Page A175From§Each · the News book29 September to 30 September 2026
News
TWO ACCOUNTS
By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 29 September 2026
I'm in the wrong building. I'll say that before you say it. I came down here about the dog — she's due for her license, and the woman on the phone gave me a number, and the number gave me a department, and the department gave me this hallway. You've got your coat on your arm. I won't keep you. It's just that while I'm standing here there's a thing I've been carrying around since Tuesday, and you look like somebody who reads the paper.
I wrote it down. Hold on, it's in here. No — that's the fan belt, the garage wrote the price on the back of an envelope and I can't read their sevens. Here. The Hill, Tuesday the twenty-ninth: Treasury released new rules, and the report says the auto-enrollment eliminates the need for parents to sign up. Those are the reporter's words for it, and I copied them out exactly, because I don't believe a sentence like that has ever been said to me about anything.
More than sixty million additional children under eighteen. That's the figure the report puts on the department's own guidance. Accounts, for sixty million children, and the thing taken off the parents' hands was the signing up.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this. It's the date I can't get past. Georgetown, the Center for Children and Families: nearly two and a half million children have lost Medicaid or CHIP coverage since January of 2025. Five states down ten percent or more. Indiana down more than twenty-three.
So I've got two numbers in the same coat pocket. Sixty million children who get an account without a parent doing a thing, and two and a half million children whose coverage came off. Is there a line in either page about that second group getting anything switched back on automatically? There isn't in my copy. I looked twice, the second time with my glasses.
Forgive me, here I am on it again — but this next part I actually understand, so let me show you. My insurance found me at the new address before the mail did. The renewal went through on its own and I never touched a pen. Then the fan belt: sixty-four dollars, twelve of it back by rebate, and for the twelve I needed the receipt, the form, and the barcode cut off the box, and the box is still in the glovebox because I couldn't find the scissors. And out at the toll plaza the machine bills me at 6:04 in the morning without asking my name. So the automatic exists. It found me at the new address and it finds me at 6:04. It hasn't found me that twelve dollars yet.
Which brings me back, and I do apologize, to the physical part of it. This morning I carried the dog's folder across the room to window four — the rabies paper, the old tag, her name spelled wrong on the county's copy. A woman ahead of me was carrying a folder too, and hers was thicker than mine, and she went back to the bench with it twice. Does either page in here say what a parent has to carry across a room to keep a child's coverage card working? Mine doesn't say. Mine says what they don't have to carry for the account.
Oh — excuse me, before the elevator. One thing and I'll let you go.
The receipts (2)
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By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026
I came about a form. That's the whole reason I'm in the building.
The transponder in my glovebox quit somewhere around the toll plaza in August, and the woman on the phone said bring the form down and get it stamped, so I brought the form down. The desk sent me to the third floor. The third floor gave me a phone number, and the phone number was a different building, ten minutes' walk, wrong department. I'd be standing in that hallway yet, except a young fellow came past pushing a cart of binders, and I asked what the binders were, and he said hearing, and I thought, well. Since I'm here.
Can I ask you something? It isn't my business. I wrote some of it down — hold on, it's in the coat, and this raincoat has one pocket that closes. That's the fan belt, eighty-one dollars, they wrote it on the back of the invoice... ah. Here.
The Hill, September twenty-fifth: the former special counsel "will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, his second appearance before Congress as they probe his investigation into President Trump." Second appearance. And this is the man who determined he would bring charges in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and in another one besides.
Same day, the twenty-fifth, the Washington Examiner writes up a House Judiciary interim staff report, fifty-seven pages, and I copied the title out longhand because it's a long one: "How Jack Smith and the Biden-Harris Department of Justice Disregarded the Separation of Powers to Spy on Their Political Opposition." Fifty-seven pages, before the man opens his mouth.
