News

Senate introduces bill to ban AI tools it isn't authorized to use

By SalStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 23 September 2026

Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 3rd, citing a run of "rogue" AI hackings and what's been called a "breakout" event — language borrowed straight from the prison beat. The bill does one thing: it forbids anyone from building a machine humans can't turn off, and creates a Department of Artificial Intelligence to make sure of it. Sanders put the case plainly — the point was to stop "AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control."

A week later, a poll came back putting support at 68 percent of voters. That's not a base number. That's most of the country agreeing the bill should exist before most of the country has ever touched the thing it's trying to ban.

Then, this week, the bill got a second sponsor's worth of urgency from a man who didn't come up through law school. Rep. Riley Moore welded before he legislated, and he called superintelligence a "nuclear bomb for work" — the kind of device that goes off quietly, in a shop, on people who never got a vote on whether the machine above their job got smart enough to take it. Moore also floated the other half of that metaphor: force-multiplier, for the workers lucky enough to be standing on the right side of the blast radius. Workers don't get to choose which half they land on before the fact.

And that's the week reporters finally asked the obvious question: what, exactly, are the people writing this bill allowed to use? NPR found the answer sitting in plain sight. Senate offices have ChatGPT. That's the tool on the desk. The advanced systems actually driving the safety debate — the ones the hearings are about, the ones 68 percent of the country wants paused — aren't available to the senators drafting the law that governs them.

So walk it in order: a technology serious enough to warrant its own federal department, urgent enough that a welder calls it a bomb, popular enough to ban that two-thirds of the public signed off before the ink dried — and the office writing the rulebook is working one version behind the industry it's regulating. Congress doesn't need a better argument for the bill. It needs a badge.

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Senator joins probe into Trump Jr.'s Russian-funded wedding, insists Hunter Biden get investigated too

By SalStaff Writer · the coffee break edition, 23 September 2026

The money moved first. In May, Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson on a private island in the Bahamas, and buried in the invoice was a name: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch who weeks earlier received the Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin, covering hundreds of thousands of dollars in wedding costs. ProPublica put the receipts on the record September 16. Democrats opened an investigation the same day. The day before that, September 15, Sen. Richard Blumenthal had already pressed the Trump administration about the arrangement during a hearing — a senator who has spent this war flying to Ukraine and back, asking why a Kremlin-adjacent oligarch was covering the tab for the president's son's island rental.

Then came the pitch. On September 17, one day after ProPublica's story, Trump stood before the Republican National Committee in Dallas and told the room the party's path to November ran through a $5,000 check: "If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000." The Washington Examiner had a name for it already: the Trump dividend, a cash offer to a base being asked to look past a private island funded by a man Putin had just decorated.

Six days after that speech, seven days after ProPublica's story, Sen. John Curtis became a Republican willing to say the wedding was worth a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into Trump Jr.'s business dealings. It took a Russian oligarch, an Order of Friendship, an island rental, and a $5,000 bonus pitched to a nervous base before one member of the president's own party found the wedding worth the paperwork.

But the ask he lands on arrives paired. Curtis wants Trump Jr.'s dealings investigated — and Hunter Biden's investigated alongside them, same committee, same push. Not a counterweight to the Russian money. A hedge against having asked about it at all, insurance that the hearing has somewhere else to look.

The oligarch keeps his receipts either way. The senator gets to say he did something. And the $5,000 check, whatever it's actually worth in November, still has to clear before anyone finds out.

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Republicans will investigate the oligarch who paid for Trump Jr.'s wedding, price: one Hunter Biden probe

By SalStaff Writer · the noon edition, 23 September 2026

The money moved first. In May, Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson on a private island in the Bahamas, and on the invoice was a name nobody announced: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch, hundreds of thousands of dollars in wedding expenses, the island rental included. Weeks before the ceremony, Vladimir Putin handed Kremlev the Order of Friendship. That is a decoration. It is also a receipt — a foreign government stating in public who a man is to it.

ProPublica put the paperwork on the record on September 16. Trump Jr. and Anderson confirmed the findings in a social media post. Not denied. Confirmed. Congressional Democrats opened an investigation the same day, and the day before that, September 15, Sen. Richard Blumenthal had already pressed the administration about it in a hearing — a senator who has spent this war flying in and out of Ukraine, asking out loud why a man decorated by the Kremlin was covering the tab for the president's son's island.

Now hold those hundreds of thousands against what the president had told a room in Dallas six days earlier. On September 10, at his party's convention, he pledged $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans take both chambers in November. No mechanism. No source of funds. No date. By September 17 the Washington Examiner — not a hostile outlet — was calling the dividend what it looked like from the cheap seats: desperate. So there is money. There is money for the island, paid in May, unconditional, in full. And there is money for you, five grand of it, contingent on an election going the right way.

Which brings us to today. Sen. John Curtis is leading a group of Republicans asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to open up Trump Jr.'s business dealings. A Republican senator, on the record, pointing at the wedding. That is the part that is supposed to make you feel better, and for about four seconds it does.

