Page A146From§Each · the News book23 September to 25 September 2026
News
By SalStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 23 September 2026
Karen Bass had a scheduling conflict. On September 4th her legal counsel wrote a letter declining an invitation from the House oversight committee, the one probing $1 billion in alleged waste and fraud inside the city's homelessness system. The mayor could not make it the week of September 15th. DC powerbrokers on the panel found the swerve hard to swallow, calling it "contempt and shameful," language usually saved for people who show up in handcuffs, not for people who simply don't show up.
The next day, September 16th, Bass proved she does still show up in public — just not to Congress. A City Hall regular named Armando Herman stormed a council meeting and unloaded on her in front of the room's sitting councilors, a scene captured on camera because City Hall meetings, unlike congressional hearings on billion-dollar shortfalls, still happen where a lens can find her. The mayor who was too busy for a subcommittee was not too busy to be ambushed by a local gadfly with a grievance and an open mic.
By September 23rd the New York Post had run two more items. One told Bass to start making her case, citing poll numbers bad enough to cost her the office. The other told readers who Melvin E. Clark Jr. is — the transit official Bass has been quietly dating, unmasked in print as her boyfriend after months of staying out of the paper entirely.
Line those four dates up and the shape isn't hard to read. A subpoena request gets a legal letter back. A council meeting gets a heckler on tape. A billion dollars in alleged fraud gets no mayor in the room to answer for it, while a private relationship gets a name, a job title, and a headline, in the very same stretch of news cycle. The hearing didn't happen. The questions about where the money went didn't get asked in front of anybody who could make her answer them.
That isn't a coincidence of timing so much as it is the mechanics of a dodge. Skip the room where the hard question lives long enough, and reporters find another room to fill. Los Angeles still doesn't know what happened to the billion dollars its homelessness system was supposed to spend. It does now know his name, his job, and how long they've been together — information nobody in that oversight hearing was asking for, delivered anyway, right on schedule.
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By SalStaff Writer · the coffee break edition, 24 September 2026
Dan Driscoll resigned from the Army secretary's office earlier that week, and by Thursday, September 3, Donald Trump had already filled the chair. Not with the Army's own line of succession — the official who normally steps up when a secretary walks — but with Adam Telle, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works. "He is a Great Patriot, who is respected by all," the President wrote on Truth Social, announcing an appointment that even the wire services couldn't call routine. NBC flagged it outright as a "surprising pick," the kind that bypasses the Army's second most senior official, and it tied the surprise to something specific: widespread reporting of tension between Driscoll and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Read the sequence straight and the choice explains itself. The acting secretary wasn't picked because Civil Works — the office that oversees the Army Corps of Engineers' infrastructure portfolio — was the deepest bench for running a fighting force. The acting secretary was picked for not being Driscoll, and for not being a problem for Hegseth. That's not institutional readiness. That's succession planning built around one man's temperament in the Pentagon's E-ring.
Three weeks on, the quiet fix has stopped being quiet. The New York Post reports the hunt for a permanent Army secretary has turned into a Pentagon "knife fight," with Medal of Honor recipients now publicly taking sides. One line from that fight is worth reading twice: Trump "shouldn't go with the easy button pick. He should pick the person that is going to build him an Army that is capable of dominating on any battlefield." That's not a staffer talking. That's a man who received the nation's highest award for combat valor telling the Commander-in-Chief, in public, not to phone this one in.
So here's where three weeks of Army leadership actually sit: an acting secretary from the Civil Works office, installed in a matter of days to avoid friction with the Defense Secretary, still holding the desk while the country's most decorated soldiers argue in the press about who should really have it. The Army didn't lose a secretary and calmly find a next one. It lost a secretary, parked a stranger in the chair, and let the fight over what comes next spill into the open where the men who've actually been shot at can watch it happen.
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By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the supper edition, 24 September 2026
The chief pinned a calendar to the wall, because this job is a calendar.
September 3: the Interior secretary says the government is preparing "over the next two-week period" to start excavation for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck. September 5: NPR reports the administration will break ground on 250 feet of it without final federal approval, with a lawsuit pending. September 16: the National Park Service sends preservation groups a memorandum of agreement, having concluded the arch would have unavoidable adverse effects on historic sites around the capital — mitigation, which is the government's word for we cannot stop the harm, here is a list of consolations. September 18: the FAA finds the height no hazard to air traffic. September 20: the arch becomes, by Truth Social post, a top-grade military complex housing drones and snipers, at the military's request. September 21: a senior member of House Appropriations says defense money should go to other military needs instead. September 24: the federal council reviewing the arch's effects on historic sites terminates that review. The same morning, the congressman whose district holds the traffic island drives out to the site, because constituents called about the construction vehicles.
The planner admires it the way you admire a safe with the door already open. Every tool needed to stop this is federal, current, and in the hands of the same government running the backhoe.
