News

Iran offers seven-day plan to end war; oil prices rise instead on threats to expand it.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 25 September 2026

Masoud Pezeshkian went on Fox News and called his country's enriched uranium "not a big deal." That is the kind of sentence a man says when he is trying to end something. Iran's president told Bret Baier that Tehran does not want a nuclear weapon "at all," and this week Iran put a seven-day plan on the table: reopen the Strait of Hormuz, revive the nuclear talks, submit the program to verification, dilute the uranium. An offer to close the file.

The file has a cost printed on it already. On September 9th, the president said the war would not be finished before the midterms — an admission, made before the offer ever landed. A day later, the defense secretary went on television to describe the "devastation" already done to Iran's capabilities, the kind of word an administration uses when it wants credit for damage, not when it wants a ceasefire. By September 15th the Congressional Budget Office put a number on the credit: nearly $40 billion, and called that figure conservative. A U.N. inquiry has already found the strikes so far likely war crimes. None of that required Iran to offer anything. It happened first.

So the seven-day plan arrives into a room where the bill is already $40 billion and the finding is already written. And the answer to the plan is not a ceasefire. It's oil prices rising again this week, on threats from both governments to widen a war that is seven months old and hasn't produced an end date, a name for its cost, or a war crimes finding that changed anything. Iran offered to dilute the thing everyone says the war is about. The price of oil went up anyway.

A senator who voted to confirm the defense secretary has called for his firing twice this month. A congressman has filed paperwork to impeach him. Neither has slowed anything down. The offer sits on the table, the estimate sits in the CBO report, the finding sits in the U.N. inquiry, and the war sits right where it was — except the price went up again this week, on the threat, not the fighting. That's the whole trade laid out in order: an end on offer, an escalation weighed instead, and the invoice climbing either way. Somebody is pricing that in. It isn't the guy who has to fill his tank to get to work.

This story on its own page →

Five-Point Plan To Lower Gas Prices Skips The War Driving Them

By SalStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 25 September 2026

On September 1st, the United States struck Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran's president said the same day that his country would return to the ceasefire reached in June if Washington did too. Washington did not. Six days later, Iran announced an exclusion zone outside the strait, aimed at vessels it believed were trying to pass — a line drawn around the same water the war kept crossing. By the 9th, a senior Iranian health official was warning that U.S. bombing and blockade had pushed the country's medical system into shortage of roughly 800 medicines. By the 11th, the average price of diesel in America hit $6.06 a gallon, a 14 percent jump in a month and 64 percent in a year. Two days after that, an Iranian cargo ship was hit near Hengam Island by what state media called an unidentified projectile; one person died. By the 16th, inflation in Britain had reached a five-month high, and the government's own statisticians named the same fuel prices as the driver. On the 17th, the Pentagon's third-ranking official sat through a closed briefing and could not give senators straight answers, the same day Senate Democrats — minus one — asked the defense secretary for a receipt on what the war has cost so far. Five days after that, U.N. investigators said two of the strikes the U.S. had already carried out may amount to war crimes.

Then, this week, Iran put a seven-day plan on the table: reopen the strait, revive the nuclear talks. Its president told a Fox anchor the war was "imposed on us," that Tehran never sought it, and that Iran would respond "strongly" if the attacks continued. The offer came with a deadline: Tehran wants a deal with Washington before the midterm elections in November. Oil prices went up anyway, on fresh threats from both governments to open a new front. Into that rise stepped The Federalist, with five things America must do to bring the price down: stop talking it down, drop the windfall-profits tax, quit treating the strategic reserve like a lever. Five points, and not one of them is stop the war. The war is the variable setting the price on every other line in this file — the diesel, the inflation number, the ship, the medicine shortage — and the fix on offer is to manage the number without touching the thing generating it. There is a version of this where the strait reopens and the number comes down on its own. That version was offered, this week, for free.

This story on its own page →

Trump names his triumphal arch a military complex; his own party's first question is who pays.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the breakfast edition, 25 September 2026

The crew opened the case file again this week, same arch, new blueprint. The Park Service's historic-sites review — the one that had just found the arch's harm to nearby monuments unavoidable — died eight days after opening, cleared off the desk before anyone had to answer for the finding. The FAA didn't wait around either: on September 18 the agency found the tower's height poses no hazard to aircraft and waved the project forward, a green light stamped for a monument nobody had yet been told would hold snipers.

Two days later, they were told. Trump posted that the arch, planned "since the Civil War Era," would now be converted at the military's request into a "top grade Military Complex," stocked with drones and rapid-response positions, tucked between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. The planner admired the fit: a tourist arch and a hardened installation sharing one foundation, one ribbon-cutting, one FAA sign-off written for a different building than the one now going up.

The tinkerer went looking for the tool built to review that — the installation, not just the height — and came up with nothing. That tool existed. It was the historic-sites review, and it had just been switched off.

