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Jackson reads the Court its own dates back: ninety days for a database, twelve for a student ID.

By MitchInvestigations · the afternoon edition, 23 October 2026

On October 22nd, the Supreme Court barred New Hampshire voters from using student IDs at the polls, twelve days before the midterms, on the rationale that a rule change this close to an election risks confusing voters. That is the ruling. The filing underneath it is the story, and it reads in order.

All together now — the dates, the way they happened.

On September 25th, the Court lifted a lower court's block and let the Department of Homeland Security run its SAVE database against state voter rolls through the appeal — a database federal law otherwise keeps out of the final ninety days before an election. Whatever clock the Court found too tight for student IDs in October was no obstacle to that database in September.

On October 20th, New Hampshire urged the Court to reinstate the student-ID ban ahead of the midterms.

On October 22nd, the Court granted it. Student IDs are out, twelve days before the vote, on the stated rationale: a change this close to Election Day risks confusing voters.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly broke with her colleagues over the order. Same court. Same campaign season. Two different clocks.

Here is the part no filing says outright. A federal database meant to run clear of the final ninety days of a campaign ran through them anyway, by order of the Supreme Court. A student ID carries no such statute. It got twelve days' notice and then got struck, by order of the same Court.

That is the order, start to finish. One clock protects a database from an election. The other clock runs out on a card an election depends on. The Court picked which one gets protected, and it was not the one that lets a student vote.

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Sixth officer charged with misusing Flock cameras since the bill to defund them reached committee.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the afternoon edition, 23 October 2026

September 23: Marion County charges five current and former Indianapolis police officers with fraud and official misconduct. An internal audit of the department's Flock license-plate cameras found officers running searches with no case number behind them — CBS reports the plates belonged to romantic partners and others the officers knew personally, not suspects.

October 14: Rep. Rashida Tlaib files a bill to bar federal money from going to Flock and systems like it, calling the buildout a "mass surveillance crisis." The same report that carries her announcement carries Flock's own count of itself: more than 120,000 cameras running in 49 states. The bill is referred to committee, where a bill goes to wait.

October 23: a Georgetown, Indiana, police officer named Justin Craig is charged with official misconduct and two counts of fraud — the identical two statutes Indianapolis used a month earlier. Court records say he ran his wife's plate through Flock more than 80 times and a previous acquaintance's nearly 250 times. That is a sixth officer, a second department, filed nine days after the bill that would have cut Flock's federal funding entered committee, where it remains.

The planner lays the pieces on the table and admires how little had to be invented — the audit already existed inside the Indianapolis department, the fraud and misconduct statutes already existed in Indiana code, the prosecutors already knew how to file them. Every part of the response to this mess was sitting in a drawer before the mess happened twice.

The one part missing from the table is the part Tlaib already built: a bill that cuts federal funding to the exact systems that let an officer run a plate 250 times with no case attached to it. The muscle doesn't get to swing at anything yet; there's nothing to wreck until the bill moves. The pilot notes the runway is clear and empty: no hearing scheduled, no markup, no vote. The fix is parked where it was parked on October 14, nine days and one more officer ago.

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THE SAME WORD

Netanyahu unveils a West Bank demolition model, plans to expand it to other cities.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 24 October 2026

Hang on, I've got it here somewhere — I write everything down, which is half the reason the glovebox doesn't close right anymore. Here. August 31st. Common Dreams, retired Israeli generals, touring the West Bank, telling the New York Times what they'd seen. They weren't describing the army. Write this part down twice if you have to — they were describing their own government, for permitting what the settlers have been doing to Palestinian families living there. "Ethnic cleansing" is the phrase the generals used. Their own government. I got that backwards the first time I read it, and I don't like getting a thing backwards twice.

Sixteen days after that — September 16th — a human rights group out of Israel, B'Tselem, puts out a report titled "The Elimination Project." A man named Ori Givati, who's with them, says the policies in that report aren't a stack of separate incidents. His exact words, because I checked them twice — "one very coherent logic." Very coherent. That's not a word I added. That's his.