Then you read the rest of the sentence. The committee is to investigate Trump Jr.'s dealings and Hunter Biden's dealings. Bundled. One ask, two names, and the second name is the fee.

Understand what the bundling does. The oligarch money is a fact with a date and a dollar figure and a confirmation from the couple themselves. Pair it with a second family and it stops being a fact and becomes a food fight — both sides get subpoenas, both sides get cable segments, nobody gets an answer about the island. Accountability arrives as a swap meet, and the price of looking at the wedding is agreed in advance.

The guy at the end of the bar was promised five thousand dollars, someday, conditionally. The private island got paid up front.

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Washington Examiner predicts the GOP 'dam' breaks after Election Day; five campaigns already broke before it

By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 23 September 2026

Start with the dilemma, because that's where it starts on the record. On September 9th, as the Trump-centric midterm convention opened in Dallas, The Hill filed it plainly: attending meant wrapping yourself in the president's flag, and most candidates still wanted his blessing. The same week, the Washington Examiner ran the ledger on Trump's own endorsement record — most of his picks had cleared their primaries, but several high-profile ones hadn't, governors' races in Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, South Carolina, Wyoming among the losses. The flag had a cost even before anyone let go of it.

By September 20th the Examiner had a new headline: Republicans searching for daylight, keeping Trump at arm's length, sometimes rebuking him outright, on immigration, on the Iran war, because the map had grown more competitive than the convention suggested. Still framed as searching. Still subtle.

Then Tuesday arrived and the search ended. Bob Cusack, who runs that newsroom, said on the record that he expects to see more Republicans break with the president as the midterms put pressure on candidates — that the White House doesn't appreciate it, and that these statements are already coming from members of Congress. His own paper's headline put a word on that forecast: dam. Cusack didn't use it in the sentence quoted; his newsroom's headline did. Either way, the same day proved the framing right before the ink dried. Fox News had three names on the record — Ashley Hinson, Mike Rogers, Jon Husted — breaking with Trump on the Iran war as gas prices reshape their toss-up Senate races. The Washington Examiner itself published a running roster of every Republican who has broken with Trump on unpopular positions ahead of November, most of them from battleground states, most of them on Iran. The Hill reported Wisconsin's own GOP nominee for governor, Tom Tiffany, again calling on Trump to end the military operation against Iran — this after a FOX6 reporter pressed him on why he has repeatedly not supported a war powers resolution that would do exactly that. CBS confirmed the shape of it: Trump-aligned candidates in tight races calling for a quick end to the war, even as Trump himself stands by the strategy and has floated escalating it.

The dam metaphor was supposed to describe November. It's describing September.

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CNN's CEO asks to stay 'useful' to new owners now mulling Elon Musk as an investor

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the early bird edition, 23 September 2026

Consider what a denial costs, which is nothing, and what it buys, which is the week. "I didn't pressure anybody," Gavin Newsom told reporters on Wednesday, and you may take him entirely at his word. Nothing in the drafting required pressure. It required a signature. The attorney general who had spent months openly against this merger sat down and supplied one, and the concessions he took for it were called, by one critic, "meaningless bullshit." A settlement is the instrument by which the party able to say no agrees to stop saying it. The price, mind you, did not move. One hundred and eleven billion dollars. One hundred and eleven.

And the men inside the thing? Mark Thompson, who runs CNN, told staffers he remained "very committted to CNN" and wants to stay if he can be "useful" to his "new bosses." Useful. A handsome word, and his own.

The money is still being assembled. David Ellison is mulling wealthy individuals who could back the deal ... Elon Musk among them. At CNN the word for that is "Really scary."

The FCC approved Saudi and UAE ownership stakes in it. Approved.

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Trump gives Xi the first airport welcome since 1962, without mentioning camps or vapes his senators want raised.

By ChipStaff Writer · the supper edition, 23 September 2026

The motorcade left the White House for Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday afternoon so President Trump could stand on the tarmac and watch a Chinese head of state's plane land — the kind of presidential welcome no White House had staged since 1962. Xi Jinping stepped down into that honor. He did not step into a hard question. The same day, the New York Times reported that Trump has repeatedly found ways to give Xi a pass, treating the rivalry between the two governments less like a contest and more like a friendship that happens to include one.

That friendship had a paper trail. Thirteen days before the tarmac, on September 10, Beijing told reporters it hoped the long-running tariff talks would wrap up soon, a tentatively optimistic note struck well ahead of the visit. Ten days after that, on September 20, Trump was still calling the existential warnings around artificial intelligence a hoax — a position analysts say lines up with Beijing's own view of the technology. Three days later, on the day of the visit itself, the same paper was already tallying up exactly where the United States still leads China on AI and where it does not.