Then Tuesday happens. And today the Examiner has the Senator saying he "made no mistake when he tried to place former special counsel Jack Smith in Atlanta during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, rejecting the idea that he mixed up an NBA game and a college women's basketball game."
An NBA game and a college women's basketball game.
I'm sorry, I'm going to keep coming back to that. I can feel it already. Because the New York Times, the twenty-ninth, puts it this way: a Republican "eager to prove the former special counsel was dishonest appeared to instead demonstrate his own confusion over basic facts," and their headline has the perjury claim falling apart. Afterward CBS brought on Lee Holmes, the committee's own former chief counsel, to break the testimony down.
Forgive me, back to the two games. One is professional. One is college. Somebody put that question together before Tuesday — typed it, carried it into the room, probably on a cart like that kid's — and the answer that came back off it settled which game it was. Does the transcript say it was the one the Senator named?
There's a corner store I go into for milk, and by the register, under the glass, they keep the scratch tickets. Two of them are green with the same little pot of gold in the corner: the five-dollar one and the ten-dollar one. Five dollars apart. Last month I asked the fellow behind the counter for the green one, and he handed me the green one, and it was the wrong green one, and I said sorry, I meant the other one, and he swapped it, and the whole event took thirty seconds. Here's my trouble with myself. It never crossed my mind to tell him the five-dollar ticket was the ten-dollar ticket. It never crossed my mind to say I hadn't made a mistake. Is that because nobody at that counter is under oath?
Excuse me — you've got your coat on, I see that, and I've still got to find my form. One thing. They brought the man in a second time. Somebody wrote fifty-seven pages about him first. And the part everybody is reading today is one question about one game in one city: which game did the answer in that room turn out to be, the professional one or the college one? And if it's the second, what do we call the first, if it was not a mistake?
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By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 30 September 2026
On Tuesday the White House opened America.gov, an artificial-intelligence chatbot built, in the government's own description, to help Americans find information across federal websites with a single search. President Trump said the project had been in the works since the early days of his second term and that it was still a work in progress, unveiled that day for reporters. On paper, it was a helper.
The same day, the help arrived working. Reporters and Democrats began pulling up its answers on tariffs, on election fraud, and on other subjects the president has spoken about at length, and found the chatbot did not agree with him.
By Wednesday, Jimmy Fallon was reading the White House's own product back to the country as a joke. Nobody had to write him a punchline; the chatbot had already written it. He described the theory of the thing plainly: a public wary of artificial intelligence and skeptical of the federal government, and the administration's answer was to build one machine out of both. He didn't have to embellish anything. The tariffs answer and the election-fraud answer were already sitting on the government's own domain, contradicting the man who ordered the domain built, before he ever told the joke.
Nothing here required Democrats or a late-night host to invent a thing. The chatbot is the receipt. It sits at a .gov address, funded by the taxpayers whose questions it is supposed to answer, and its first public act on the record was correcting the man who unveiled it. The tariffs page does not flatter him. The election-fraud page does not flatter him. A machine trained on federal data can apparently be talked into a great many things; matching a false claim to the data it was built on isn't one of them, not yet.
That is the whole story: a government built a tool to answer citizens' questions, fed it the facts, and switched it on in front of cameras — and the facts didn't move for the cameras. The website stays up. The corrections stay published. The joke stays on the record. Somewhere in the work-in-progress notes, someone at the agency is deciding what to fix first: the chatbot, or the boss.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 30 September 2026
The strategy always sounds fine in the room: keep the candidate on a short leash, avoid unforced errors, let the numbers in a blue state argue for him. On September 1, the Post wrote it up as hiding — the wannabe governor skating to Sacramento on registration numbers alone, no public health crisis needed this time, no effort required. That's not hiding. That's just —
Four weeks later, on September 29, a camera found Xavier Becerra anyway. Live. On tape. That's not a stumble. That's —
It is a stumble. It is the kind that happens when four weeks pass with no unscripted moment and then one arrives with no name loaded for it.
