Page A129From§Each · the News book13 September to 14 September 2026
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By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 13 September 2026
On August 27, in the Detroit suburbs, Abdul El-Sayed told Semafor he has "no plans" to campaign with Hasan Piker. That was the answer. Not a condemnation, not a break, a scheduling note. Piker had campaigned for him during the primary. El-Sayed didn't say Piker was wrong about anything. He said there was nothing on the calendar.
Seventeen days later, on September 13, CBS's Weijia Jiang tried again, more directly this time, asking El-Sayed about Jewish voters worried about his relationship with Piker and why he hadn't called out Piker's rhetoric. El-Sayed's answer had upgraded. He was no longer interested "in having a conversation about streamers in California." That's the distance the candidate has traveled in seventeen days: from no plans to no interest. Same non-answer, restated with more contempt for the question.
Piker did not stand still while El-Sayed practiced his footwork. The same week as the CBS interview, Piker went on his Twitch livestream and defended his "God-given right" to say how much he hates America, after an attack ad tied that rhetoric to El-Sayed's race. So the tightrope isn't hypothetical anymore. It's a live wire: the man El-Sayed won't discuss is on camera, on the record, doubling down on the exact rhetoric the question was about, in the same news cycle El-Sayed is refusing to have the conversation.
The Washington Examiner counted six Democrats, total, who have explicitly spoken out about Piker's remarks blaming Jews who "fail to reject their culture" for violence against them. Six. Out of a party that holds itself up as the guardian against political violence and bigotry, six named people found words. El-Sayed isn't one of them, and "not interested" isn't a seventh.
"Not interested" is not "condemn." It's a category the candidate gets to define for himself, and he's defined it as the one containing questions he doesn't want asked twice.
The tightrope doesn't require El-Sayed to fall. It only requires him to keep not answering, cycle after cycle, while the man beneath him keeps talking, and the wire keeps getting more expensive to walk. Nobody's asking him to disavow a friend. They're asking him to answer a question about rhetoric he's already on record condemning in the abstract. He can't, or won't, connect the abstract to the name. That's not distance. That's the same spot, described more coldly each time someone points a camera at it.
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By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 13 September 2026
Walk me through it. Not the laugh — I want the other thing first, the part where somebody sits down at a keyboard and does the actual work of writing a sentence. Can you show me how that goes, step by step, the way the file has it?
Here's what the file has. On September 9th, the President told the Tunnel to Towers crowd the story about the construction workers at Ground Zero, and within hours a wave of fact-checks came back at that story — a deluge, the paper's word, not mine. The same day, he sat back down and posted that the account was "exactly accurate." That's the phrase I keep circling back to, so I'll only say it the once. Walk me through what a claim like that is supposed to hold up once the deluge has already landed on your desk — do you make it before you've read the fact-checks, or after?
Because here's the part that doesn't sit next to it easy. Back on August 27th, weeks before any of this, the plan on the books wasn't Ground Zero at all — it was the Pentagon — because, the paper reported, the memorial's own organizers don't allow speeches there. He changed the plan. According to the file, is that the reason it moved — the rule about speeches — or is there another one I'm missing, because the file only hands me the one?
Now walk me through the ceremony itself the same way — who showed up, doing what, in what order. The receipt I've got says the Mayor was there on the 11th, and that Rudy Giuliani — who'd called on him to skip the thing entirely — shook his hand instead. That's the receipt. It does not tell me where the President was standing when that happened, and I'm not going to put him someplace the file doesn't put him. What I've got is the handshake, and I've got, two days later, the President calling it "terrible" that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Mamdani appeared to laugh during the ceremony. Appeared to — that's the wire's word, not something I watched myself off a screen. Fair enough. Do we get the same hedge handed to the other story?
Let me try it at the toll plaza, since that's a place where a claim like that gets tested on any day, whether anybody's looking or not. You go through, the gate reads the tag, and the statement shows up at the end of the month with a time stamped on each entry, in order. If you tell the bank you got off at exit 9 at 4:15 and the statement says 4:52 at exit 12, nobody's reaching for the word I already used on you. Nobody fact-checks a toll receipt into matching. It either matches the tape or the state sends you a bill. So walk me through what makes an account of a day in 2001 different from a gate arm — is it that there's no tag, or that nobody's sending the bill?
I already spent that word once on you, and I'm sorry, I don't like coming back a second time to the same thing, so let me put it the other way instead of saying it again: he's calling one account of one day precise down to the letter, and calling somebody else's face on a different day terrible, and it's the first claim the fact-checks landed on, not the second. Excuse me — before you go — of those two things sitting on the same desk this week, which got the benefit of the hedge, the laugh that was only "appeared to," or the account that survived a deluge and came out the other side exactly?