Not every Senate Republican shared that instinct. Released the same day as the airport ceremony, a letter from Senator Ted Budd and ten other Senate Republicans asked Trump to press Xi, face to face, on the flow of unauthorized Chinese-made vapes into the country. A second letter arrived alongside it, from a bipartisan duo — Senators James Lankford and Angus King — cataloging 105 years of Communist Party repression, mass killings included, down through the Uyghur detention camps still running now. Both letters reached the same desk as the tarmac photos. One asked about nicotine. The other asked about camps. Neither made it into the greeting.

By the time those letters landed, the public had already started moving the other direction from its president. The same day's polling found more Americans taking a positive view of China than they had before, a shift experts trace partly to fading memories of the pandemic and partly to plain disaffection with Trump's trade wars. He is warming to Xi. The country is warming to China. The letters on his desk are the only paperwork trying to make those the same sentence, and so far they have not been opened.

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THE TOLL

GOP candidates campaign against a war their party won't let the House vote to end

By SalStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 23 September 2026

The dead soldier arrived in the record five days late, and so did the number.

On September 18th, Capt. Bianca Wilkerson, 37, of Norfolk, died in what the Pentagon called a non-combat incident. The public did not learn her name until September 23rd, when The Hill reported her death had pushed the disclosed toll to 19 — five days between the dying and the counting. That gap is not new: on the 19th, four days before that report, Common Dreams cited five Pentagon officials, speaking anonymously, putting the true toll at 22, not whatever number the building was defending that week. The 19 the Pentagon confirmed this week is still three below the 22 its own people had already leaked. That is not a discrepancy. That is a ledger being amortized in public, one funeral at a time, so no single week has to carry the whole number.

The number is what Rep. Thomas Massie tried to make Congress own on September 15th, when he filed eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for waging a war Congress never authorized and for a run of boat strikes rights groups call killings without due process. Speaker Mike Johnson's answer, the next day, was to call it a publicity stunt and cancel Thursday's votes, sending the House home into the seven-week recess it is still inside — a dilemma The Hill this week called Republican leadership's to sit on until the midterms, and Democrats' problem to inherit after.

Sitting on it did not make it disappear. Republican candidates in competitive races are now telling CBS News they want the war wound down — not because a war-crimes finding moved them, but because Trump's approval sits at 32%, a record low, with diesel prices at a record high beside it. Johnson himself, the same man who called impeachment a stunt, is now the one publicly calling for "a resolution" — his word — to a war he has spent this recess refusing to let the House vote on. Sen. Tim Kaine called the whole operation "triply illegal" this week, citing three House war-powers votes already on the books. And Trump, meeting Iranian officials for the first time since June, is still promising annihilation of the regime in the same breath as the talks.

His energy stock holdings, according to a CNBC analysis of his own financial disclosures, are up as much as $4.4 million since the war started. Nineteen Americans have died so that count could climb. Twenty-two, if you believe his own building.

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Flock skips Senate hearing on cameras already caught tracking an ex-girlfriend 3,000 times.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the early evening edition, 23 September 2026

The Wrecking Crew got the callout Wednesday, same as everyone else watching C-SPAN: a Senate Judiciary subcommittee had titled its hearing "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network," invited the CEOs of Flock Safety, Axon, Motorola and Verkada to come explain the network, and the CEOs did not come. Senators from both parties unloaded anyway, into an empty row of chairs.

They didn't need the witnesses. The charging documents were already sitting in two other jurisdictions, doing the explaining for free. In Albany County, a 13-year veteran sheriff's investigator, Laurie Moore, is accused of running searches on an ex-partner's license plate roughly 3,000 times, plus four more plates hundreds of times each. In Indianapolis, an internal audit turned into fraud and misconduct charges against five officers who ran the department's own automated readers the same way — on people, not on threats. That's the demo the CEOs skipped giving.

Here's the part that makes this a job and not just a headline: the fix was already built before the hearing started. On September 3, three weeks ahead of the no-show, Rep. Thomas Massie filed the Flock-Off Act — a funding valve. It cuts off federal money for any municipality that buys, installs, maintains, operates or upgrades an ALPR or biometric camera network. That's the shutoff switch, machined and filed, sitting in committee since the day it was introduced.

Florida didn't wait for Washington to turn its copy on. On August 31, the state's own transportation office revoked local police access to license-plate readers on state highways — one segment of the same network, unbolted by a state agency using authority it already had. Not a bill promising a fix somewhere down the road; a fix, already thrown, on a live system.

So the wreckage here isn't the cameras — it's the excuse that nobody knew how they'd be used. The subcommittee called the hearing "Always Watching" and then watched an empty panel; the docket in two counties was already watching back, showing exactly who gets tracked when nobody's required to answer for the network. The Flock-Off Act has been sitting in the same committee for three weeks, unopened, next to a hearing that just proved its own case for it. Florida already showed the switch works. The rest of the machine is filed, dated, and waiting on the same senators who spent Wednesday asking questions the docket already answered.

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