A month later, October 16th, a photojournalist for the Washington Post, Heidi Levine, sixty-three years old, is attacked by settlers near a place called Abu Falah. There's film of it. And the Prime Minister's office puts out a statement saying the facts "remain unclear and are under investigation." Is a camera unclear? I don't know whose job it is to answer that.

Three days after that — October 19th — another American, a man named Mohammed Sakat, in a town called Turmus 'Ayya. Settlers burn his house, beat him. I won't call it a report, because it isn't one — it's a journalist on the ground, Jasper Nathaniel, who posted what he saw, and the wire carried his count: over a dozen masked men. I'll leave the number where he left it.

Four days after that — Friday just gone — two Israeli soldiers are shot dead near Hebron Junction. Within hours the Prime Minister is standing at the scene, and I wrote down what he said because I wanted it exact: "We will destroy this place and completely transform it." House to house. Evacuate the residents. Remove the weapons. And then the part I keep flipping back to: "We will consider expanding this model to other cities as well."

How many houses is that? I don't know. Nobody's put a number on it yet, and I'd rather have the number than the word he reached for instead — something "that has never been done before." Has it not? Or has nobody counted the times?

I was putting the notebook away — had it half in my coat pocket already, standing out by the car, the one that won't turn over under forty degrees — when it came back to me. You dismantle things in a garage. A shelf. An engine block somebody left half-finished. Plywood, usually — something nobody downtown signed a permit for.

So — hold on, before I put this away for good — forty-six days before the shooting at Hebron Junction, the word on the wire was "dismantlement," and the thing being dismantled was a handful of outposts nobody had a permit for. Structures. And this week a deputy of his used the same word on something that was never built with anyone downtown's permission at all — the government the Palestinians live under. A shed, then a government, and now a city. What hasn't that word been pointed at yet?

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Vance tells Republicans to stop whining about ad his own party calls the worst politics imaginable

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 24 October 2026

I have to hand it to the gentleman's campaign for the candor, at least at first. A lot of ads in a tight race get laundered through some group most people couldn't name, a filing nobody traces back to anybody. Not this one. On October 21st, Vivek Ramaswamy stood up and said the ad was his — his campaign made it, his campaign is paying to run it. I wrote that down, because you don't see a candidate take the credit out loud that often. Then I read the rest of that same story. The headline on it called the ad his campaign had just claimed, word for word, "the most disgusting, pathetic ad ever created in the history of political ads." Is that a credit you take, or a credit you own up to?

Same day — and I checked the dates twice, because I didn't believe these happened within hours of each other — the vice president told reporters he was disgusted. Not by the ad. By the Republicans complaining about it. He called that whining, on camera, and told them what's coming from him in 2028 would be more of it — his own word for it was "venom." I don't have an opinion about 2028. I have the word, and I have the date he used it: the 21st, same day as the credit-taking.

My notebook gets crowded fast after that. The day before, Sherrod Brown, running for Senate in that same state, had asked his Republican colleague Jon Husted to condemn the ad. On the 21st, Husted said something short of that — he said he wouldn't have run it. That's not the same sentence. One says the ad is wrong. The other says it isn't how he'd have spent the money. I keep that kind of distinction the way I keep the papers in my glovebox — the registration says one thing, the insurance card says something close to it, and a trooper who only glances figures they match. The New York Times, by midweek, was already calling the ad one that had divided the party.

Four million dollars went into putting it on statewide television. That's the number in the filing. I don't have an opinion about that number, either. I have it sitting next to the one that stopped me, from today: a Republican commentator, Scott Jennings, paid to argue this side of things, went on the record calling the ad — and I want to read this back exactly — "the worst politics you could imagine." And still, CBS reported today, the President himself joined the vice president in defending it. I was about ready to close the notebook on that.

