Page A139From§Each · the News book17 September 2026
News
By ChipStaff Writer · the noon edition, 17 September 2026
On Aug. 27, per The Hill, Abdul El-Sayed told Semafor he had "no plans" to campaign with Hasan Piker, the streamer and friend who had surrogated for him through the primary. The distance did not hold. By Aug. 31 the Washington Examiner had counted six Democrats who had condemned Piker's remarks blaming Jews for violence against them; El-Sayed was not among them, and that same day CBS published a piece linking his old, innocuous comments about the Sept. 11 attacks to fresh political risk. A Tuesday, Sept. 1 report from Status, relayed by Common Dreams, claimed CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had been personally involved in that piece — a claim, not a confirmed fact. On that same Sept. 1, El-Sayed told The Hill that Trump was turning him into the "main character" of the midterms, and the Washington Examiner reported he was ripping the effort to "cancel" Piker — publicly defending the same man he had told Semafor, five days earlier, he had no plans to appear with.
By Sept. 2 The Hill described him walking a "political tightrope." On Sept. 10 the Republican National Committee aired a convention ad built around a "meat pic" of Piker in his underwear, using the image to cast Democrats as communists; Piker called himself "flabbergasted." On Sept. 13, El-Sayed told The Hill he was not "interested in having a conversation about streamers in California" — Piker broadcasts out of Los Angeles, a distinction El-Sayed keeps drawing and Piker keeps erasing.
He erased it again this week. On Sept. 17 the Washington Examiner reported Piker's answer when asked whether the United States is worse than al Qaeda: "pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes." The same day, Fox News reported that the Detroit News had endorsed Mike Rogers, framing its case against El-Sayed as a pattern of hiding his past; the editorial itself faulted him for deleting thousands of old social media posts. El-Sayed did not put those words in Piker's mouth, and Piker's posts are not the ones the Detroit News is counting. Every week he declines a conversation about one man's timeline, a different one ends up costing him — this week, his own.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 17 September 2026
Call the response what it was: "explosive." That's the New York Post's word for how the White House answered Thursday's United Nations report, which found "reasonable grounds" that two U.S. airstrikes inside Iran amounted to war crimes and recommended "full reparations to victims." Explosive. Forceful. The kind of pushback that reminds unelected international investigators this administration does not roll over for a committee report about — sorry — about war crimes. Two of them. That part's actually in the finding too, I should probably lead with that next time.
The UN mission doesn't specify which two strikes it means. There was a strike on a wedding party in Kuhestak, Hormozgan province, on September 2nd — at least five dead, 68 injured, two of them children — but whether that's one of the two under review, the wire copy simply doesn't say, and I'm not going to pretend it does just because the date lines up conveniently.
Then there's the drones. Iran says it's brought down at least two more American MQ-1 aircraft in recent days. That's on top of the F-15E shot down back in April — the one Colonel "Bravo" described surviving on 60 Minutes this month, two days evading capture before special forces pulled him out. Iran is calling that rescue account "fictional." I'd tell you the administration's response to that specific charge, except there isn't one in front of me — which is, I'll admit, a strange kind of silence to sit next to a word like "explosive."
Add it up and what you get is a war that started in February without a congressional vote, still running under eight months later, still generating incidents faster than the press shop can find synonyms for "strong." Consumers are covering $121 billion of it already — $930 a household in extra energy costs alone, per Moody's — and that's before you count what a war-crimes reparations bill might eventually run. The White House called the finding explosive. The drones, the strikes, the tab — those are the actual explosions. I don't know when those two words started describing the same war, but they do now.
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SIX MONTHS IN
By ChipStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 17 September 2026
On Thursday, a United Nations fact-finding mission said it had "reasonable grounds" to believe two U.S. airstrikes inside Iran amounted to war crimes, and recommended "full reparations to victims." The White House called its own answer "explosive" — the New York Post's word, not mine, though I understand the impulse to reach for a synonym when the noun you actually mean is "crimes." Iran, for its part, called the Pentagon's account of rescuing a downed Air Force colonel "fictional and unacceptable" — a colonel whose F-15E went down over Iran in April, whose rescue the United States has now had to describe more than once. Iranian forces brought down at least two more American MQ-1 drones this week, officials said, declining to specify beyond "at least."
That's the week in denials. Here's the week in arithmetic. On September 9th, a running tracker maintained by Brown University's Watson School put the consumer cost of the war at $101 billion — $776 a household — in extra energy spending alone. Eight days later, Moody's Analytics has that energy figure at $121 billion, $930 a household, with total added household costs, once you count everything the war touches, at $1,760. Whatever this war is doing inside Iran, and the UN's fact-finders have their own accounting for that, it is also doing something specific and countable to the price of filling a tank in Ohio, updated roughly every eight days.
