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Trump and Mamdani hold their third shockingly cordial meeting in under a year

By SalStaff Writer · the supper edition, 21 September 2026

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Missouri's twice-rejected congressional map returns from the dead a third time, six weeks before ballots print.

By SalStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 21 September 2026

Missouri Republicans have now sent the same congressional map to the Supreme Court twice, lost twice, and on Monday got a third invitation to try again — this time from three judges who owe their jobs to the party asking. On September 4th, Missouri's attorney general filed with the Supreme Court to restore the map, warning that a lower court's block had unleashed a "federal-election-administration disaster." The justice assigned to hear it, Brett Kavanaugh, denied that request the following Tuesday, September 8th. Late that same evening, the fight briefly ran in two directions at once — the Supreme Court and a lower federal court handing down conflicting orders within hours of each other, a collision the record calls chaos and does not otherwise describe. The next day, September 9th, the group that had already beaten the map in state court, People Not Politicians, asked the justices to restore the map that predates the Republican redraw — not to stop the vote, but to pick a different map to run it on. On September 10th the Supreme Court ended that round: it struck the GOP map a second time, and not one justice on a court with a Republican supermajority noted a dissent. Seven days later, a panel of the 8th Circuit sat down to consider reviving the map anyway. On Monday it did — ruling that the 2022 map cannot be used in November and that only the 2025 map, the one the Supreme Court has twice blocked, satisfies the Constitution. All three judges on that panel were put there by Republican presidents: one by George H.W. Bush, two by Donald Trump. Even the New York Times, filing the same day, noted the order may have little practical effect, since the Supreme Court's block is still standing. That is the whole trick: the ruling does not need to survive review to do its job. It only needs six more weeks. Three judges, not voters, just put Missouri's map back in play with the general election in November. The count of dissents at the Supreme Court's second block was zero. The count of Republican appointees on the panel that just overruled that block is three. One number stayed at zero. The other one kept climbing.

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THE PRICE OF WAR

Rogers spent two decades demanding war with Iran, now films a grocery-store ad calling for it to end

By LouOne More Question · the early evening edition, 21 September 2026

Sorry — one second, it's in the coat. Other pocket. Here.

This is a page I tore out of a magazine on the twenty-seventh of August, and it's been riding in the raincoat since, so it's gone soft at the folds. The headline is: Mike Rogers pushed for war with Iran for two decades. Underneath it says his career-long advocacy is now wreaking economic havoc on Michigan. Michigan is where he's running for the Senate.

I wouldn't bother you with a month-old page except for what he did Monday.

Monday afternoon he put out a video. Seventy-five seconds, and he's standing in a grocery store, and he says food prices need to come down. Then he says — I copied this part out, hold on, yeah — "the war with Iran needs to end." And in the meantime he'd like a temporary embargo on exports of diesel, because diesel has hit a record $6.51 a gallon. Then: Michigan families can't afford to wait.

His opponent, Mr. El-Sayed, put up two clips of him from earlier interviews with three words underneath: liar, coward, fraud. The Republican nominee in Iowa said the war should end that same day.

So which part of that video is the new part — the grocery store, or the ending?

Because the price he's pointing at has a paper trail. On the fourth of this month diesel set a record at $5.85, and an economist wrote "Trump did it!" On the eleventh it was $6.06 — fourteen percent over the month before, sixty-four percent over the year before. Monday, per AAA, it's over six dollars in forty-nine states, and in California it's $8.42. The wire noted that diesel moves the freight and the delivery networks, so higher diesel means higher transportation cost. What does it run now, then, to get the food onto the shelf he's standing at?

Also Monday, Reuters/Ipsos had the President at 32 percent, the lowest of his political life. Among Republicans it went from 82 to 73 in a single week. And for the first time, a majority of Republican voters — 51 percent — said they disapprove of his handling of the cost of living. When the candidate says families can't afford to wait, is he disagreeing with anybody in his own party?