Excuse me — before you go. Did you catch the other part from today? Vivek Ramaswamy accused his opponent, Amy Acton, of lying about the ad, about what her own mother says in it. The Guardian ran the court records against that claim today. The records didn't back up the mother's claim. They contradicted it.

I didn't have that part when I started this column. Now that the record has gone the other way, is "worst" still the word, or do we need one the paper hasn't used yet?

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Elon Musk, this midterm's largest known donor at $276 million, spent three days saying the 100 mph limit on Ukraine's air defense was the government's call.

By MitchInvestigations · the evening edition, 25 October 2026

The ceiling on what one person may put into one party came off this week, and nobody had to touch it.

On Monday the Times reported that Elon Musk is the largest known midterm donor in American political history, at $276 million. On September 22 the reported plan had been at least one hundred million; three weeks on the figure was nearly triple that, and not one rule on the books stood in the road. The money moves through America PAC, an outside group that disclosed its first spending of the cycle on September 3 — mail advertising. The party it funds goes into November with a $400 million edge.

That is the first half of the week. The second half ran on a much smaller number.

On Monday in Warsaw, Zelensky said he had been surprised by Trump's "energy ceasefire" announcement, which went up as Russian drones hit Kyiv, and vowed to retaliate if strikes on Ukraine's power grid continued. ABC News put the arrangement plainly on Thursday: Trump declared a ceasefire, but both sides are still shooting.

Tuesday evening, Ukraine's access to Starlink was throttled without warning. Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Zelensky on defense technology, wrote on Telegram that the restrictions apply to Starshield, SpaceX's military service, and limit terminals moving at speeds above 100 mph. Military missions were disrupted. Some drone operations were cancelled. Ukrainian officials told CBS News that the Starlink missile tracker failed that night, during a new wave of Russian strikes.

All together now, the operative clause: the limit applies to terminals moving at speeds above 100 mph. Not terminals in the wrong country. Not terminals put to the wrong use. Terminals above a posted speed. That is not weather and it is not a fault; it is a setting, and a setting is something a person enters. The remainder of the week was spent on which person.

On Wednesday Musk answered in public: "Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government." Limits on speed or usage, he said, are decided by the US military and, ultimately, the president. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina had asked Musk to explain the overnight disruptions, expressing hope that the restriction was an error and not a deliberate decision. So a senator asked the contractor, and the contractor named the Pentagon, which funds the program. By Thursday the BBC had it in the same posture: Musk says the US government may be behind the slowdown of Ukraine's drone speeds. Three days, one direction, no name.

The question had a second half, and CBS News reported it that Wednesday: the administration may have withheld intelligence warnings to Ukraine about Russian strikes that killed 6 and cut power to 600,000 people. The Times reported the same Wednesday that officials say the United States continues to provide intelligence to Ukraine, while Ukrainian officials suspected the orders restricting their access "had come from Washington." Zelensky, on Wednesday: "It's a pity that we are losing a strong partner." By Thursday he said he felt "betrayed."

There is a stated reason for the pressure. Trump blames Ukraine's strikes on Russian energy targets for driving up diesel prices, and has pressed Kyiv to stop them ahead of the midterms. The diesel is real: on October 3 the Guardian found Joe Hamilton, who farms 2,500 acres of corn and soybeans in Indiana's Delaware county, facing a record bill for about 9,000 gallons as his soybean harvest began, with the Iran war stoking record prices. That is the sum of the arithmetic on offer — an Indiana fuel bill on one side, a speed threshold over Kyiv on the other, and $276 million moving through the mail in between.

Also on October 3, the administration's AI accord was described as establishing "Real Oversight – Without Creating A Regulatory Capture Regime."

Two ceilings were in the news this week. The one on money came off without a vote. The one that held was 100 mph.

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Ohio Republicans call Ramaswamy's ad 'deeply troubling,' their own president tells him to keep it up.