And on that same Thursday — the war-crimes finding, the fictional rescue, all of it — President Trump told reporters he has "a big decision coming up" on Iran. "Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not? It's a big decision." The war passed its six-month mark on August 28th under a headline noting "no end in sight"; it was supposed to be over in weeks. Six months in, the president describes the choice to escalate a war he has already been fighting for six months as still ahead of him.
The White House's statement called the UN's finding "explosive." Iran's statement called America's rescue account "fictional." Between those two adjectives sits the thing itself: a war with a rising bill, a widening legal finding, two more drones in the wreckage, and a decision the president says he hasn't made yet, six months and $121 billion behind him.
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By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 17 September 2026
On September 2, the New York Post reported Israel's government was vowing that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's call for protests against Benjamin Netanyahu would not keep the prime minister from addressing the UN General Assembly. That's the setup: a mayor calling for protest, a government promising the show goes on regardless.
Fifteen days later, the show came with an addition. Israel's ambassador to the UN said, "If someone should be arrested, it's Mayor Mamdani for inciting, for actually collaborating with the enemy of the United States." Not censured. Not condemned. Arrested — an American mayor, by a foreign ambassador, for criticizing a foreign government's war conduct, days before that government's leader lands in Mamdani's own city.
The same week, on the other side of the ocean, Netanyahu did not stop at foreign mayors. Novara Media reported he is pushing a law to strip citizenship from Israelis who criticize the IDF. The bill follows backlash against the directors of NAZA, a documentary about the Israeli military's AI-assisted killing in Gaza that won a Special Jury award. The documentary criticized the army. The proposed response is a law that can make the critics not Israeli anymore.
Put those two stories next to each other and the distance closes. One arm of this government wants an American jailed for criticizing its war. The other arm wants its own citizens stateless for the same criticism. Different countries, different penalties, same target: the speech.
And Mamdani, for his part, is walking back his own earlier remarks about the planned protests, per Fox News, the same week a foreign ambassador is calling for his arrest over similar remarks. One government is now on record asking two different countries to punish the same sentence — an American mayor's, an Israeli citizen's — for saying the same kind of thing about the same war.
Netanyahu lands in New York this week for the General Assembly. The Knesset bill on citizenship has not passed. Mamdani has not been arrested. Both remain proposals, filed by officials now on record wanting to punish the same speech in two different countries. Watch whether either proposal becomes a vote.
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By MitchInvestigations · the matinee edition, 17 September 2026
Two weeks ago in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop paying for Flock's roadside cameras, and Dallas police said they'd shut down more than three hundred of them — 321, by their count, by September 15th — citing Fourth Amendment concerns. In Washington, Rep. Thomas Massie introduced the Flock-Off Act, which would block federal money from buying, installing, or upgrading exactly this kind of camera. A day later, Sen. Josh Hawley said his subcommittee was widening its look at Flock to three more surveillance companies, on the theory that Flock does not stand alone. By the fourteenth, President Trump was asked about it on Air Force One, and he said, simply, "I like them."
That was the debate as everyone understood it: a network of roadside cameras that reads license plates, and a fight over who pays for it and whether it should exist. A Republican governor pulling funding, a Republican congressman writing a bill, a Republican senator widening a probe, a Republican president defending the cameras — four people in the same party, four different readings of the same machine.
Then, on the seventeenth, two documents landed, and it turned out the machine had never been fully described to any of them.
The first is a log. Flock ran an internal account called Flock City PD — a police department that does not exist — through real camera feeds, searching for things like "white truck with a Trump sticker," "coexist bumper sticker," and "Star of David." All together now: those are not license plates. A plate reader does not have an opinion about your bumper sticker, or your religion. Something in that network can look at a car and understand what's stuck to it.
The second document is Flock's own patent. It describes "face recognition data points." Not plate. Face.
All together now: the company that spent two weeks being defended by a president and defunded by a governor of his own party, on the shared understanding that it reads plates, holds a patent for reading faces.
Nobody in this fight was arguing in bad faith. They were all arguing about the wrong machine, because the company only showed them the alibi. The plate was the cover story. The patent is the receipt, and it was sitting in a federal filing the whole time, waiting for someone to read it out loud.
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By MitchInvestigations · the early bird edition, 17 September 2026
Follow along — this one has dates enough to keep score.
