief and it lands on a UCLA panel, a mayor's guest list, and a British courtroom — not once on the thing the son actually asked for.

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DeSantis offers asylum to holdout juror days after their own domestic violence record surfaces

By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 12 September 2026

I want to say something nice about this one, because nobody does anymore. Governor DeSantis's statement Friday used the word "asylum" for the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case, and as a piece of writing, that's a strong choice. Asylum is a serious word. It's the word for somebody running from something dangerous, and somebody in Tallahassee sat with it a while before they used it on a juror. I respect the craft. Then I looked at the date on the statement — September 12th — and the date on the NBC Boston story about the same juror's own restraining order — September 11th. I wrote both dates down on the same scrap of paper that lives on my car visor now, since the glovebox gave out around the Clinton administration, and I've been staring at that scrap since.

I'm sorry, I keep going back to those two dates, but here's the question they leave me with: which came first — the story about their history, or the offer of asylum?

I'm sorry, let me try it from a different side, because the calendar isn't the only way in. This jury split eleven to one. That's on the record — the foreperson's note, the judge pulling the holdout aside on day seven to ask them, on the record, about their reasonable doubt. A whole country spent a week admiring the one. Then the court file turned up a different kind of "one" attached to that same person — one restraining order, the kind a court doesn't issue over a parking dispute. Does the word "asylum" appear anywhere in that court file, or only in the governor's statement about it?

I apologize, I know I've now brought this up twice, but there's a third side to it that bothers me more than the first two. The Daily Caller called what happened to this juror doxxing. The Federalist called it badgering. A Fox newsletter ran this case next to Kohberger and the Menendez brothers, filed under true crime, ripped fresh from the headlines. Four outlets, one week, and every one of them had a word ready for what the jury and the press supposedly did to this juror. How many of those same outlets had a word ready, that same week, for what a court file says they'd done to somebody else?

I'm sorry, I bring this up a fourth time, but I keep a folder in my garage toolbox — court dates, mostly, my brother-in-law's and mine — and I know what it takes to move a document like a restraining order anywhere: somebody has to pull it from the clerk's office, somebody has to read it, somebody has to decide whether it belongs in a statement about a smear campaign. That decision, in this case, got made the same week the file surfaced. I only bring the folder up because it's the only way I know how to measure the trip a piece of paper takes — and this one moved fast.

Excuse me — before you go. The story about the restraining order ran on a Thursday. The governor's offer of asylum ran on a Friday. Which came first — the story about their history, or the offer of asylum?

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Told to skip the 9/11 ceremony, mayor attends and spends it praising firefighters and victims

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 12 September 2026

They spent four days demanding Mamdani skip his own city's ceremony, then spent the anniversary itself accusing a university and a newspaper of politicizing it. The man who actually lost his father that day stood up and asked everyone to knock it off — not one side, everyone. That's the tell: the loudest voices about respecting 9/11 skipped the part where they show any.

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FBI Coerces 9/11 Suspect's Confession, Judge Rules It Too Coerced To Use, Trial Pushed To 2028

By LouOne More Question · the milkman edition, 12 September 2026

I want to say something decent about this before I get to the part that isn't. A military judge down at Guantanamo, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, spent the summer with an interrogation file that goes back to 2007, and at the end of it he did what a judge is supposed to do. He read what was put in front of him and he ruled the statement involuntary. He excluded it. Whatever Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the FBI doesn't get to be evidence in his own case anymore. That's not a small thing. That's a man doing the job the way it's written up.

Here's the number that spoils it: 2028.

That's the year Fox News says the trial is now set for — nearly 27 years, by their count, after the attacks the trial is supposed to be about. I read that twice. And the reason it's 2028, and not some year already come and gone, is the same ruling I just told you was done right: the statement the case leaned on for two decades is the statement a judge just took off the table, because of how it was obtained.

I'm sorry to keep circling this — it's just, 2007 keeps snagging me. That's the year the FBI sat him down and got him talking. Six years after the towers came down, they finally had him on paper saying what they needed him to say. It took them six years to get the words. It's taken nineteen more to lose them.

I know, I know — I already said twenty-seven years. I'm sorry. But look at that number from one more seat: it isn't a wait for a verdict, not really. Fox is calling it an open sore, and I believe them — I've had a splinter I couldn't reach, and I know what a wound looks like when you keep checking on it instead of leaving it be. Twenty-seven years is what happens when the thing that opened the case is the same thing that's now holding it shut.

And I'm sorry, one more angle and then I'll leave it alone — the ruling itself came down in August. Nineteen years after they got him talking, one month before the anniversary of the attacks he's charged with.