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 25 October 2026

I called the Ohio Republican Party this week because I needed a favor. I wanted somebody there to walk me through something, because they're the experts on their own campaign, not me — I just read what comes over the wire and try to keep it straight.

Here's what I couldn't get straight. I had it on a card in my coat pocket — hold on, let me find it, here. On October 22nd, the Guardian had Ohio's Republican governor calling Vivek Ramaswamy's attack ad "deeply troubling" and asking him to pull it. Same week, same paper, the Guardian also had President Trump telling Ramaswamy to "keep it up." Not a different week. Not a different ad. The same ad, within days, from two people in the same party.

I figured I had the dates wrong, so I went and checked CBS. CBS had it too, that Thursday: the President "defended" Ramaswamy "amid backlash" over the ad. And France 24 had the Vice President, same week, telling fellow Republicans to "stop whining" about it and go win the race.

So now I've got three Republicans and three different reactions — troubling, keep it up, stop whining — to one four-million-dollar ad. I'm no mechanic, but I know what it looks like when a shop tells you the brakes are bad and then waves you back onto the road anyway. Happened to me once, down at the garage on Fifth, with the car that won't start half the mornings as it is — the guy writes "needs work" on the ticket, hands me the keys, tells me I'll be fine. I don't go back to that garage. I was hoping the party could tell me what a voter's supposed to do instead.

Because here's what the ad actually is, according to what I've got written down. CBS also had Acton's brother on the record saying their stepfather sexually abused Acton when she was a child, and calling the ad a "despicable low." The Washington Examiner had Ramaswamy's campaign putting four million dollars behind it, as of October 21st.

Then it was the weekend, and on the 24th and 25th, former President Obama came to Cleveland for his first rally of the cycle and went after it by name — the Washington Examiner quoted him saying there's "no office that is worth stopping that low." The New York Times had him going after Trump in the same visit. ABC had Amy Acton herself, after the rally, saying Trump and Vance should "look at the facts."

So that's the whole thing as I've got it written down: one governor calling it troubling, one president saying keep it up, one vice president saying stop whining, and a former president turning it into his first applause line of the campaign. I was hoping somebody at the party could help me square that. Nobody's called me back yet.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing, before you head back inside. That quote from the governor, "deeply troubling" — I never saw it withdrawn. The ad was still running the day Obama stood up in Cleveland and went after it by name. So which one of those two quotes is the one still operating — the governor who asked him to pull it, or the president who told him to keep it up?

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Attorney general vows fair Cornell probe, hires outside lawyer to be fair for her

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 25 October 2026

I need somebody to help me understand this one, because I called the Attorney General's office this week and the man who picked up — he works there, he's paid to explain these things — couldn't quite walk me through it, so maybe you can do better than he did.

Here's what I've got written down. On October 16th, Attorney General Letitia James was on camera saying she intended to run a fair investigation into what happened at Cornell — the fraternity house, the seven young men named, the lawsuit filed by the student known as Jane Doe. Fair. That's the word she used. I wrote it down because I wanted to get it exactly right: "fair probe."

Now here's the part I need the office's help with. Before that camera was rolling, she had already made comments about the case — prejudicial comments, the reporting says, and nobody at the office told me that reporting was wrong when I asked. So I called back and asked which came first, the comments or the promise to be fair about the thing she'd already commented on. The fellow said he'd have to check and get back to me. He has not gotten back to me.

This is the kind of question I'd think the professionals would have an answer ready for, which is why I went to them instead of guessing myself. They're the state's chief law enforcement office. Sorting out who's been fair and who hasn't is the whole job. I don't do that for a living — I spend my Saturdays under the hood of a car that needs a fan belt I keep meaning to replace — but they do, every day, for a living.

