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THE THIRD EXCUSE

Musk confesses to the blackout he blamed on Washington, Pentagon rewards him with more satellite tracking data

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the afternoon edition, 25 October 2026

After Volodymyr Zelensky called on him to restore Starshield, the Pentagon-funded version of Starlink, Musk said any limit on it "would be due to decisions made by the US government." The next day, he said Zelensky should "go."

On October 20, the Wall Street Journal reported, through The Hill, that the decision Musk had pointed at Washington was his own order, and that it had hobbled Ukraine's drones, airplanes, and helicopters. The same day, War Secretary Pete Hegseth offered the Pentagon's own account: a possible violation of Starshield's "terms of service," the Washington Examiner reported. A second excuse, now aimed at Ukraine, with no name attached to defend it under oath.

On October 21, Senate Democrats asked for that oath. Senator Adam Schiff framed the choice as binary: "Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine." The Senate can compel testimony with a subpoena. It asked instead.

It asked again four days later. On October 25, three things landed in the same stretch: the excuses collapsed into a third, Schiff renewed his ask, and the Pentagon widened the contractor's access. Musk confirmed, in his own name, that he had ordered the throttle, writing that Starlink had been used "for offensive drone strikes to kill people" and calling the country that used it "evil warmongers" — a characterization Kyiv denies. In a separate item that Saturday, the Daily Caller ran Musk's other line for Kyiv: "May you burn in hell." The same day, Schiff said Hegseth should testify on the slowdown, NBC News reported — the second ask in four days, still without a subpoena attached. And The Guardian reported that the Pentagon had handed SpaceX access to restricted space-tracking data, the kind that gives one company a hand on traffic control in Earth's orbit.

The contractor who spent twelve days deciding whose fault the blackout was gets a bigger set of keys while the committee that could compel him to explain it keeps asking nicely. The subpoena is still in the drawer. So is the explanation.

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Brazil's fix for mayors shutting down election-day buses: two extra hours to vote.

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

Today we are making a presidential runoff, which is not a dish you can get over here since we settle ours in one round, so I shall go slowly. You will need two candidates, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president; a funding plan, revealed by the Guardian, aimed at a campaign against Brazil's supreme court; and an attorney general, Jorge Messias, who called it something that "cannot be tolerated."

Lula's campaign asked the country's top election court to open a file on the shutdown as interference, and did not wait for an answer before saying so.

CLIVE: Cannot be tolerated. I've been saying that about the boiler since August, and nobody's revealed a funding plan for that one either.

GARY: The boiler. You want a document revealing a plan, try asking Keith what happened to the kitty before anyone else revealed anything.

On 19 October, Brazil's top electoral court gave Meta twenty-four hours to prove it was treating Lula's and Bolsonaro's campaign content equally online, with a daily fine attached for refusing. On 20 October, Lula's campaign asked the same court to disqualify Bolsonaro outright, calling what had reached his feed "algorithmic manipulation."

ROB: Twenty-four hours. That's less than Keith gave me to shift the lentils, and nobody's fined him a daily rate for it.

KEITH: Algorithmic manipulation. Say the word and I'll have a version of it running our rota by Thursday, commission included.

Today, with polls open across Brazil, several mayors cut bus service on election day; Lula called for their arrest. Both candidates then asked the Superior Electoral Court to keep voting open two hours longer, until seven in the evening Brasília time, citing a lack of transport, political or rained-out. Brazil's Supreme Court granted the extension, and the count was paused while it did. Two extra hours bring a runoff back to a simmer; they do not answer who cut the buses.

France 24, which is what they watch here instead of ours, has it as "Lula's Legacy, Flavio's Future?" — a coin-flip election. At home, CBS has it merely as a tense presidential runoff.

This serves whoever is still able to reach a polling station by seven. The bill, as always, goes to the buses that did not run and the consulates that did not open.

CLIVE: Arrested over a bus route. I'd have the apology in verse before the ballot's even counted, and credited this time.

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Attorney general vows fair Cornell probe, hires someone else to be fair, then won't discuss it

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

I spent forty minutes at the Board of Elections office on Thursday, trying to find out whether my polling place for early voting had moved again, and whether last year's form was still good. Nobody behind the counter could say for certain, so I filled out a new one, just to be safe.

That isn't actually what I wanted to write about this week.

Here is what I have written down. On October 2nd, the paper quoted the President saying the Cornell students "won't get a fair shake" with the state's attorney general, Letitia James, leading the investigation into them. I wrote those words down exact, because I wanted to get them right. Six days later, on October 8th, a former prosecutor from her own office told the Post that a year-long investigation into the President had found nothing, and that investigators were told to keep digging anyway, because, as the whistleblower put it, "what Tish wanted, Tish got." I don't know what that has to do with Cornell. Does it tell you anything about how an investigation runs in that office, generally, before Cornell ever came up?