I keep a car in the garage that hasn't turned over clean since spring. You know the fix: you run another battery's charge through the cables into the dead one, full blast, until the engine catches. It catches. It runs fine after that — you couldn't tell the difference from outside. But you don't then tell your wife the car started up on its own, because you were standing right there holding the cables. I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this too, but that's what I keep picturing when I read "excluded": the engine ran. That part was never in question. The question was what was hooked up to it when it did.

One more thing, since you're already off the porch and halfway to the car —

The FBI's tactics got the statement in 2007. The FBI's tactics are the reason a judge just took that statement back out of the case in 2026. Those are the same tactics; he didn't reach for a different set the second time. So which is it — was the confession good enough to build a case on, or was it involuntary?

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Federalist demands 9/11 blame Islam; Texas already did, UCLA hosted the mastermind's lawyer, a victim's son says stop.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 12 September 2026

The Federalist ran a piece this week accusing schools and "corporate media" of writing Islamic terrorists out of the 9/11 lesson plan, pointing to a six-page guidance letter that tells teachers not to associate the attacks with Islam or Muslims. Four days earlier, the Texas State Board of Education had already reached the opposite conclusion, approving standard language that ties "radical Islam" to the attacks rather than naming the specific groups involved. Whatever erasure the Federalist is worried about, the largest textbook market in the country closed the gap before the complaint ran.

The same week, on the other coast, UCLA hosted a 25th-anniversary symposium on terrorism that put a lawyer for the attacks' mastermind on a panel. So the range of what counts as an acceptable 9/11 lesson this fall runs from a state mandate naming "radical Islam" in the standard to a university panel featuring the defense, and neither end asked the people the attacks actually happened to.

Someone did ask, on the record, at the 25th-anniversary commemoration at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan. Michael Massaroli Jr., whose father was killed in the towers, told the crowd that using the tragedy to spread anti-Muslim bigotry does his father's legacy "no honor," and asked, plainly, that people stop. His statement doesn't sit inside either camp's argument, because it isn't an argument about curriculum at all — it's a complaint about being used, filed by the one party with standing to file it.

This isn't new either. A Democracy Now retrospective published two days before Massaroli spoke laid out what the last round of blaming a religion for the attacks actually produced: vigilante harassment, police roundups, surveillance of Muslim communities, terrorism prosecutions built on thin evidence, and mass deportations, all documented in the public record. That's not a hypothetical cost of the Texas language. That's the receipt for the last time a state legislature decided which faith gets blamed in the standard.

So the fight was never really about erasure. Erasure would require the topic to actually be missing, and it isn't missing from Texas, and it isn't missing from UCLA's guest list. It's a fight over who gets to hold the pen — a state board, a law school, a cable segment — while the son of a man who died in the towers stands at the memorial built to hold nearly three thousand names, and asks all of them, plainly, to stop.

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Republicans call Democrats a graver threat than Pearl Harbor a week after Gallup put them behind nationally.

By ChipStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 12 September 2026

The president closed the convention with a message built for maximum size: communism, they told the room, is a graver threat to this country than Pearl Harbor or 9/11 were. That is not exaggeration for effect, it's a clarifying frame for what's actually at stake this fall — no, that's not right either, the Times ran that line as hyperbole in the same sentence it reported it, hyperbolic is the paper's own word, not mine, and I should not be defending a talking point by contradicting the outlet I'm quoting it from. Let me back up.

Here is the actual case for going this big: a party facing midterm peril wants the largest available noun on the banner, and communism has a longer résumé than any rival threat on the shelf. It comes with breadlines and does not come with a Gallup crosstab attached. A crosstab is exactly what you don't want the room thinking about on its way out of the hall. Which is the trouble, because five days before the gavel came down on the Pearl Harbor line — no, wait, the wire on the convention runs September 12 and Gallup's number ran September 5, that's seven days, not five, I had the math wrong — seven days before the gavel, Gallup published the number the whole convention was built to talk past: Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents holding their largest advantage over Republicans since 2008.

So hold both sentences at once. One says the opposing party is a danger larger than the deadliest days in the country's history. The other, from the pollster whose numbers the paper printed straight, says that same week the party saying it is behind nationally by more than it has been since 2008. Those are not competing opinions. One is a message. The other is what the message is covering for.

A party ahead in the argument doesn't need a comparison that size. A party that reaches for the worst days in the country's memory, seven days after its own numbers came in worse than any point since 2008, is not describing the threat. It's describing the polling.

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