News

THIRD TIME

Missouri asks Supreme Court to let it rig its map, gets no for the third time in a row

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the midnight edition, 28 September 2026

The chief hands the crew the file the way it keeps arriving: same map, same bench, third rejection slip. On September 5, Missouri went to the Supreme Court's own docket, filing an emergency application with Justice Kavanaugh, asking the justices to overturn the state's own high court and let a new Republican-drawn map stand ahead of the November election. Missouri's lawyers called the state court's block a "federal-election-administration disaster." The justices did not see a disaster. On September 25 they blocked the map, and the unsigned ruling walked its own history: the Legislature enacted a map in 2022, enacted a new one in 2025, and now this one too gets sent back. Missouri returns to the 2022 lines for the midterms.

Two days later the president took to Truth Social and blamed the referee. "The Supreme Court of the United States will just not let Missouri have an Election Victory," he wrote. "They continuously, three times now, overrule Judges who came to the correct decisions." Same court, same week, different file: Attorney General Todd Blanche said the administration would ask that same Supreme Court to intervene after a federal appeals court dissolved a stay protecting the government's rapid third-country deportation framework. The court blocking a map draws contempt. The court asked to bless deportations draws an appeal. It is the same building either way.

Here is where the crew gets to work, because the actual tool nobody has touched is not on the Court's desk at all. Congress holds constitutional authority over the rules for its own elections — the power to set one uniform, nonpartisan redistricting standard for every House map in the country, so no legislature gets a third or fourth attempt at a friendlier one.

The muscle wrecks the load-bearing myth first: that the Court is the villain of this particular story. It has ruled the same way three times running. The tinkerer lays the real parts on the bench — the standing constitutional authority, sitting unused, that could end the state-by-state redraw-and-reject cycle in one statute. The planner admires how simple the assembly actually is. The pilot doesn't promise the bill passes. That part's on the readers, and on the Congress that has never once picked up the tool.

This story on its own page →

White House denies offering China weapons the same week two pandas clear U.S. customs.

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 28 September 2026

Two giant pandas landed in Atlanta Sunday morning aboard a Boeing 777 painted for the occasion — "FedEx Panda Express" — a dedicated cargo flight arranged under a new agreement between Zoo Atlanta and the Chinese government. Ping Ping and Fu Shuang are real, specific, and already on the ground.

Back up three days, to Thursday's state dinner at the White House. Xi Jinping stood beside Trump and announced the gift himself: the two pandas, plus invitations for 100,000 American students to study in China. "The giant panda has been an envoy of friendship between the Chinese and the American people," Xi said. CBS called it what decades of coverage have called it: panda diplomacy, animals and access exchanged on terms China sets and can revoke.

That same Thursday, former ambassador to China Nicholas Burns appeared on CBS and said he feared the president was taking too soft an approach with Xi. He didn't have the specifics yet. Three days later, he got them.

On Sunday, the sitting ambassador, David Perdue, supplied those specifics himself, on Fox News Sunday. Trump, Perdue said, told Xi: "We sell arms to other people around the world" — and asked whether Beijing wanted in. Not a completed sale. An offer, from the president, to Xi Jinping's government.

The White House said afterward there were no such plans.

Lay the week end to end. A state dinner where China hands over two bears and a hundred thousand student slots. A former ambassador voicing worry about softness that same afternoon. A current ambassador confirming, days later, exactly what the softness looked like. A White House walking the confirmation back before the week was out.

The gifts didn't get a denial. They cleared customs on schedule, government stamp and everything, pandas in a crate with their names on it and 100,000 visa invitations behind them. The arms offer got one, fast enough that outlets ran the denial in the same story as the news itself. Line up what got confirmed and un-confirmed this week and only one cargo actually crossed the Pacific without anybody in Washington trying to take it back.

This story on its own page →

ON REPEAT

CNN reposts 'the 2024 presidential alternative many voters will want' every four days, unconcerned who's president.

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 28 September 2026

On September 18th, CNN's site carried four headlines side by side: "The 2024 presidential alternative many voters will want." "Dominion still has pending lawsuits against election deniers such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell." "Taxes are due tomorrow. Here's how to file for an extension." "Russia is 'going backwards' in equipment and deploying post-WWII-era tanks, according to Western officials." Ten days later, this morning, September 28th, the same four ran again. Same headlines, same order, same wording. Dominion's suits against Giuliani and Powell are still described as "pending," which they have been for years. Taxes are still due "tomorrow," a fact that goes false and then true again every year on its own schedule. Russia is still "going backwards," an assessment that would be alarming news if it were new news.

Under the Russia headline, three lines rode along on both dates, also unchanged: Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was denied a detention appeal in Moscow. Putin visited troops at military headquarters in Kherson. A video still shows the moment the reporter appeared in Russian court.