Here's the part I keep not understanding. The war is 201 days old. Thursday the President was asked about it and said he has a big decision: "Do I want to go in and annihilate them, or do I not?" That was on the heels of U.N. experts saying the United States likely committed war crimes in the earlier attacks. On the fifteenth the Congressional Budget Office priced the thing at nearly $40 billion and called its own number conservative — conservative is their word, not mine. A senator who voted to confirm the defense secretary has asked twice this month that they be fired. A Republican congressman filed impeachment paperwork against them. Is there anybody in these receipts still defending the war itself?

Now. My car. The fan belt's shot, has been since spring, and I've got a fella at the garage who has told me — told me at the counter, told me on the phone, told me in the lot while I was looking for my keys — that the belt is a scam, dealer nonsense, take it off, drive it. Say I take it off. Say the engine cooks on the interstate in August. And say he comes out to the shoulder with a phone camera and films himself standing by the hood, saying somebody has got to put a belt on this car, and families can't afford to wait. Would I be out of line to ask him, right there on the shoulder, who exactly he's asking?

Oh — sorry, you've got your coat on. One thing and I'll let you go. Those two clips his opponent posted, the ones he says show the man supporting this war — in those, Mr. Rogers is asking for something too. How long, according to this page in my pocket, had he been asking for it? Two decades.

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New York starts requiring AI firms to register in November; Washington still has no AI law.

By SalStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 21 September 2026

Twenty countries opened the UN General Assembly this week by asking for something the United States has not produced: an actual rule for artificial intelligence. Norway and Finland led the declaration, a call for control over frontier AI models, adopted as technology executives lined up to warn about what happens without one. The coalition numbered twenty nations. It did not include Congress.

The same week, Albany did what Washington has not. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, and the state announced that frontier AI developers must register with New York starting in November, ahead of the law's full effect next year. A state government now has a filing requirement for AI companies. The federal government does not.

And in Washington, Geoffrey Hinton — credited as an architect of the technology he is now warning about — told Congress it has, in his account, maybe a year to act. The writeup covering it flagged the obvious obstacle: political gridlock, and midterms that make hard votes harder to schedule.

Line up the three and the pattern is not complicated. A bloc of nations wants an international body. One American state wants a registry. The man who helped build the technology wants Congress to move before the clock he named runs out. None of the three is waiting on Washington's permission.

This is not a story about artificial intelligence outrunning regulation. It's a story about who fills a room when the people paid to sit in it don't show up. This week that's a coalition of foreign ministries, one state's governor, and a scientist warning lawmakers on borrowed time. None of them were elected to write AI law for the country. They are writing it anyway, one filing deadline and one declaration at a time, because the alternative on offer from Congress is nothing.

The bar bill still comes to the same table. Somebody sets these rules — a UN working group, an Albany regulator, whoever answers New York's registry line in November. Somebody decides what counts as a frontier model, what a violation costs, who pays it. The receipts answer the only question that matters this week: it will not be the United States Congress, because the United States Congress did not send anyone to the table.

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THIRD TIME

Twice-struck map is the only one the Constitution allows, three Republican appointees find six weeks before ballots print

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 21 September 2026

Missouri's legislature drew this map in 2025, at Donald Trump's behest. It makes the delegation 7-1 by eliminating one of the state's two Democratic districts. Voters have already cast primary ballots under it. Everything since has been a party shopping for someone in a robe who will say yes.

September 5th, the state asked the Supreme Court to overturn the block on the lines. September 8th, the Court denied the emergency application; Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump nominee, rejected Missouri's effort that evening. Hours later the Supreme Court and a lower federal court were handing down conflicting orders in the same case — the record files that under chaos. On the 9th, the group that won the block was back at the high court asking it to restore the old lines. On the 10th the justices tossed the new map a second time, with no noted dissents. A right-wing supermajority, three of them appointed by the man who wanted this map, and not one would put a name to an objection.

That is normally where a case ends. By the 17th a federal appeals panel was already weighing how to revive the districts anyway, block and all. On Monday it did. The panel held that Missouri's plan to use the 2022 map "violates the Constitution," and that "only use of the 2025 map complies with the Constitution and federal law." The map two Supreme Court orders threw out is now, per the 8th Circuit, the only lawful map in the state. All three judges were appointed by Republicans: James Loken by George H.W. Bush, David Stras and Justin Smith by Trump.

