News

HIS OWN WORDS

Trump campaigns for Paxton by calling him a 'pain in the ass' and 'a little controversial'

By LouOne More Question · the milkman edition, 2 October 2026

There's a dash in Thursday's New York Post headline I keep looking at. "Trump trucks to Texas to tout 'pain in the a–' Ken Paxton." Two letters missing, replaced with a line, like the paper ran out of nerve or ran out of room. I don't know which. I looked for my notebook to see if I'd written down the full word somewhere else, and I had — The Hill printed it whole: the president said his own Senate candidate is "a pain in the ass." Also "a little controversial."

I'm not saying that's strange. I'm asking what a campaign stop is supposed to accomplish, if the headline act is the candidate's own boss describing him the way you'd describe a flat tire.

Here's where I go back to the page. Aug. 28, Sen. John Cornyn — not an opponent, the man whose seat this is — told the Texas Tribune Paxton is "lazy," a "poor campaigner," doesn't raise money. I wrote that down because it was the home-state senator, not a Democrat, saying it on the record, about the man running to replace him.

Sept. 14, a filing. The Senate Leadership Fund's Texas PAC put $53.8 million into Paxton's campaign — call it $54 million, the receipts do. Is that the figure meant to answer Cornyn's complaint about money? Eight days later, Sept. 22, Cornyn and George W. Bush held a Dallas fundraiser for six Republican Senate candidates. Six. Eight days after $54 million landed, the two men closest to that money in Texas raised more of it for everyone running except him.

Sept. 27, a poll. Talarico 49, Paxton 44. Five points, a month before Election Day, from Texas Public Opinion Research.

So I took it out to the car. Fan belt's been squealing since July, cheap part, I finally bought the new one at the auto store on the corner — eleven dollars, I kept the receipt out of habit. Put it in Saturday. Car still won't turn over in the cold. New belt, same problem. Was the belt ever what was wrong with it?

Is fifty-four million dollars a new belt? It's a specific, countable, real amount of money. Does any of it answer the five points? Does any of it answer "lazy"? Does any of it answer "a pain in the ass"? The filing doesn't say which one the money was for.

I drove it to the toll plaza anyway, because the car does run, just not in the cold, and I sat in the line behind the cars ahead of me feeding in their change, and I thought about six names on a fundraiser list and the one that's missing, and about a man who flew in his candidate's crowd for him — Dennis Rodman, North Korea knowledge and all, Thursday night, Denton — to stand next to a man he also, that same day, called a pain in the ass.

Excuse me — before I let this go. I keep coming back to that dash, I'm sorry, I already brought it up once. It isn't that the Post couldn't print the word; The Hill already had, in full, from the candidate's own boss. Which fact was the fifty-four million dollars supposed to fix — the word the Post wouldn't finish, or the one Talarico's five points already did: pain in the ass?

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THE DOCUMENT TRAIL

Hochul strips Cornell rape case from DA she doesn't trust, hands it to prosecutor experts doubt can win.

By ChipStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 2 October 2026

Cornell's position was that this was handled internally. For two years, internally is exactly where it stayed.

The night happened in 2024 at the Chi Phi fraternity house. A woman identified in court papers as Jane Doe says she was drugged and gang-raped by seven fraternity brothers. Three weeks later, she told Cornell's campus police, in a transcript unsealed only now, that she could say, with 100 percent confidence, that she was raped. In September she sued Cornell and the seven men. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who had let the case sit, reopened it on new evidence. Nancy Pelosi canceled an October 15 event tied to the university. Students at Cornell began asking, in print, for the accountability the file hadn't given them.

Then came this week's filings, and with them the hundreds of pages Cornell's own Title IX investigators had compiled and never released. CBS News and the New York Times obtained the transcripts. Text messages between Doe and one of the defendants, sent in the days after the alleged assault, surfaced alongside them. The seven men's own accounts of that night, laid out in the same files, did not agree with each other; the Times called them disjointed and sometimes contradictory. All seven deny wrongdoing. None of that, by itself, is a conviction. It was enough to end Van Houten's hold on the case.

On Thursday, Governor Hochul said she had lost faith in the county prosecutor's ability to oversee the case fairly, and signed an executive order handing the investigation to Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. "The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued," Hochul said, promising the matter would be handled "without conflict or bias."

James now holds the file, the texts, and the seven contradictory accounts — and inherits the problem legal experts spent Thursday explaining to reporters. A rape case built mostly from messages sent after the fact is, by the law's own mechanics, a hard one to win in court. The file Cornell sat on for two years did not disappear. It changed desks. What it still has to prove, now in a courtroom instead of a file cabinet, is unchanged by who is holding it.