Five days after that, on October 13th, the same office was fielding demands that the Attorney General step aside from the Cornell case, over something she had said publicly, backing the young woman who filed the lawsuit, before the investigation had even opened. Three days after that, on October 16th, she was on camera being asked about exactly that, and the line printed under the video, word for word, the way the story ran it, was this: "Letitia James vows a fair probe into the alleged Cornell University gang rape, but Trump and defense attorneys question her impartiality." I wrote that one down twice. I didn't believe I'd copied it right the first time.

Eight days after that — October 24th — the Post reported her office was hiring an outside lawyer to run the Cornell probe. Not help with it. Run it.

I went to the bank on Friday to deposit a check, and they sent me to four different windows for one transaction. First window said I needed a form. Second window had the form, but wanted a stamp from the first window. Third window had the stamp, but said the form was out of date. Fourth window had the current form, no stamp required, and didn't explain why the first three existed. I'm not saying that's the same as hiring somebody else to do your own job. I'm asking how many windows a person needs, for one deposit.

Here is where it stands this weekend. One day after the outside-lawyer story ran, on Sunday, James was campaigning in Crown Heights, and a reporter asked her, on the record, about the Cornell case. She did not answer. She smiled, the story said, and gave this instead — I'm reading it straight off the page, because I don't trust myself to get it right from memory: "We're here today to talk about elections, early elections."

Twenty-three days, start to finish, this one runs. The vow, the camera, the outside lawyer, and now that. One office, one case, four stops along the way, and at the end of it the question on the table got swapped for a different one.

Oh — before you go. The form at the Board of Elections, the one I filled out twice this week, the new one — it was about early voting. So, it turns out, was her answer. Is that where this one ends up too? In elections?

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White House goes to extraordinary lengths to free the one person convicted of election fraud

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 26 October 2026

Baltimore, it says. A shipyard, six point six billion dollars. The company that owns the thing is Anduril Industries — I didn't have to look that part up twice, it's right there in the piece. Who paid for the factory, and whose name is on it as the owner? Those aren't the same name. I wrote that down and then felt foolish for writing down something I could just read.

Did I mention who runs Anduril? A man named Palmer Luckey. He raises money for the president's party — that's not me saying it, that's the paper, I just read it back like a man at the counter reading his own grocery list to the cashier. Does the company that got the factory and the company that gets the fundraising dinners happen to be the same company?

I keep a glovebox like everybody else — two years of registration stickers in there, a toll receipt from a bridge I couldn't swear I crossed. I hang onto paper. You never know when somebody's going to ask you to prove where you were. The next morning after the shipyard story — I checked the date, it was the next morning — another page landed on top of it. Companies backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, six billion dollars in Pentagon contracts, most of it running through a firm called 1789 Capital that made the president's son a partner. Is that six billion the same six billion as the shipyard, or is that a second six billion?

I was at the corner store this week, paying for cigars I probably shouldn't smoke, and the owner was complaining about what the bank takes off the top no matter whose hand the money started in. Does it matter where the money begins if it ends up buying the same thing? Because that's what got me about the super PAC story. Facing the backlash, the president said taxpayers wouldn't pay for his ads anymore — a political committee would. Is a dollar from a super PAC a different dollar than a dollar from the Treasury, or is it the same dollar with its shirt changed?

So here I am with three soft pages in my coat, and I haven't even gotten to the one that sent me out tonight. CBS is reporting the White House went to what they call extraordinary lengths to get Colorado's governor to commute the sentence of an election official — Tina Peters, convicted of helping breach the very voting system she was sworn to protect. The administration that pushed for her release is now being investigated over how hard it pushed. This is the same administration that calls election fraud the gravest threat to the republic. Did it also spend its political capital springing the one person a jury found guilty of committing it?

CBS asked the White House what it offered Colorado in exchange for this, if anything, and the administration declined to say. Declined — their word, I read it twice standing at the mailbox to make sure I had it right. Does a man decline to answer a question he likes the answer to?

Oh — before you go. The one who actually signed the commutation was Governor Jared Polis. Nobody's asked him yet, far as I can find, what Colorado got for saying yes. I've got the page. I just don't have that answer written on it anywhere.