The New York Times notes the order may have little practical effect, because the Supreme Court's block still stands. Sit with that. It is not written to run an election. It is written to be appealed — a third ticket to the same nine people, punched by three judges who know the address. The escalator runs one direction. On August 28th the full D.C. Circuit denied a White House trade adviser's bid for rehearing, and the reporting on it shrugged: the case was always headed to the Supreme Court. Lose, appeal, lose, appeal, and the calendar does the work the argument couldn't.

Because the calendar is the argument. Six weeks out from ballots printing, Missouri's clerks, candidates and voters do not know which districts exist. Nobody in this fight has to win on the merits; they have to still be filing when the presses roll. The third appeal is already moving and the clock is not. When you're this far down the only thing left to do is climb — and to keep the count out loud, because the next time this map is struck down, somebody will call that the end of it.

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Rogers's ad asking for an end to the Iran war he spent 20 years demanding runs 75 seconds

By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 21 September 2026

Hang on — wrong pocket. That's the oil change. Here. This is a grocery receipt, Saturday, nine items, and it's been riding around in the coat because I keep meaning to show somebody what a can of coffee runs now. I wouldn't bother you with my groceries. I bring it in because of where a man chose to stand on Monday afternoon.

Monday afternoon Michigan's Republican candidate for the United States Senate, Mike Rogers, posted a video on social media. Seventy-five seconds. He is standing in a grocery store. He says food prices need to come down. Then — and I copied this part out, excuse the handwriting — he says "the war with Iran needs to end." And in the meantime, he says, the United States should impose a temporary embargo on exports of diesel, which has hit a record high of $6.51 a gallon. The figure I have for California is $8.42.

Sensible. A man by the registers, worried about the registers. Except there's this other page I've been carrying since the twenty-seventh of August, soft at the folds now from the raincoat, and the headline on it reads: Mike Rogers pushed for war with Iran for two decades. Underneath, it says his career-long advocacy is now wreaking economic havoc on Michigan. Michigan is the state he's running in. That's my whole trouble, and I'm sorry it isn't more complicated than that. The page says twenty years of asking for the war. The video says end the war.

His opponent went and got the tape. Abdul El-Sayed put up a pair of clips from the Republican's own previous interviews and wrote: "You've spent your entire campaign supporting the war in Iran. Liar, coward, fraud." The Senate Majority PAC also called him out. Nothing there was manufactured — those clips are interviews the man sat down and gave.

The price of the thing, from the numbers I was handed: the Congressional Budget Office puts it over $40 billion. The president's approval is at a record low of 32 percent, and the write-up lays that largely to the war and the economic fallout. Diesel at a record. I don't have a figure for what it cost the people who were under it.

Now. I want to show you something, and then I'll get out of your way.

Eleven years I wanted the silver maple out of my yard. I'm not exaggerating, eleven — I told the man at the corner store, I told the fellow who does the gutters, I told the tree service twice a year every year: that maple has to come down. Well, it came down. Took the power line with it and two of the porch steps, and now the dog won't walk past the stump. So here's what I did. I stood in my own driveway with the phone held out and I said tree removal in this neighborhood has to stop, and in the meantime the township ought to temporarily stop anybody hauling firewood out of the county, on account of firewood being at a record price.

My wife watched the entire performance from what's left of the porch and asked me one question, which was who had wanted the tree down. I didn't have a good answer standing in the driveway and I don't have one now. It was my yard. My tree. My eleven years of asking.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing before you get away, and then I'm done. The wire prints the inventory of that video: food prices, the war needs to end, the diesel embargo. That's what's in it, all of it, that's the list.

So how much of the twenty years fits in the seventy-five seconds?

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Fetterman taped a Republican convention video, fundraised off it on ActBlue, now fundraises on GOP donor lists.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 21 September 2026

The list is the story. Not the tape, not the speech — the list.