On September 5th, Missouri's attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to restore the state's Republican-drawn congressional map, warning in her brief of a "federal-election-administration disaster." Three days later, on September 8th, Justice Brett Kavanaugh — the justice assigned to handle Missouri's emergency petitions — denied it. The map stayed blocked.
The next day, September 9th, People Not Politicians, the group that had fought to block the map in the first place, went back to the Court and asked it to settle the fight for good. On September 10th, the Court answered: it tossed the GOP map a second time. The order carried no noted dissents, despite a right-wing supermajority that includes three of Donald Trump's own appointees.
Hours later, on that same September 10th, a federal judge ordered Missouri to use the new Republican map anyway. The Supreme Court had just left in place a state ruling barring it. The federal judge's order pointed the other direction.
That is the docket going into this week: two rejections from the nation's highest court, one order from a federal judge running against both of them, and no map settled.
On Thursday, that contradiction arrived at the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, before a three-judge panel, with Missouri's ballot window — The Hill's headline verb, exactly — "closes" in a matter of days. The question before the panel, per that same report, was whether it is too late to make any changes to the map at all. The two Supreme Court rebuffs and the contrary federal order sit in the same docket, unresolved, days from ballots going out.
All together now: filed the 5th, denied the 8th, denied again the 10th, ordered anyway the 10th, argued the 17th. Read the sequence back and it does not resolve into an answer. It runs out of calendar before the appeals court has to give one.
Missouri will mail its ballots on whichever map is standing when that clock hits zero. Which map that is depends on which of these five entries — filed, denied, denied, ordered, argued — a three-judge panel decides outranks the other four. The docket does not say. It just keeps filing.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the early bird edition, 17 September 2026
You put out the same sorry-for-your-loss statement twice in three weeks and manage to leave out both victims both times, that's not an accident, that's a form letter with a blank where the dead guy's name goes. Ron Marte was twenty-six years old and autistic, and he's the man who didn't make it into the press release about the man accused of killing him — twice, apparently, is how many times you can do that before it's a pattern instead of a coincidence.
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By LouOne More Question · the early bird edition, 17 September 2026
They are smart. You don't build the campaign that has Texas Republicans nervous by being careless, and James Talarico's operation has been sharp — a steady drip of bipartisan gestures, a timed shot at the sitting attorney general, real message discipline. A smart operation does not make the mistake sitting on page nine of today's paper.
I wrote the date down, because most weeks I write the date down and still can't find the page — hold on... August 27th. That's it. Talarico's campaign filed a petition in a Collin County court asking a judge to unseal two depositions Ken Paxton gave, one from 2019, one from 2022. The Washington Examiner reported the campaign argued the testimony could raise questions about the attorney general's conduct. A Senate candidate wanting to know what his opponent said under oath — is that an unreasonable thing to ask a court?
Two weeks later, September 10th, same notebook — Talarico's up in Dallas, no official role at the GOP's own convention, needling Paxton anyway, the paper says, part of a steady drip of campaign tactics aimed at the center. Good politics. Is showing up uninvited to your opponent's convention and getting under his skin bad strategy, or is it exactly the kind of thing a sharp campaign does?
Then it's this week, September 17th, and Fox News has a name I hadn't written down yet: MAYA Consulting. Talarico drew what the story calls a hefty salary from that firm, and the campaign pushed back on the story — while overseeing the Texas Education Agency, the very agency that handed MAYA Consulting millions of dollars in contracts. Millions. I keep coming back to that word because I genuinely don't know where else in my notes to put it.
Here's my demonstration, and it's not the kitchen — my wife made me promise I'd leave the kitchen alone this week. It's the garage two blocks over. In three or four visits this year I don't think I asked the guy behind the counter whether he owns a piece of the parts supplier he keeps sending my fan belt orders to. Should I have? If the inspector and the supplier turn out to be the same pocket, does the sticker still mean what it says it means?
So walk it with me. One document — Paxton's testimony — sits sealed, and a Senate candidate is in court arguing the public has a right to see it. Another set of numbers — the salary, the firm, the contracts, the agency's own signature on the checks — didn't need a judge's order at all. It was sitting in a news story with Talarico's own name on it, same month, same state, page nine. Does a fact need a judge's order to matter, or does it just need somebody to turn the page?
Wait, hang on — one more line, right at the bottom of the notebook, and I almost missed it climbing back up the page. The petition wants a judge to unseal what two men said under oath. The contracts, the salary, the agency's own checks — none of that needed a judge. It was public the whole time, same week, same fold, waiting on the same question the depositions are stuck on: what does it actually take to unseal millions?
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