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Examiner calls Collins's polling a firewall, leaves out the graffiti, the corruption report, and her new love of debates.

By ChipStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 2 October 2026

On August 28, the Washington Examiner ran a small item built around one word: "bucks." Sen. Susan Collins, it noted, was bucking the usual incumbent instinct and agreeing to four debates against her Democratic opponent, former state senator Troy Jackson, who hadn't yet agreed to any. The piece treated it as a quirk of character. It did not ask why an incumbent running on a brand of quiet constituent service would suddenly want four public stages instead of none.

Three and a half weeks later, on September 22, the question answered itself. ProPublica published what it described as a "sprawling pay-to-play operation" centered on Collins. Jackson didn't wait for the ink to dry: "Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign," he said, and then, shorter, for the cameras: "the jig is up." Collins's office called the whole thing "categorically false."

Six days after that, on September 28, someone reached a different kind of answer. The statement addressed the paint. It did not address the ProPublica story, the debates, or any connection between the two, and no one asked it to.

Which brings the calendar to October 2, and the Washington Examiner again, this time with a headline calling the race a "firewall." The piece tracks national polling running badly for Republicans and presents Maine as the seat holding anyway. It runs the numbers.

A firewall, by definition, is the thing standing between you and what's already burning. The Examiner found the wall. It just forgot to mention what's on the other side of it, or why the senator behind it suddenly wanted the cameras on.

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TWO INJECTIONS

Tennessee halts all executions after a 'clinical' lethal injection takes two tries, forty minutes, to not work.

By ChipStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 2 October 2026

On September 22, Truthout reported the state had booked Christa Pike's lethal injection for September 30, a woman the state would make the first it executed in two hundred years. On September 28, Pike's lawyers filed a motion saying she had already survived two lethal injections, asking the courts to stop a third. On September 29, the Supreme Court declined her clemency appeal and cleared the date. Call it that if you like; the record does not. On Wednesday night the clinical language ran out of road: two injections became a double dose, and forty minutes passed before anyone in the chamber could say the word finished. The Guardian reports she was still alive, breathing, and, the paper notes, snoring.

Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, called it "deeply disturbing" on Thursday, suspended every execution in the state through the end of the year, and ordered an independent inquiry. I was ready to call that inquiry a technical fix, a tune-up for a broken machine. Fox News quoted former Knoxville police chief Phil Keith warning the botched attempt could end capital punishment in Tennessee altogether; the former chief of police is now the clearest voice arguing for the method's survival.

The same week, in the same news cycle, National Review ran a different argument: that American executions have become too medicalized, too sanitized, to still deter anyone — that the clinical language Tennessee spent decades building is itself the problem. Two readings of one word arrived within hours of one another. The state spent a generation making the needle look like medicine so the courts would call it constitutional. National Review says that medicine is exactly why it no longer frightens anyone into obedience. Both arguments were published this week about the same forty minutes, the same woman, the same snoring, and neither one is about her.

One receipt dates Pike's conviction to 1994; another, to 1995. The state has not managed to agree on the year it decided to kill her. It has had thirty years to settle on one.

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El-Sayed apologizes to Jewish Democrats in person, pressed five weeks later to condemn Iran's regime again.

By LouOne More Question · the breakfast edition, 2 October 2026

You know the toll plaza on 94, the one with the orange sensor that's supposed to read your transponder and wave you through? I go through there most Tuesdays, same car, same lane, same little beep. Three weeks back the beep didn't come — no wave, nothing — so I drove through anyway, because what's a man supposed to do, back up on the highway? Fine. Two weeks after that, a letter. Unpaid toll, a dollar sixty-five, due immediately. So I go to the counter — not the phone, the counter, because I like to watch a person's face when they tell me I owe money I already paid — and I've got the bank statement folded up right there showing the dollar sixty-five came out the same day I drove through. The woman looks at it, looks at her screen, says the two systems don't talk. The toll was paid. The letter went out anyway. Nobody told the letter.

I bring this up because I was reading two things this week that put me back at that counter, and I wrote the dates down on the back of an insurance card I keep in the glovebox, on account of I couldn't find anything else with a blank side to it.