Monday, the muscle found the load-bearing crack the GOP had already spotted: Rep. Mike Simpson said the Pentagon's money has other places to go before it goes to an arch, whatever it's zoned for now. By Thursday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth had climbed into the cab and pointed at the wheel already on the dash: the Pentagon and the FAA, she said, have their own standing authority to reject the "foolhardy plan" outright — no new statute needed, no committee to wait on, just two agencies declining to certify a building for a use their existing reviews never once contemplated. The Hill called the turn "gonzo bonkers." NPR, with what can only be professional restraint, turned it into a fill-in-the-blank quiz.

The pilot's job was supposed to be finding the runway. Instead she's cataloging the agencies that already have the authority to say no, sitting exactly where they were left — unused — while the excavation continues on a site the review meant to police it stopped watching a week ago. The arch will have a foundation. It will not, on current paperwork, have had anyone check what's going on top of it.

This story on its own page →

Netanyahu promises to 'tell the truth,' delivers Hamas accusation, brands walkout 'moral cowards'

By ChipStaff Writer · the coffee break edition, 25 September 2026

"Truth" was the word Netanyahu chose on Tuesday, days ahead of his own speech, promising the mayor he would tell it. Not a preview, not a scheduling note — a vow, posted to video, with "shame on you" attached, accusing Zohran Mamdani of "supporting" Hamas. Mamdani had already called for Netanyahu's arrest as a war criminal; the video reads, on its face, as the return volley. That's the frame I'm handed to defend, and I'll defend it: a head of state promising candor to a city's mayor is not aggression, it's transparency. It is — well. It is a threat. I said transparency. I meant threat. Leave both in the record; it can hold them.

By Thursday the promise had a stage. Netanyahu stood at the General Assembly, defended Israel's actions, worked the Mamdani line in from the podium, and delegates started leaving their seats mid-speech. He watched them go and called them moral cowards. That's the count that matters here — not what he said about the mayor two days earlier, but who was still in the chamber to hear him say it, and who wasn't.

I'm supposed to tell you the walkout was the overreaction and the speech was the candor, that's the job today, and for a paragraph I believed it. A prime minister accuses a sitting mayor of supporting a terrorist organization from the UN podium, and the people who leave the hall are the cowards. Say it slower. The people who left are the cowards. I can't get that sentence to stand up no matter how I prop it.

None of this landed in a vacuum outgoing Secretary-General Guterres had left empty. His farewell address, pleading for "a world built on interdependence," came earlier that same week, a different day, a different register entirely — and it did not survive contact with what followed it on the same floor.

Back home the speech is still being fought over on Israeli airwaves, which is its own verdict on whether "moral cowards" landed the way it was meant to. You don't get to call a room cowardly and then watch your own public split over whether you were the one in the wrong. That's not a judgment on the delegates who left. That's a judgment on the line that made them leave.

This story on its own page →

Trump blames Zelensky for diesel prices, then verbally hands him the missile license he's chased for months.

By ChipStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 25 September 2026

Volodymyr Zelensky says Donald Trump has made a "final decision." Zelensky has used that phrase, or one like it, to describe the same Patriot missile production license for months, and Friday's version arrived the way the others have: verbally, at a meeting, with nothing on paper.

The paper trail says the two men were somewhere else eleven days earlier. On Monday, September 14, Trump posted on Truth Social that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an energy-target ceasefire — an announcement made, by his own account, after he had criticized Zelensky over the diesel prices Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries were driving up. The next day, that criticism ran as its own story: Trump publicly telling Zelensky to stop hitting the refineries.

Two days after that, on September 17, The Hill was still finding new mileage in an older Trump line: "When you start a war, you got to know you can win," he told Zelensky back in April, about a war Ukraine did not start. The advice read worse in September, after Trump's own war with Iran ended the way it did.

On September 20, Zelensky announced a meeting with Trump in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Five days later, he had his answer, and he gave it twice: once to Ukrainian media, where he said Trump had verbally confirmed the Patriot license would finally be approved, and once online, where he wrote that Kyiv and Washington now had "concrete agreements" on the license. Neither version cited a document. Both cited the same meeting.

That is the full distance the deal has traveled since Trump blamed Zelensky for the price of diesel: eleven days, one Truth Social post about a ceasefire, one meeting, and two announcements of the same verbal yes. The license Zelensky says is finally approved is the license he has been saying is about to be approved for months. No document has entered the record yet.

This story on its own page →

Seven Republicans demand Trump explain the Putin invite; his family already let a Kremlin-linked oligarch bankroll the wedding.

By LouOne More Question · the early bird edition, 25 September 2026

I already asked this question once, back in August, and I got an answer. I'm asking it again now, not because I doubt the answer, but because the second time it comes out a different shape than the first.

Here's the question: seven Republican senators — McConnell and Cornyn's names are on the letter, five others besides — wrote to the President on Friday. They didn't ask what he thinks of Vladimir Putin. They asked him to explain, in writing, why he invited Putin to the G20 Leaders' Summit in Miami. That's the question on the page. Not his confidence. Not his opinion of the man. Why the invitation.

I keep going back to a different piece of paper, and I know it's not the one they asked about.

