By MitchInvestigations · the wee small hours edition, 16 September 2026
They took the two easiest tells a hiring form can have — you rob your boss, you can't pass a basic background check — and just deleted them, the same season an ICE watchdog said out loud that the agency doing the raids stopped checking who it arms. That's not streamlining paperwork, that's clearing the shelf so it doesn't look empty when the cameras show up. Both of these outfits carry guns for a living, and both bosses called it necessary under oath.
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By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 16 September 2026
Same word keeps showing up before the same kind of prosecutor does — "Soros-funded" — and then the recall petition follows, and then, this week, the DOJ referral. That's not a coincidence, that's a distribution list with a lawyer attached. Nobody elected the group running the crosshairs, but they're the ones deciding who keeps the job the voters actually filled.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 16 September 2026
They're not losing to a guy who likes Europe too much, they're losing to a guy who's up four points in a state they used to own outright. When your best play against a four-point lead is "he liked a drag show and read a book about Denmark," that's not opposition research, that's panic with a press release attached. Come November that panic's either something you laugh about or something you live with, depending who's actually running the state.
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By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the milkman edition, 16 September 2026
On September 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act with Rep. Greg Casar, described by its sponsors as legislation to stop AI oligarchs from building machines beyond human control. Three days earlier, President Trump had already staked out the opposite position, warning on social media that any community that rejected a data center would end up "backwards and poor." The two AI stories were already running in opposite directions before the week Congress needed to notice both of them.
On September 10, Sanders set a date: a bipartisan hearing, scheduled for September 16, on what he called the "extraordinary dangers" of unregulated AI. Three days later, September 13, Speaker Mike Johnson called on AI leaders to sit down with Congress and agree on safety legislation — careful to add that the US could not cede ground to China. He did not mention that a bill doing exactly what he was asking for had already been sitting in Congress for ten days.
On September 15, the alarm got a stage. CBS called it "strange bedfellows": progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and MAGA provocateur Steve Bannon, standing together to call for AI decisions to be made "humans first." The same day, The Hill reported that Washington had been "caught flat-footed" on AI safety, citing party politics, a narrow legislative window, and no consensus as the reasons the task had gone from difficult to next-to-impossible. The bill answering all three of those excuses was twelve days old and had not needed a hearing to exist — only a vote.
By September 16, the hearing convened as scheduled, and so did the rest of the apparatus. Rep. Bill Foster went on television to discuss the danger. Reporters explained where the legislation stood. Anthropic's CEO published a 3,800-word letter proposing a slowdown, and the watchdog he picked to enforce it turned out to have ties to his own former housemate. Trump defended the data centers on his own platform, and commenters clapped back. Thirteen days after it was introduced, the bill that would have answered the entire hearing sat exactly where it had been on September 3: filed, and waiting.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 16 September 2026
James Talarico is a state representative from Texas, one of 181 members of a legislature that meets for 140 days every two years. On September 8, a man who spent nearly a decade as Attorney General Ken Paxton's director of law enforcement — the same aide who reported Paxton to the FBI six years ago — cut an ad backing Talarico instead. On September 9, Talarico told CBS News that voters were "tired of this professional wrestling" in politics. On September 10, the AARP poll landed: Talarico 48, Paxton 44, a four-point lead in the race to replace retiring Senator John Cornyn. The same day, Talarico used the Republican National Committee's own midterm convention in Dallas to needle Paxton directly, and the Washington Examiner ran a piece accusing him of lying about a position he says he's held for years.
On September 11, the response arrived in person. Vice President Vance flew to Dallas and used a speech at that same RNC convention to criticize a Texas state representative by name — the kind of attention usually reserved for governors, not for members of a state house.
By September 16, the attention had a sequel. Fox News resurfaced a clip of Talarico saying Americans should look to Western Europe for democratic inspiration, drawing a response from Elon Musk. The New York Post ran a separate story the same day: Talarico had quickly named his favorite drag performer, and Republicans piled on. A state rep who has spent years defending Texas drag performers answered a question about one, and it became news twice in a single day.
None of this is illegal. A vice president can fly anywhere he wants. A network can resurface old footage. A newspaper can run an item about a favorite drag queen. But a travel schedule is also a budget, and the RNC spent a vice president's Thursday in Dallas attacking a state representative four points ahead in a Senate poll released the day before. A wire day is also a budget: two outlets spent the same news cycle on one old clip and one quick answer about a drag performer.
The receipts run in order: a whistleblower's ad, a "professional wrestling" jab, a four-point poll, a vice president's plane ticket, and then, six days later, two separate stories about a drag queen and a clip from before the campaign started. Talarico is not backsliding. The attention on him is.
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FIFTH VOTE
By LouOne More Question · the sunrise edition, 16 September 2026
I can't afford a fan belt.
That's not a complaint, that's a fact I wrote on the back of an envelope in the garage Tuesday: forty-one dollars, and I'm putting it off till payday. So when I tell you the Pentagon's own Inspector General put the price of the Iran war at $33.4 billion — that's CBS, dated the 16th, most of it munitions — I want you to sit with the fan belt a minute before we go anywhere else.
Same week, the Congressional Budget Office comes in with its own number. $38 billion total, they say, and two to three billion more every month from here on, going forward. That's also CBS, quoting the CBO report straight. And that Pentagon figure — the $33.4 billion — doesn't even count what the Pentagon itself says other agencies spent on top of it. Hundreds of millions more, they said. They didn't put a price on that part. They just said it happened.
Is the $33.4 billion the whole bill? Is it the $38 billion? Or is it whatever the other agencies spent that the Pentagon never priced?
Here's the word I keep coming back to. The Wall Street Journal — this is the Common Dreams write-up of it, back on September 3rd — says Secretary Hegseth is keeping what he calls a "presence" of fifty thousand troops in the region, extended into next year. Presence. Not war, not occupation, not deployment. Presence. Like a guy who shows up to the block party and never quite leaves.
Tuesday, the House voted 220 to 204 to tell the President to end the war or come back and ask Congress first. Third time the House has done that this year — that's CBS's count, and the Washington Examiner's count too, seven Republicans this time, three more than backed it the time before.
And two weeks before that vote, the Pentagon had already signed off on stretching that same "presence" into 2027. One paper says stop. One paper says 2027. Which one is still standing this morning? I'll tell you what CBS said about the last two votes just like this one: they failed to stop him. That's not my conclusion. That's their sentence.
Same Tuesday, Representative Massie was on the floor forcing a vote to impeach that Secretary — "high crimes and misdemeanors," his words, ABC's story. And the White House, that same day, said it was backing the Secretary. Both things happened Tuesday. Both things are about the same man.
I went and stood at the corner store Wednesday, the way I do, and asked the kid behind the register what he thought "presence" meant when the government uses it. He said it means whatever they need it to mean until somebody makes them stop meaning it.
Oh — before you go. One more thing. That word again. Presence. Fifty thousand troops, into 2027, and that's what they called it. My car's been sitting in the garage since June. I don't call that a presence. I call it broken, and I know down to the dollar what it costs me every day it sits there doing nothing. They've got fifty thousand people and thirty-three billion dollars sitting somewhere overseas, doing something.
They don't call that a war anymore. They call it a presence.
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