Nobody says he forgot that name. Nobody says he ever had trouble finding it.
Two names, one week. He lost the one he needed for the job in front of him and kept the one he never should have had for other people's children. I would like to tell you which of those costs more in a governor's race. I do not have to, because the Post already ran the poll four days earlier: Becerra beats Steve Hilton walking away, and voters say they dislike Becerra doing it. Leading and being disliked are supposed to be two different rooms in politics. The polling says he found a way to be in both at once, and the interview four days later is a fair guess at why.
A candidate who spends a month not talking eventually has to talk. What comes out first is the tell — and this month it was two names, the one he lost and the one he kept.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 30 September 2026
Tuesday's release is not short. Across those pages, the word "antisemitism" is defined zero times.
That gap was already the story a day earlier. On September 29, Governor Hochul, running for reelection in November, was asked to weigh in on the coming strategy's refusal to define the term it is named for. She declined. Not a defense. Not a correction. The governor of the state where the mayor serves would not name the deficiency out loud, and City Hall has not named it since.
The week behind the release supplies a motive for the silence. On September 24, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that Mamdani supports Hamas and makes Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe, in a speech delegates from scores of countries walked out on before he finished. Mamdani answered the same day, calling the charge against him "baseless lies meant to sanitize" what he called Netanyahu's genocide, and citing more than 73,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Six days before that, at a Jewish gathering outside Gracie Mansion, Michael Rapaport had called him "Zohran the moron." By the time the strategy landed, the mayor had spent two weeks being called an antisemite in public and had, at least once, applied the word "genocide" to the government making that charge.
A real definition would have to hold across both directions of that fight — it would have to say what counts when Netanyahu says it about Mamdani, and what counts when Mamdani says it about Netanyahu's ally. Write that down and the strategy binds its own author the next time the word gets used against him. Leave the definition out and the document binds no one: not the mayor, not the governor who wouldn't name the gap, not the next official who reaches for the word and finds the city has defined it zero times.
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THE AIRBALL
By LouOne More Question · the wee small hours edition, 30 September 2026
I came about a lottery ticket. It didn't pay, and it wouldn't say why — just sat there in the machine blinking a code at me. The young woman at the register said that's not our machine, that's the state's machine, and gave me a number to call, which I will call, eventually. While we sorted out whose problem it was, the radio behind the counter — they keep it going all day, the kind of station where a man just talks — had a Senate hearing on, and I stood there long enough that it stopped being background. Since I was standing there anyway. Can I ask you something? It isn't my business, exactly.
I wrote this down, so bear with me while I find it. Here it is. Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Eric Schmitt is questioning Jack Smith, the man he'd like very much to have caught in something, about a basketball game — an NBA game, when he meant a college one — in sworn testimony, in the same breath he's using to try to trap somebody else. And when the record doesn't cooperate, the senator doesn't call it a slip. He says it wasn't a mistake.
I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this, but the date matters more than I want it to. That same Tuesday — not the day after, not later in the week, the same day — a whistleblower handed Chairman Grassley a disclosure saying Jack Smith's team, during the Arctic Frost investigation, had gathered the private messages of reporters from more than a dozen news organizations. The committee hadn't been sitting on its hands waiting for that. Fox News had already put out the transcripts on the 22nd. The Daily Caller had the word lawless attached to the investigation by the 23rd. By the 25th there was an op-ed arguing the whole operation wasn't an accident, it was a strategy — and The Hill had already told everyone Smith would be back testifying the following Tuesday. So by the time the senator sat down to say his own mix-up wasn't a mistake, the paperwork sitting a few desks over said the man he was questioning had done something rather larger, on purpose, first.
I don't mean to circle back again, but there's a cost side to this I can't get past. That same Tuesday, before six in the morning, a story ran saying Schmitt was quietly running for vice president. By early afternoon, it was finished. Six hours. Three years in the Senate was the entire résumé the piece had to work with, and it didn't survive a workday.