On Monday The Intercept reported that Senator John Fetterman is raising campaign money on Republican donor email lists, using Republican campaign infrastructure, while he flirts publicly with switching parties. Understand what a donor list is. It is the least sentimental object in American politics: a file of names that has already proven it will pay. Speeches are cheap and reversible. A list is an asset, and somebody has to hand it to you.

Walk it back and the handoff has a paper trail. On September 4, Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said of his own state's senator, after reports that he was neglecting the duties of the office, "John Fetterman is a disgrace" — a lazy trust fund baby, in Boyle's words. Five days later a pre-recorded video from that same sitting Democratic senator played on the opening night of the Republican National Committee's midterm convention in Dallas, introducing Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick as a great American and friend, praising Trump, filed under Team PA.

The next day he sent a fundraising text springboarding off the cameo. It highlighted his bipartisan work with McCormick. It linked to ActBlue. Read that sequence flat, in order: appear for the Republicans, then bill the Democratic payment rail for the appearance. Twelve days later, the Republican donor lists. The direction of travel is not ambiguous, and nobody involved is hiding it, because hiding it was never the plan.

Pennsylvania's largest newspaper did the math out loud the same day as the text. The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board: "News flash: U.S. Sen. John Fetterman is still an embarrassment. The Pennsylvania Democrat enjoys one of the cushiest jobs in America, but he can't perform basic duties." Stephen A. Smith, asked on News Nation whether the convention video was common sense, said "Hell no," and called it pretty much spitting in the face of the Democrats who elected him.

Here is the part the caucus would rather you skip. In that same stretch, Democratic primary voters in Rhode Island denied a sitting governor renomination, 62.5 to 37.5 with eighty percent counted, and threw out Providence's mayor. Voters fired two incumbents in one night. That is the tool. It exists, it works, and it is the only one that does — because a caucus card costs a party nothing to leave in place, and it did.

So keep the receipts in order. The seat was won with Democratic votes. The endorsement went to a Republican. The Democratic rail took the donation. The Republican list takes the next one. Your kid's school is not on any of these lists. There is money in this story. There is quite a lot of it. It is moving.

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Defense makes five attempts to remove one juror, files zero evidence against him

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 22 September 2026

On September 3rd, Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney asked a Massachusetts judge to dismiss the lone holdout juror in her murder trial — the man he said "refuses to listen" to the rule on reasonable doubt. The same day, the foreperson sent a note saying the holdout wasn't following that instruction. The attorney read the note as something bigger: a single juror standing between the case and a unanimous verdict.

The next day, the defense tried the judge again — this time asking for a private hearing with the holdout. The judge told attorneys he would not have one, in what The Hill called a heated exchange. Within hours, Clancy's team had gone over his head, asking the Massachusetts high court to force him to question the juror, or remove him, whichever came first.

By September 9th, the defense had a new problem to manage: a handful of the jurors voting to acquit had gone on NBC 10 and described using their own experience to talk the holdout out of his position — the outside expertise the jury instructions forbid. A count of jurors admitting they broke that rule stood at a handful. A count of findings that the holdout had broken any rule stood at zero.

The following day, the attorney tried a fourth door: a motion asking the judge to skip the jury altogether and find Clancy not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility. A mistrial had already been declared. The motion asked the court to end the case without a verdict at all.

On September 18th, the holdout — Michael Desronvil — was taken to a secure location, his own attorney announced, after details of the deliberations went public. He had not been dismissed. He had been moved.

And this week, door number five: the defense wants the judge to question Desronvil about a phone he allegedly used during deliberations, and to pull his phone records. Maybe he used it. The count of findings that say so is still zero.

Five approaches, one man, the same arithmetic running under all of them: dismiss him, request a private hearing, appeal past the judge who wouldn't grant it, move to acquit around him, then go through his phone. Whatever a Massachusetts court eventually decides about Michael Desronvil, the record will show it took five separate motions to chase a single unproven allegation.

That's the whole story. Everything else is procedure dressed up as suspicion, waiting for one fact to catch up to it.

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