The presidential-alternative headline is the plainest tell. It reads like it was written for a reader deciding what to do about the 2024 election, an event that, as of this morning's posting, is twenty-two months in the past. It is still up. A reader could have filed taxes, requested an extension on those taxes, and let that extension itself lapse in the time this headline has been telling them who the alternative is.

None of this is a glitch. A desk that files four items on a repeating clock and leaves them live regardless of what happens underneath runs on a template, and the template's only instruction is to post on schedule, whether or not the story under it moved. Gershkovich's appeal clock and CNN's four-day clock are both running right now. Only one of them is set to anything a reader can actually see.

This story on its own page →

Holdout juror provided zero evidence during deliberations, his lawyer says he had a mountain of it.

By MitchInvestigations · the midnight edition, 28 September 2026

On September 3rd, Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney told the court that a single juror stood between the panel and a unanimous verdict. The claim arrived in a note from the foreperson: the holdout was not following the judge's instructions on reasonable doubt. The jury was nine women and three men, weighing whether Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children.

A week later, September 10th, a name attached to the claim. Fellow juror Nick Dargie told reporters that the holdout, Michael Desronvil, had failed to provide any evidence to support his vote. The mistrial that followed rests on that account: one man's doubt, and by his own colleague's telling, nothing behind it.

Eight days after that, September 18th, Desronvil was moved to what his attorney called a "secure location," after details of the deliberations became public. The record does not say what he was doing in the jury room. It says why he needed protecting once people found out what had happened there.

Four days later, September 22nd, Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, filed a motion asking Judge William Sullivan to investigate Desronvil over alleged cellphone use during deliberations. All together now — line one of that docket: a mistrial, caused by a single juror. Line two: that juror, according to a colleague, offered no evidence for his vote. Line three: a motion asking whether he was looking at his phone instead.

Today, September 28th, Desronvil's attorney, Edward Paltzik, gave a different account — not in a filing, but in a clip released ahead of a Fox News interview with Kayleigh McEnany. Paltzik said his client had "zero doubt" and "a mountain of evidence" to support finding Clancy criminally responsible.

The mountain and the zero belong to the same juror. One account came from the colleague who sat beside him through deliberations. The other came from his lawyer, on cable news, six days after the court itself was asked to check his phone. Neither account is evidence in any legal sense — one is an interview clip, the other is a claim made outside the courtroom. The motion about the phone is the only document in this docket that a judge has actually been asked to rule on.

Whatever the mountain contains, it did not make it into the room where the verdict was decided. What made it into that room, according to the person who was in it with him, was nothing at all.

This story on its own page →

The four-day clock reposts CNN's Dominion suit and New Left Review's dead historian's letters, unconcerned who's publishing.

By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 28 September 2026

According to CNN's own morgue, the headline "Dominion still has pending lawsuits against election deniers such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell" posted on September 6th, again on September 10th, again on September 14th, and again on September 18th — four documented runs in twelve days, each four days apart, a lawsuit that has now been "pending" long enough to qualify as permanent fixture. By that fourth run, on the 18th, three companions had joined it on CNN's front page, confirmed running the same day: "The 2024 presidential alternative many voters will want," "Taxes are due tomorrow. Here's how to file for an extension," and "Russia is 'going backwards' in equipment and deploying post-WWII-era tanks."

New Left Review's website was keeping the identical rhythm on a subject that has nothing to do with CNN's. Benjamin Kunkel's essay on national-economic policy hit the morgue on September 6th, the 10th, the 14th, and the 18th — the same four days, the same outlet, an essay about globalization instead of a lawsuit about an election.

CNN's four are back: the alternative, the lawsuits, the taxes, the tanks. New Left Review's page carries Kunkel and the Ginzburg correspondence once more, sitting beside pieces dated today that read like actual news: Donald Sassoon on Keir Starmer's ouster by his own MPs, Ilya Budraitskis on a history of Soviet-era dissidents, and Mao Jian's essay on Chinese online slang, which finds in the phrase "going dark" a new sense of agency against diagnoses of "brain-rot." The rerun and the real news sit in the same list, in the same font, distinguishable only by pulling the morgue.

The decision to repeat sits in software, not in this week's editorial meetings at CNN or at New Left Review. That is what a four-day cycle running identically across a cable network and a Marxist quarterly proves: the industry built the pipeline, not the anchor, and the pipeline does not know the difference between Rudy Giuliani's lawsuit and a coup in Westminster. This is not information. It is inventory, and it ships whether or not anything happened.

This story on its own page →

National Review says only one holdout juror deserves respect; the docket says he's not it.

By MitchInvestigations · the wee small hours edition, 28 September 2026

On September 3rd, Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney told the court that a single juror stood between the panel and a unanimous verdict, per a note from the foreperson: the holdout was not following the judge's instructions on reasonable doubt. The jury was nine women and three men, weighing whether Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children.

Seven days later, September 10th, a name attached to the claim. Fellow juror Nick Dargie told reporters the holdout, Michael Desronvil, had not produced a single piece of evidence to support his vote. The mistrial that followed rests on that account.