Parts list. One: the review itself, described by the Times as a legally required step — terminating a required step does not unrequire it. Two: the Park Service memo, the government's own signed finding that the damage is unavoidable; that paper does not dissolve when the council adjourns. Three: the FAA letter, dated the 18th, which measured a monument. The drone-and-sniper complex was announced on the 20th. The thing that cleared review and the thing being dug are two days apart. Four: the appropriations gavel, held by a Republican who put the objection on the record before the check cleared. Five: the lawsuit, still live, which is where "no final federal approvals" becomes a sentence somebody reads out loud in a room with a stenographer.
The muscle goes first and wrecks the premise that a finding of unavoidable harm can be cured by ending the meeting where the harm was discussed. The tinkerer bolts the memo to the docket. The pilot is already parked at the site with the constituents who made the call.
They will tell you there is no money for your kid's school. A senior appropriator from their own party says this money belongs to other military needs. The hole is dug. The paperwork is not.
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By LouOne More Question · the early evening edition, 24 September 2026
My nephew Anthony is in his second year of law school up in Hartford, and I called him Sunday about this Justice Department grant, because my daughter says he is the one who actually reads these things instead of just skimming past the seal at the top. He was quiet on the phone for a second, which is what lawyers do right before they tell you something is going to cost more than you thought.
The federal grant office put out the notice Thursday, the same day the Attorney General hosted a summit for families of violent crime: twenty-five million dollars, the notice said, to help and reward law enforcement offices across the nation. That is a word from their own release, not mine, not my nephew's.
One of the mothers in that room Thursday was Jessica Gorman. Gorman's daughter Sheridan was eighteen, killed on a pier in Chicago in March, and this summer Gorman testified to Congress about it — the record shows that much. Thursday Gorman was back, this time at a podium with the program's name behind it, telling Fox News that Democrat lawmakers won't listen to families like Gorman's, that one congressman slept through the testimony. I don't know what that's like, having somebody sleep through the worst thing that ever happened to you. Neither does my nephew. He just said that's a hard thing to build a program around.
Here's the other mother. Susan Pretti's son Alex was a nurse — an ICE nurse, no, I keep saying that wrong, let me say it right — Susan Pretti's son Alex was a nurse, and ICE agents shot him dead on a street in Minneapolis in January. Seven months later, this August, the family sat down with a reporter and asked one question, on camera, same as Gorman was on camera: what did he do to deserve to be murdered. Nobody from the Justice Department answered that Thursday. Nobody from the Justice Department has answered it since January, far as my nephew or I can find. There was no summit for that question. There's no acronym for that question.
I was at the toll plaza Tuesday, the E-ZPass lane and the cash lane side by side, and the cash lane backed up twenty minutes while the E-ZPass lane just waved everybody through. Nobody built the cash lane slow on purpose, probably. It's just that somebody decided, a long time before I got there, which lane gets the sensor and which lane gets the human being counting out quarters. That's what I kept thinking about, sitting in the cash lane, after I hung up with Anthony.
My wife says I think about tollbooths too much for a man who mostly stays home. Maybe. But twenty-five million dollars is a real number — she about dropped her coffee when I said it out loud — and a program is a decision about who's in the fast lane and who sits counting quarters. My nephew says that's the whole trick of a grant. Nobody has to say no to anybody. You just build the summit for one mother and not the other.
I called Anthony back Wednesday about something else entirely, my sister's lease, and right before we hung up I said, oh, hang on, one more thing — the notice, the twenty-five million, does it say anywhere in the paperwork who decides which mother gets the podium and which one gets the toll lane with the quarters?
He didn't have an answer. I didn't figure he would. I just sat there with the phone warm in my hand, thinking about their word for it. Reward.
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By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 24 September 2026
My nephew is in his second year of law school, and I called him because I wanted to know what a word is worth. He's not a nuclear engineer. He's not finished with contracts yet, either. But he spends his days learning what "voluntary" means in an agreement, what "temporary" means in an order, what happens to a sentence that promises everything and specifies nothing. I trust that more than I trust a briefing.
I told him what I'd read. The president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, sat down with Fox News on Thursday and told Bret Baier that the enriched uranium his country has stored inside a mountain is "not a big deal." Those are his words. I wrote them down because I wanted to get them right, and because a mountain full of enriched uranium being not a big deal is the kind of sentence you want to read twice.
My nephew asked what happened next. I told him: in that same round of interviews, Pezeshkian also said Iran would submit its nuclear program to verification and dilute the enriched uranium to ease tensions. He's offering to water it down. I asked my nephew — if a thing is genuinely not a big deal, do people usually offer to dilute it? He told me that wasn't a legal question, that was just a question. I told him I was working on it.
I have a car in the driveway that's needed a fan belt since Tuesday, and I stood next to it while I read him the next part, because it seemed like news you take standing up. Back in 2021, Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency it intended to enrich uranium to 20 percent, after a law passed following the assassination of a nuclear scientist. That same year, Iran switched on a new line of advanced centrifuges at Natanz, which it later confirmed violated the deal meant to prevent exactly that. Has "not a big deal" needed a second sentence before?
Then there's the other reassurance, the one with nothing to do with uranium. Reporters asked Pezeshkian about the Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who nobody has seen or heard from in about a month. Pezeshkian said he is "completely" healthy. I want to be fair to the word, so I copied it exactly the way the paper printed it, quote marks and all, because I didn't want to be the one adding the emphasis.