Did Abdul El-Sayed stand up in front of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus on Saturday, August 30th, and say, in his own words, "I made a mistake"? That's what The Hill had it as. Did the Washington Examiner, writing the very next day, describe that same appearance as him trying to build a bridge with Michigan's Jewish community over something he'd said after the attack on a Detroit-area synagogue? I believe it did. Both dates are on the insurance card.

So then why, twenty-six days later, on September 25th, did the New York Post run a piece asking why Mr. El-Sayed "refuses to condemn Iran's Revolutionary Guard thugs" — like the 30th never happened? And why, this week, on October 2nd, did The Federalist run very nearly the same question, a writer saying El-Sayed wouldn't condemn "the Islamic terror regime that persecuted my family members" — is that a new toll, or the old one, stamped a second time? I only ask because I've got August 30th written down, and I keep checking it against the other two, and the apology's still there. Nobody crossed it off.

The same week, a different driver got a letter at a different address. Out in Los Angeles, Fox News ran a piece calling Nithya Raman, who's running for mayor, a "DSA jihadi," on account of she defended calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide and said she backs the boycott movement, at a Jewish community forum, no less — same kind of forum El-Sayed stood up at. Is that the same system that doesn't talk to the other system? I don't have Ms. Raman's bank statement. I only have mine, and El-Sayed's, which is the only one with a payment already posted.

My car barely starts most mornings — I've been putting off the fan belt — and standing at that toll counter I had time to think, waiting on the woman to find the right screen. And look, excuse me, before you go — one more thing's been bothering me since the counter, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. If a man stands in a room on August 30th and says, "I made a mistake," and two different papers print it, with the date on it, is that apology still good on September 25th? Is it still good on October 2nd? And if it is — if it's sitting right there in two separate files, same as my bank statement was sitting right there in my pocket — who exactly is supposed to be the one who tells the toll plaza it's already been paid?

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National Review says "follow the evidence"; the evidence says "don't say anything."

By LouOne More Question · the coffee break edition, 2 October 2026

My neighbor's moving out. I watched the whole thing from the porch, because the dog needed walking, and after the dog you still owe twenty minutes standing around looking useful. The movers load the truck a particular way, and it isn't the way you'd think. Heaviest stuff first — that's just physics, a couch goes on the bottom so it doesn't slide. But that's not actually what goes on first. What goes on first is everything you won't need for six weeks. The last box on, closest to the door, is the one with the can opener and the extension cords and the phone charger — the stuff somebody's going to ask for on day one.

I asked the lead guy how he decides, and he said something like this: whatever's going to get asked for first goes in last. Whatever's buried doesn't mean we don't have it. We've got everything in that truck. It's just a question of what order you make us dig. I wrote that down. I don't know why. It just seemed like a sentence I'd want later.

So then I'm reading — and I don't follow these things, I want to be clear, somebody left three printouts on my porch step this week, I don't know who — about the Cornell case. The one with the fraternity. And here's what I can't get past, and maybe you can help me, because I'm not a prosecutor. I'm a guy with a dog and a Buick that needs a fan belt.

In 2024, the county declined to bring criminal charges. That's the sentence — I wrote it down twice to make sure I had it right. Fine. People decline things for reasons.

Then I read — and this is from a Title IX transcript, not something I'm making up — that three weeks after the night in question, the young woman told campus police, and I'm reading this exactly as it's written: "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped." Three weeks after. On the record. With campus police. That's a sentence that existed in 2024.

And then there's a second transcript. Same investigation. A witness — somebody else who was in the house that night — told the Title IX investigator that one of the accused called her the next day and asked her not to "say anything." Not "what happened." Not "I don't remember it that way." "Don't say anything." That's also a sentence that existed back in 2024, sitting in a file somewhere, the way the can opener sits at the bottom of the truck, under everything else.

So here's my question, and I really don't know the answer — I'm asking you. If the county already had the transcript where she says she's certain, and the county already had the transcript where somebody's asked not to talk, was the file short on evidence, or was the file just packed wrong? Because now the governor's brought in the state attorney general to run it instead, and that's not a thing you do over a paperwork delay.

The movers, by the way — when they finally got to that last box, the one with the can opener — somebody'd written "OPEN ME FIRST" on it in marker. Nobody opened it first. It still got there. It was always going to get there.

Oh — before you go. There's a piece out this week arguing the case "may not be a rape," calling it instead "a disgusting spectacle of moral rot," and telling the reader to follow the evidence. I've got the transcript right here. The one where they tell her not to "say anything." That's the evidence. Which page were they reading?