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By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 13 September 2026
Walk me through it, would you? Not what the number said today — how you get to the number in the first place, step by step, the way you'd walk me through it if I were standing over your shoulder with my coat still on. The wire's been humming all morning and my coat still hasn't dried out from getting to the office, but that's beside the point — I want to see the hands do it, not the headline. I don't want your conclusion. I want the mechanics.
So here's the walk, near as I can follow it, and stop me if I've got a step wrong. Somebody at AAA doesn't get diesel prices phoned in — that'd be too easy. Somebody pulls what stations are actually charging that day, averages it, and puts out one number for the whole country. A survey, not a guess. On Friday, September 4th, that survey came back at five dollars and eighty-five cents a gallon. All-time high. An economist, in what I'd call a dry mood, posted online: "Trump did it."
That same weekend — and I want you to sit with the calendar on this one, because I had to sit with it twice — the President's son-in-law and a special envoy flew to Moscow, then on to Kyiv, trying to talk Russia and Ukraine into stopping the fighting. Different building. Same week. Same war sitting underneath both stories.
A week later, Friday the 11th, they ran the survey again: six dollars and six cents a gallon. Fourteen percent higher than the month before it. Sixty-four percent higher than the year before that. A petroleum analyst said, on the record, that the number "is not slowing down." That same Friday, a drone hit a pipeline in Saudi Arabia, and the energy markets got nervous about the Gulf all over again.
Two days after that — Sunday the 13th — the President stood in front of reporters and said Ukraine needs to stop hitting Russian oil refineries, that the strikes are "hurting the world." Told Zelenskyy, in so many words, to knock it off — that's the "one thing" he wants stopped. That same day, stock futures dipped on the same Saudi pipeline worry from Friday. Not on Ukraine. On Saudi Arabia.
I've walked it three times now, start to finish, and I keep landing on the same gap, so tell me if I'm missing a step here. The survey moved on the 4th, and it moved again on the 11th. Was a Ukrainian refinery strike anywhere in what moved it either time — or was it a war on Iran, and a drone on a pipeline in Saudi Arabia?
Excuse me — before you go — one more, and I promise this is the last time I bring it up, sorry. You told Zelenskyy to stop the one thing, the refineries, because the strikes are hurting the world, and I don't doubt that you believe it. But the number that's supposed to back that up — the one from Friday the 11th, the one I keep having to double back to, sorry — did a Ukrainian drone put it there, or was it already sitting at six-oh-six?
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THE PRICE LIST
By MitchInvestigations · the midnight edition, 14 September 2026
You know what a "vetting system" is when the president invents his own? A gift shop. They put a velvet rope in front of executive clemency and then acted surprised when guys started selling tickets to the rope. And the fixer — the guy who actually kept Trump's secrets — doesn't even need a ticket, because he already knows the guy at the door.
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By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 14 September 2026
Okay, before we get into it — can you walk me through it? Not the movie, I mean the room. Somebody sat down, that's what the piece says, twenty-four of them, and each one is telling the filmmakers how they used to do the job. So walk me through that morning. You're at your desk, you've got a target, and you punch in a number — is that how it goes? Because the film's called NAZA, that's the word they used, that's the acronym the officers used for how many civilians they expected to die when the strike went in. I've got that from the piece that ran the tenth of the month, the Common Dreams thing, twenty-four insiders, a secret unit, and they call it — this is their phrase, not mine — a "routine, bureaucratized affair." I don't know what that walk to the desk looks like. Coffee first? You sit down, you look at the map, you type the number, you hit send? Somebody's going to have to show me, because I can't get past the desk part.
So the film premieres in Venice. Standing ovation, record-breaking, the piece says, and it wins the Special Jury Prize. And a few days later the Culture Minister, a man named Miki Zohar, he's not happy — he says the two who made it, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, were willing to "harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world." And now there's talk of pulling their citizenship. I want somebody to walk me through that part too, the actual form, because I've filled out plenty of forms in my life — car registration, the thing for the dog's license, the paperwork when the fan belt finally went and I had to prove the car was even mine to junk it — and none of those forms start with "revoke." I don't know what box you check. Is there a box?
Here's where I get stuck, and it's not even the citizenship part. Same week, a different piece runs — the Post, the thirteenth — about a study of the Times' war coverage. And the finding, near as I can read it, is that on two days out of every three, there's a personal account of Palestinian suffering in the paper. And on the Israeli side, the study says, that kind of account almost never shows up. Two out of three. I keep doing that math at the toll plaza, waiting in line, because it's the kind of thing you can do without a pencil — two out of three days, one kind of family shows up in the paper, and on the third day, and most of the days after that, the other kind mostly doesn't. That's not my count. That's the study's count. I'm just walking through it.