Eight days after that, September 18th, Desronvil was moved to what his attorney called a "secure location," after other jurors said publicly he had doubted whether Clancy was sane when she killed her children.

Four days later, September 22nd, the defense went further. Attorney Kevin Reddington asked Judge William Sullivan to investigate Desronvil for alleged cellphone use during deliberations. That motion sits in the same docket as everything that follows.

Six days after that, this weekend, Desronvil's own attorney, Edward Paltzik, went on Fox News and said his client had "a mountain of evidence" for conviction and "zero doubt" about his vote. Those are Paltzik's words, offered on his client's behalf, in the same docket where a fellow juror already swore under oath that the mountain came to court as nothing: no exhibit, no document, no single piece of anything.

Same weekend, National Review filed its own brief, an essay titled "A Tale of Two Jurors," setting Desronvil beside Henry Fonda's holdout in "12 Angry Men" and finding, as the subhead puts it, that only one is worthy of respect. All together now — Fonda's character spent the film producing the evidence the other eleven jurors had not considered: a knife bought at a pawn shop, a subway timed against testimony, a woman's eyesight tested in open court. He held out with exhibits. The docket in Massachusetts records a foreperson's note, a colleague's sworn account of zero evidence, and an attorney's press-release mountain that has yet to appear in the courtroom where it would matter. National Review picked its hero before checking which juror actually showed his work.

This story on its own page →

U.S. denies arming China, takes two pandas instead.

By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 28 September 2026

On September 18, three senators — Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders — introduced a bill to block a $5 billion U.S. weapons sale to Saudi Arabia. That is the ordinary machinery for stopping an arms deal a lawmaker distrusts: a bill, a sponsor, a name attached to it.

Four days later, on September 22, the president disclosed 1,156 stock trades from July, a reshuffling of his personal portfolio worth between $79 million and $270 million that touched, among other sectors, weapons-makers.

By Sunday, September 27, the threads met. Ambassador Perdue told Fox News Sunday that during those same meetings the president had asked Xi whether China wanted to buy American weapons — "Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world," Perdue quoted him saying. The New York Times carried the ambassador's account that day. That is a statement about plans, not a statement that the offer was never made.

That same Sunday morning, before the ambassador's account or the denial had finished moving on the wires, a Boeing 777 painted "FedEx Panda Express" landed in Atlanta. Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, the pandas Xi had announced three days earlier, were aboard, under a new agreement between Zoo Atlanta and the Chinese government. They cleared customs on schedule. On Monday, September 28, The Hill printed the ambassador's quote in full.

Line the beats up in the order they happened, not the order they got denied. A senator files a bill to stop one arms sale. A president's disclosure forms show trading in the sector that would fill another. The country he is said to have offered weapons to sends animals and a visa promise instead, and the man who used to hold the ambassador's job says out loud that he's worried about the softness. The denial covers the offer to sell weapons. Nothing covers the gift of pandas — it already landed, on schedule, the same week the offer surfaced.

This story on its own page →

THIRD REJECTION, COUNTED

Trump demands Supreme Court award Missouri the Election Victory it just lost for a third time

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the wee small hours edition, 28 September 2026

The chief pulls the file back out because it keeps coming back. On September 5, Missouri filed an emergency application with Justice Kavanaugh, asking the Supreme Court to overturn its own state court and let a new Republican-drawn map stand before November. Four days later, on September 9, the group that beat the first map — People Not Politicians — asked the justices to hold the line instead. By September 23, the fight was back at the Court for the third time that month, both sides asking nine people in Washington to settle what a state legislature keeps refusing to settle itself. On September 25, the justices answered: the 2022 map holds, the 2025 map doesn't, and the unsigned order recited its own history — a map enacted in 2022, a new one enacted in 2025, both now on the losing side of the same docket, the third rejection in a row.

The muscle looks at that structure and doesn't like it: three trips to Washington to referee one state's lines, work the Constitution assigned somewhere else entirely. Sunday morning the president went to Truth Social and called the third loss something else. The Supreme Court "will just not let Missouri have an Election Victory," he wrote, "they continuously, three times now, overrule Judges who came to the correct decisions." Three losses, by his own count, rebranded as a victory the Court is simply withholding. The planner reads it twice and admires the arithmetic even while it argues the opposite of what it proves.

The tinkerer goes to the part Congress has never taken off the shelf. The Elections Clause hands Congress the power to set the times, places and manner of congressional elections — one national standard for how a map gets drawn, so a legislature can't lose, redraw, and land back on the docket a fourth time next cycle. The same week's other read makes the same point from the opposite direction: this isn't a tyrannical bench, it's a Congress built, by its own design, to delay and let the courts hold the bag while it does nothing.

The pilot notes the flight path doesn't change: Missouri runs November on the 2022 lines, the third rejection standing, until whoever holds the actual authority picks up the part built for exactly this and uses it.

This story on its own page →