I apologize for going back to the file again, but here's what else is in it. In March, Iran named an Interim Leadership Council to govern alongside the president, after the previous Supreme Leader — Khamenei's father — was assassinated. In August, state media reported that Mojtaba Khamenei had met with Pezeshkian in July, describing it as his first publicly reported meeting since taking over, and released a video to go with it, because until then there hadn't been one.
My nephew, who has not taken the bar exam and would want me to say so, told me that in his contracts class they're taught not to trust an absolute unless somebody can show their work. He said a good lawyer doesn't argue with a word like that. A good lawyer asks what it's covering.
Hold on — one more thing, before you go. The mountain comes with an offer to verify it and a paper trail back to 2021. The man they say is fine has one meeting, in July, and one video, because there wasn't one before it. Which of those two would you say we actually know is completely?
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GUEST LIST
By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 25 September 2026
Let's start with the part everyone's getting backwards. The President did not "ban" three news organizations from the White House. He made a personnel decision about who gets to stand in a room, which is a distinction I will keep making until someone explains why it stopped working around September 21st, when CNN, MS NOW, and Politico all announced they were done covering his daily activities until the ban lifted — that's not a boycott, that's scheduling.
The case landed with Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee, which tells you everything about how seriously the White House treats — actually, it tells you the judge ruled against the man who appointed him, on September 24th, ordering access restored. So: victory for open government. The doors reopened.
Except CNN and MS NOW got turned away from the arrivals event anyway, hours after the order, at the event that was supposed to be open. The TV pool is still suspended. I want to be clear that this represents full compliance with the — it does not represent full compliance with the court order. I'm told that's still being worked out.
Meanwhile the dinner itself proceeded exactly as planned: bald eagle statue gifted to Xi, a ballroom tour offered, giant pandas inbound to Atlanta as what Xi called an envoy of friendship, and a toast to the "long relationship between China and America" — delivered by a President who, two months ago, gave a primetime speech accusing China's government of interfering in the 2020 election. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and also apparently of foreign policy.
The guest list ran heavy on tech: Meta's CEO, OpenAI's co-founder, Tesla and SpaceX's CEO, Amazon's founder, all in black tie for a head of state whose government the New York Times ranked among the most repressive in the world. Republican senators are asking questions too — Thom Tillis called the whole reception a "WTF moment," and his own colleagues are demanding answers about F-35 parts that turned up diverted to Hong Kong. Senate Democrats say the administration is still failing to close the export loopholes China's using on AI. None of that made it into the toast.
Outside, protesters chanting "Free Hong Kong" were loud enough to be heard over the dinner. I'd call that a distraction from an otherwise dignified state visit, if the point of a state visit weren't dignity, and if the chanting weren't the only part of the night nobody scripted.
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By LouOne More Question · the wee small hours edition, 25 September 2026
My nephew's in his second year of law school, torts and contracts, and last week I called him about a word. Not a case, not a client. Just a word. He laughed until I read him the sentence, and then he stopped.
I wrote it down — hang on, let me find it — here. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said Thursday that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is, and I'm reading this exactly, "completely" healthy. My nephew wanted to know what that word was doing in front of a man nobody's seen. I told him I didn't know. That's why I'd called.
Here's the rest of what I had written. The president said this a month after he'd last laid eyes on the man himself. A month. My nephew, who reads every qualifier like it might be hiding something, asked me a plain question: when's the last time somebody told you a person was fine, and meant they hadn't actually checked in four weeks?
I told him about the garage, because it was the only place I had. My car's been down there three weeks now for the fan belt, and when I call, the fella tells me she's all fixed, running like new. I haven't driven her. I haven't heard her turn over. I have his word on the phone, and a bill coming. My nephew said that's not proof, that's an assertion, and the law knows the difference even when a barstool forgets it.
So I read him the rest of my notes. February 28th, a strike killed the man who held the job before him — Khamenei's father. March 1st, Iran stood up something called an Interim Leadership Council, three names, meant to run the country until the Assembly of Experts picked somebody permanent. I wrote down the word "until" and underlined it twice, because until usually means somebody's supposed to stop being interim eventually.
Then August: state media says the new man met the president back in July, first time anybody'd reported seeing him since he took the job. A video, even — they called it rare. My nephew wanted to know: on a job where showing up in public is supposed to be most of the work, why is rare the word they reached for?
And then September, the sentence I originally called him about. A month since anybody laid eyes on him, and the one word the president reached for wasn't "seen" or "spoken to." It was the word from my first page. My nephew, who bills in six-minute increments, wanted to know: when does a lawyer reach for a word like that, if the plain truth already covers it?
I told him I'd let it go, I really was closing the notebook —
One more thing, before I put this away. That council from March, the interim one, built to run things until somebody permanent was picked. Nothing I've read tells me it was ever formally stood down. Was it? I don't have that page. Nobody's handed me that page.
So here's what's actually in the notebook, and it's all I've got: a father killed in February, a council installed in March to cover the gap, a leader nobody saw until a rare video in July, and a president in September reaching, a month after he'd actually looked at the man, for the word completely.
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By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 25 September 2026
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