So this week the Post is reporting the office is going to bring in outside counsel to investigate the seven Cornell students. Not the Attorney General's own people finishing the job she said she'd do — somebody hired in from outside, to do the part she'd already promised the cameras was hers to do. I called a third time and asked why you'd need to pay somebody else to keep a promise you made yourself. The fellow said that wasn't really a question for him. I believe he's right about that. I don't think it's a question for whoever answers the phone.

I think about the corner store down the block from me. If a customer says the scale's reading wrong, the owner doesn't go hire a second man with a second scale to stand there and confirm it while the first scale sits on the counter. Either the scale's right or it isn't, and if it isn't, you fix the scale or you explain what happened to it. I asked the office if that was a fair way to think about what they're doing and the man said he'd note my concern. I wrote that down too: "noted my concern."

I was about ready to leave it there and send this in — until I saw the other thing sitting under everything else on my page, and I want to ask you about it before you go, because I only just noticed it myself. No reason given in anything I've got written down. Just the ask.

I don't have an opinion on that one, and I wouldn't know where to start forming one even if I did. But I'd like to know this, and I think it's a fair question for the office, since fairness is their whole department: the investigation she promised on camera, and the investigation the outside lawyer is now being paid to run — is that one investigation, or two? Because if it's one, I'd like to know why it needed a second man to finish what the first one already swore was fair. And if it's two, I'd like to know who's running the one she promised.

I wrote the question down exactly like that and I'm sending it to the office in the morning. If they get back to me, you'll be the first to know. So far, on this one, nobody has.

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Washington shuts its own Brazil consulates two days before the election it swears it isn't touching.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the afternoon edition, 25 October 2026

Today we are making a consular shutdown, not a service you cancel on your neighbours over here, so I shall go slowly. You will need an embassy, a scheduled election, and a Friday night two days before the first round.

You will also need a funding plan, revealed by the Guardian, aimed at a campaign against Brazil's supreme court; Jorge Messias, Brazil's attorney general, calling it something that cannot be tolerated; and a coup attempt from 2022 in the dish.

CLIVE: A coup attempt. I'm drafting my response as a villanelle, harder than it looks and largely uncredited.

GARY: Uncredited? Try this house for credit. I've wanted the shed door off its hinges for ages.

ROB: Hinges, house, same old. The meter's up again and I'm still the one topping it.

Begin with the funding. On 1 October the Guardian reported that the Trump administration was pushing to direct money toward a campaign against Brazil's supreme court. Messias wrote that meddling in his country's institutions "cannot be tolerated," calling the report "an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty."

Two days before the first round, on a Friday night, the United States suspended consular services across Brazil and advised Americans to avoid its diplomatic facilities. You will be looking for the regulator that halts an embassy closing before a vote. There is none; Lula's campaign asked Brazil's top election court to examine the shutdown as interference.

Take the funding plan by both ends: it was aimed at Brazil's supreme court, a separate body from the election court now examining the shutdown, and both answer to the same government that says it did neither.

KEITH: Topping it up again. I'd have that meter sold to the street by Thursday, funding plan included.

On 4 October the Guardian put it plainly: Trump wants control of South America, and a win for Bolsonaro's son could make that so.

The first round left no majority. Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father, Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a twenty-seven-year sentence under house arrest for orchestrating a coup attempt in 2022, led Lula by two points, his tally at 47 percent.

Today, 158 million Brazilians choose between Lula, seeking a fourth term, and Flávio Bolsonaro, the race a dead heat in the polls. The campaign has run on corruption scandals, economic difficulties, and allegations of American interference, which Washington denies.

The paper on the table here, France 24, has it as "allegations of US interference, which Washington has denied"; at home, Fox News has it as "next test for Latin America's surging conservative movement."

A consulate does not usually need defending two days before a vote; this one did, with an advisory telling citizens to keep away from it.

Serves 158 million voters, one way or the other, and a funding plan that answers to a government which says it had nothing to do with it.

GARY: An advisory telling people to keep away from their own embassy. We've a damp patch under advisement since the landlord last visited, and nothing's sold on that.

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