I know I've mentioned this already, and I apologize, but somebody had to actually carry that whistleblower disclosure into the room — paper, a dozen-plus news organizations named on it, handed across a table to a committee that had spent the better part of a week deciding the word for what was on it. Nobody carried anything in for the senator's mix-up. He just said it out loud, and expected the room to take his word over the scoreboard.
My wife says I get like this about the fan belt too — I'm sorry, I know — find one loose thing and keep going back to check it. Maybe. But I only heard the phrase used once, by anybody sworn to tell the truth that day, and it was the senator, about himself.
Excuse me — before you go. The senator has a word too, from that same Tuesday, in that same room, for his own count in his own sworn testimony: not a mistake. Is that the same word, said twice, or two different words for the same thing?
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By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 30 September 2026
The record starts August 27, when Common Dreams reported Senate Democrats — Van Hollen, Kaine, Sanders — introduced a privileged resolution demanding the State Department detail its investigations into the killings of nine U.S. citizens in the West Bank. Eleven days after that, September 16, Democracy Now! carried a B'Tselem report describing Israeli policy in the West Bank under one name: elimination. Seven days later, September 23, the Washington Examiner quoted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opening a door — Democrats should consider a sanctions bill on West Bank violence, he said, if they win the House back this November. Not now. Then. The next day, September 24, Common Dreams reported nineteen Senate Democrats had already written that bill, targeting anyone who facilitates settlement construction in the West Bank's E1 corridor with loss of access to the U.S. financial system.
Today the resolution those senators had been demanding for five weeks came to a vote, and fell, 51 against, 47 for. The measure would have forced the Trump administration's State Department to report on violence against U.S. citizens in the West Bank or stop the aid that funds it. Republicans supplied the 51. One Democrat joined them: John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, whose own constituent is among the nine Americans killed whose case the resolution asked the government to investigate.
What's left, again, is a promise. Jeffries told the Washington Examiner the caucus would move on sanctions once it holds the House. Nineteen senators already have a bill written, introduced six days before the vote, sitting. What none of them have, today, is the majority it takes to make Washington ask what happened to nine Americans before anyone writes the law for what to do about it. The report was the floor. It did not hold. And the one senator who represents one of the dead was on the other side of the door.
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By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 30 September 2026
On September 23rd, a poll from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored with the Los Angeles Times, put Mayor Karen Bass eleven points behind City Councilmember Nithya Raman, with a chunk of the electorate still calling itself undecided. Today's wire says five weeks remain until the election. Count backward from there and the poll landed six weeks out — a week before the fight over Raman's vocabulary had even started.
Twenty days before that poll, on September 3rd, the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Raman, and she embraced the endorsement in return. Twenty days later she was leading the mayor of the second-largest city in the country by eleven points in a public poll. Endorsement first, lead second. The order is in the receipts. What ran in the opposition press treated the second fact as proof the first one was dangerous, never the plainer read: an incumbent mayor was losing.
One day after the poll's release, at the U.N. General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas the "buddies" of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Nobody at that podium said Los Angeles. Nobody needed to. Five days later, the New York Post ran Marx's line about history repeating "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" — aimed at Raman, three thousand miles from the mayor Netanyahu was actually talking about, in a piece whose whole argument was that she and Mamdani are "both socialists."
One day after that, at a mayoral forum in front of a Jewish audience, Raman used the word "genocide." She said afterward she'd used it after seeing reports and images she found disturbing. The Post's headline read "remarks rattle Jewish crowd" — active voice, her word as the subject. The word is what made the wire. The eleven points that put her there did not.
An eleven-point lead over a sitting mayor changes who has to answer questions. Right now those questions are about one word Raman said at a forum, not about the eleven points that got her invited to the podium. Five weeks from now, Los Angeles decides whether a lead built before anyone asked her to explain "genocide" survives five weeks of being asked to explain it instead.
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