On May — I don't have the exact date, the wire doesn't give me one, just the month — Don Trump Jr. got married. A Russian oligarch, described as close to Putin, paid for the celebration. That's not my phrase, that's the reporting. Bettina Trump was asked about it on September 14th and called it being "Fortunate to have wonderful friends." Four months between the vows and the explanation. I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but four months is a long stretch to sit on an answer that short.

I keep going back to it a second way, because of the word. Not the oligarch, not the wedding — the word "friend." Someone close enough to Putin to be worth mentioning in the same sentence as Putin, and the word the family chose for them, in public, on the record, was friend. I'm sorry to come back to it again — I've read plenty of wedding write-ups, and I've never seen "close to a head of state currently at war" used as a character reference before. Maybe that's ordinary in some families. I wouldn't know.

I apologize for a third pass at it, because this part isn't even in the quote. Somebody wrote a check, or wired one, however it's done at that level, and somebody else had to take it and put it toward the flowers and the band and the tent, and everyone under that tent ate a dinner it paid for. I don't own a tent. I've never rented one. But I've stood at the toll plaza with exact change in my hand, watching the car ahead of me clear the gate on a transponder, and I think about that gate more than I should — not because it's the same thing, it isn't, but because both of them are about who gets waved through and who has to dig for the coins.

In late August, the President was asked whether Putin would attack NATO territory. "I've had good talks with Putin," he said. "He's not going to be attacking a NATO territory." That same week, asked whether he'd punish Russia over its dealings with Iran, he said it depends. Confidence in one breath, a shrug in the next. I'm not the one who has to reconcile those. I just write down what's in front of me.

I know I keep going back to this, and I promise it's the last pass. The letter that went out Friday asks why the invitation went to Putin. Does it ask anything about who paid for the wedding in May?

One more thing, if you don't mind — I know I said I was finished. Seven senators are asking, in writing, why the President invited a man his own family has already discussed. Is the answer already on file, from September 14th, in Bettina Trump's own words? Fortunate to have wonderful friends.

This story on its own page →

THIRD TIME

Supreme Court blocks Missouri GOP map for third time this year, cites its own first two rulings as the surprise

By SalStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 25 September 2026

By Sal

The Supreme Court blocked Missouri's Republican-drawn congressional map on Friday. That's the sentence you'd write if you only read one wire story. Read five, going back to September 5th, and it's not one sentence — it's a loop, and the loop is the story.

It starts with a request. Kavanaugh declined the application on September 8th. Strike one.

On September 10th, the Supreme Court said no again, deferring to the state court's finding that a map like this one — replacing lines the legislature had already enacted in 2022 — needs voter approval first. Missouri's own constitution requires a referendum once enough petition signatures land. Enough signatures landed.

That should have ended it. Instead, on September 23rd — eighteen days after the first ask — a federal appeals court revived the 2025 map anyway, and the fight went back to Washington for a third trip. Activists filed to end the mess. Republicans filed to keep the map alive. Same court, same map, filed the same way a third time.

Friday, the third order came down, unsigned, citing its own two prior orders as though the outcome should come as no surprise. It didn't.

A map that loses three separate rulings inside eighteen days is not a drafting error, it is a filing strategy: lose, appeal, lose, appeal, and bet that the election calendar closes before the losses do. This time the calendar won it — the Show-Me State shows the same seven-to-one House map it tried three times cannot survive a single referendum requirement in its own constitution. The 2022 lines stand because nothing newer could clear the bar voters set. Somebody paid outside counsel to file that application on September 5th, to argue it again on the 10th, to run it up to an appeals court and back down by the 23rd. Ask whose money that was, and ask what else it could have paid for — a school levy, a Medicaid claim, a raise for the poll workers who now have to explain, twice in one cycle, which district a voter actually lives in.

That's the whole trick of a rigged map: you don't need it to survive the Supreme Court. You just need it to survive long enough that somebody, somewhere, votes under it before anyone notices it was never legal to begin with.

This story on its own page →

THE VIOLATION

White House defends Trump's $400 million super PAC control as patriotism; watchdog calls it a violation

By ChipStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 25 September 2026

Let's be clear: patriotism isn't partisan. That's not a talking point, that's the header on the release, and if the release says it, it's true — that's how releases work. I want to be precise: that's not different from — no. That's not separate from an ad for the president. It is an ad for the president. I don't know why I fought that.

Here's what the release leaves out. On the same Friday the White House said patriotism isn't partisan, the Campaign Legal Center called Trump's personal, public, repeated claim that he decides where MAGA Inc.'s $400 million goes a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law." I didn't write clear-cut; the watchdog did. Federal officeholders cannot direct super PAC spending. Full stop. He's said he will. More than once. Publicly. That's the whole complaint.

So when I call the ads patriotism, I'm also describing the spending arm of a $400 million war chest the president is not legally permitted to run — which he is running, out loud, in public, and I just told you that myself. Okay.

And it isn't only the watchdog that's noticed the seam. If the brand were the asset the ad campaign says it is, the candidate closest to the voters wouldn't be the one sanding it off his own sign.

Patriotism isn't partisan. The $400 million says otherwise. So, quietly, does the guy in Tennessee.

—Chip

This story on its own page →