And I want to be fair, because a government's got a right to be sore about its press. Only — the same government, the same week, is telling two of its own people they might not be citizens anymore, over a film built out of the testimony of twenty-four of its own soldiers, describing the very system the newspaper study is supposedly overselling the coverage of. So which is it. Is the paper showing too much, or is there simply too much to show, and somebody sat down and counted it, and got two out of three?
Excuse me — before you go. That word the Post used for the coverage, not "one-sided," not "unbalanced" — the word they picked, printed right there, I'm sorry to come back to it — is that the word, biased?
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By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the midnight edition, 14 September 2026
THE WRECKING CREW arrives in New Bedford first, because the story starts there. Evelyn took a job at the Marder Trawling seafood plant needing money for her kids, and her manager told her the price of admission: a hundred dollars a week, cash, off the books, just to keep the job she already had (Labor Notes, May 8, 2026). She paid it. That is the mess: a wage floor that already existed on paper, undercut in cash, one worker at a time, with a fee nobody in city government had checked.
Four months later, on Labor Day, September 7, the chief unrolls the blueprint. Mayor Zohran Mamdani signs an executive order standing up the Office of Worker Power, and Common Dreams runs the mayor's own framing: a first-of-its-kind city agency built to help workers organize "in an economy where more and more is stacked against them." The planner walks the site plan and finds nothing invented — no new statute, no new court, no new federal program. The tool is the same right to organize that existed the whole time Evelyn was handing cash to her boss.
The tinkerer starts assembling from the parts already on the shelf. The Washington Examiner's own account of the mandate: the office exists so private-sector workers can "get informed, connected and organized" — the administration's stated job description, filed the same week as the launch, not a slogan the crew wrote. Information and connection, handed out by the city instead of sold by the foreman.
The muscle's job is smaller than usual on this one, because the thing getting wrecked isn't a law — it's a business model, the one where a manager charges rent on a job that already pays minimum wage or less, betting no agency will ever ask. Jacobin's interview with the mayor calls the new office "the country's first city agency dedicated explicitly to helping workers organize," tied to the affordability agenda it's meant to serve — the same workers who'd otherwise be quietly billed by their own supervisor for the privilege of clocking in.
The pilot doesn't promise Evelyn gets her hundred dollars back. City agencies don't run on promises; they run on caseloads, and this one opened with a stack of them already sitting in the news. What she had, this whole time, was a right on paper. What the city just opened is an office whose entire job is reading that paper out loud, once, in front of the person doing the billing.
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By MitchInvestigations · the midnight edition, 14 September 2026
The brokers pitching access to the president's pardon system have one thing they don't put in the deck: what the document can't do. This week a real plea worked its way all the way to Trump's desk, and his answer, read straight, is the fine print the pitch leaves out.
On September 8, Lindsay Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, asked Trump publicly to pardon her before Massachusetts could retry her in the state murder case tied to her three children's deaths. Follow along — the next day, CBS News Boston ran the request under a headline that already gave away the ending: "despite it being a state case." A federal pardon reaching a state indictment was the whole ask, stated plainly by the outlet covering it.
September 9 carried a second pardon story on the same wire. Trump told The Hill he would consider pardoning his former attorney Michael Cohen, star witness in the 2024 New York hush money trial, since Cohen had recanted his testimony. One man got consideration. The Clancy request was still sitting on the president's desk, unanswered.
Five days after the request, on September 13, asked directly about Clancy, Trump called the case a "state situation, not a federal one." Asked what he thought of a pardon anyway, he added: "There's no winner there." Read that next to the pitch the brokers are selling — access, moved fast enough, gets a pardon considered. Line by line, it doesn't, not here. The power he's being asked to use only reaches federal cases, and Clancy's is not one.
Trump also said he felt for the family, the three children among them. That sympathy and the jurisdiction sit in the same sentence, doing different jobs. The sympathy is what the brokers can sell around. The jurisdiction is the part they can't move, and Trump said so himself, in public, without being asked twice.
So the document the brokers are selling has a boundary printed on the first page, and this week somebody finally read it back out loud: the federal pardon stops where the state case starts, and no fee changes that.
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By MitchInvestigations · the wee small hours edition, 14 September 2026
They call it a leak investigation, but run the calendar: guy says "unlimited munitions," calls the reporters scum for saying otherwise, and five days later there's people hooked to a machine trying to find who talked. Then the actual four-star just tells CBS he's not concerned at all — so which is it, was there nothing to leak, or did they polygraph half the building over a fact that turned out to be true? Either way somebody's budget bought that machine, and it wasn't spent finding missiles.
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