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University tells investigators to say nothing on one case; its own survey says something happened to 35 percent

By LouOne More Question · the noon edition, 2 October 2026

My E-ZPass quit on me sometime over the summer — the car hasn't held a charge right since spring, and I think it took the transponder down with it — and I didn't find out until an envelope showed up with a photograph of my own bumper on it. Three weeks after the fact. A toll I didn't know I owed, for a trip I'd half forgotten taking.

Here's the thing about that gantry, though. The transponder isn't actually how the state knows you crossed. It's just the polite version — the beep that waves you through without a camera having to make a decision about you. Underneath the road at every one of those overhead frames there's a loop of wire, and the loop doesn't care what's chirping on your dashboard. A car goes over it, it counts an axle. Every axle. The camera only photographs the ones that didn't announce themselves first. Two different systems, counting the same road, and they don't agree on the number unless you make them.

I had the toll bill in the glovebox, with the registration and a flashlight that hasn't worked since I owned the car, and I was digging through that pile for something else when this week's paper caught up with a story that's been sitting in Tompkins County since the end of September.

On Sept. 28 a woman who used to go to Cornell filed a lawsuit. She said seven brothers of a fraternity called Chi Phi drugged her with ketamine in 2024 and assaulted her. The university's answer, on the record, was that its police investigated and consulted the district attorney's office, which it calls established protocol.

Then this week: Fox reported the attorney general, Letitia James, opened what her office calls an "active criminal investigation," after the governor named her special prosecutor. ABC got hold of texts in which one of the accused apologized to the woman afterward. The Times talked to people who try these cases for a living, who said winning a conviction here won't be simple. And the governor, that same week, said she wants New York to close a law that lets a rape charge fail if the person was willingly intoxicated — a law written for whoever comes after this case, not for this one.

All of that — the lawsuit, the reopened file, the special prosecutor, the apology in writing, the proposed law — attached to a single name on a single docket.

Then The Hill ran the other number. Cornell surveyed its own undergraduates last year. The results are only getting attention now, because of the lawsuit, but the survey itself is a year old. More than a third of the university's undergraduate women — 35 percent — told Cornell they'd experienced nonconsensual sexual contact sometime on that campus.

Thirty-five percent isn't a transponder number. A transponder only logs what announces itself — what gets a lawsuit, a reopened case, a text message surfacing, somebody telling somebody else not to say anything. Thirty-five percent is a loop-counter number. It counts what crossed whether or not anybody filed, whether or not a camera happened to be pointed at it that day.

One case got a special prosecutor, a proposed statute, a grand jury date. The loop under the road says 35 percent crossed.

Oh — hold on, before you go, one more thing. That loop doesn't ask whether you meant to. It only asks whether you crossed. The survey asked the same way — not who reported it, just who it happened to. So how many of that 35 percent has the state assigned a special prosecutor?

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GOP senator warns of a 2006-style wipeout the same week the party stops defending North Carolina.

By ChipStaff Writer · the noon edition, 2 October 2026

Everything here is fine. That is the thesis of this column, and I plan to defend it the hard way, receipt by receipt, because the Washington Examiner reported this week that Democrats "appear to be in good shape, but the election is not today," which is true, and which is the kind of sentence a column can be built on if nobody reads past the comma. Fox News adds that the White House has a 32-state rally tour and a "hidden strategy" that pundits are missing. I believe the blitz is the plan.

The calendar disagrees. On September 22nd, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball moved three Senate races and four governor's races toward Democrats, citing a "persistently poor national environment" for the party. Iowa went from "Leans Republican" to a flat toss-up. Kansas moved too — the item doesn't say to where, so I won't guess on this page, but it moved in the same direction as Iowa, which is away from us. Call that the first correction.

The next day, September 23rd, the Cook Political Report followed, moving Kansas from "likely Republican" to "lean Republican," South Carolina alongside it. "Lean" still has "Republican" in it. I would like that on the record.

Two days later, September 25th, Cook went further and projected Democrats to retake the House outright, 208 races favored their way against 205 for ours. That is not a lean. That is a call.

Then today. The Senate Leadership Fund is pulling money out of North Carolina to prop up Kansas, which The New York Times is reporting as triage and which I am reporting as discipline, a distinction I intend to keep insisting on. The same day, Senator Steve Daines, who used to run this committee, told The Hill the midterms could be like 2006, "and 2006 was really bad for Republicans."

Also today, the president warned Republicans directly about Texas and Michigan — the two states our messaging has insisted all along are fine, and I was about to say they're fine, they're— they are not fine. I am going to need a minute.

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