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OCCUPATION, ON SCHEDULE

Israel's army sealed the West Bank and ran its largest drill in years; neither was on Tuesday's ballot

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the evening edition, 26 October 2026

You will have been told that Tuesday is a reckoning, and in one narrow sense it is: the first Israeli election since October 7th, 2023, with Likud lagging in the polls. Hold that, because nothing else in the week required a vote. On September 27th the attorney general moved the E1 settlement deadline past the election, and the finance minister fumed. Moved, mind you, not cancelled — in abeyance, which is to say the deadline still exists and now falls after the ballot. On Friday gunmen in Hebron killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three. By Sunday the army had ordered new restrictions on Hebron and the West Bank crossings were to be closed before the vote. And what had to be passed for that? Nothing whatever. A closure is an order, and an order is signed. Someone will say that Tuesday answers it. Tuesday elects a Knesset. Then the drill: multiple divisions, the largest in years, an analyst reaching for the Yom Kippur War of 1973 ... and not one line of it on a ballot paper. Three disastrous years for Israelis, the Times has it, and the core support remains strong. Tuesday may change the name over the ministry. The gates at Hebron it does not touch.

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Vučić resigns the presidency to outmaneuver the student movement, loses to it anyway

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 26 October 2026

Walk me through it, would you? Not the whole election. Just the one part — a sitting head of state steps down to go run for a different office. I don't have a lot to measure that against. The closest thing in my life is a Chevy with a fan belt that quits every spring, and a dog who won't get back in the car once he's out of it, so bear with me.

I wrote the date down. Hang on — here it is — September 27th. The page says the president "stepped down as the country's head of state," and that the same move was "paving the way for him to run as his... party's candidate for prime minister," ahead of the vote on October 25th. Is that the whole sequence? Quit one office on a Sunday in September, file for a different office, same party, by the next election?

I tried to picture it out in my garage, where I keep the toolbox, because some things you have to put your hands on to follow. Say a man runs the floor as foreman and the crew's been filing complaints for two years — never mind about what. Say he hands in his notice as foreman on a Sunday and puts in for crew chief on the Monday, same floor, same crew, same clipboard on the wall. I don't know if that's done anywhere else. I just know it's what the page says happened here.

And here's the part I keep setting the toolbox down to look at again. Sunday, October 25th — the day he's on the ballot for the new chair — the same crew that had been filing complaints for two years turned out to vote, more of them than in years, 69.34 percent of them, the page says, the highest turnout in years for that parliament. And the list they voted for wasn't his. Fifty-three percent of them, near enough, went to a list of first-time candidates picked by student assemblies — a hundred thirty-some seats, against a hundred and five for the party whose man had just changed chairs to get in front of them. If changing chairs was supposed to put distance between him and that crowd, what does a turnout number like that say about how much distance he got?

Because I went back to where the crowd came from, and there's a word in that part of the page I can't stop circling. Two years ago a railway station roof came down in a city called Novi Sad. Sixteen people were under it when it did. The station, the way the page describes it, had been newly renovated. Not old. Not neglected. Was that the word on the ribbon they cut?

I don't have an answer for what a family does with a word like that once the roof's already on the ground. I'm not saying the word was a lie when somebody wrote it down. I'm saying it's the word I've got sitting next to the fan belt and the dog in my notes, and it won't come loose.

Oh — before you go, one more thing, excuse me. The move from president to prime minister, the whole plan to swap chairs and keep the same hold on the floor — was there a word for that too, in their language, the way there was a word for the station? Was that, by any chance, called renovated?

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Senator accuses California of ballot harvesting; Justice Department files charges for registering to vote.

By MitchInvestigations · the morning edition, 26 October 2026

I read charging documents for a living, which means I spend a lot of my week being more polite to the Justice Department than it has earned. This week it earned a little.

Start with the calendar, because the calendar is the whole story. On October 19th, the department charged 28 green card holders in California with fraudulently registering to vote and casting ballots — eleven of them arrested, per the Guardian, the Hill, and the Washington Examiner, three different outlets filing the same number inside two days. That same weekend, a Ninth Circuit panel held a rare Sunday hearing on the department's own emergency request to set aside twenty thousand California mail ballots — and spent it, Fox News reported, questioning the department's lawyers, not the state's. The same weekend, Los Angeles's top federal prosecutor told the New York Post the election was being "corrupted." And on the Senate floor, Thom Tillis called California "guilty" of a ballot-harvesting scheme — and, per the Hill, could not name a single case prosecuted under it.

That was the record as of last Monday: an accusation, a federal court skeptical of the government's own filing, and a crime with no docket number attached to it.

This Monday the docket arrived. The Justice Department announced 48 people charged nationwide with federal voting crimes — 28 of them in California, the rest in Florida, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania, per the Washington Examiner. Here is the accusation finally getting a case number. All together now — the California complaint, the one piece of this the receipts actually describe clause by clause: fraudulent voter registration, illegal voting. Not harvesting. Not the word the senator used on the floor. The filing answers the speech by charging something the speech never alleged, for the 28 defendants the record lets us check.

I want to be fair to the other 20 names on the sheet — Florida, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania — because the wire that reached my desk doesn't say what they're charged with, and a federal complaint deserves to be read before it's summarized, not after. So I'll say only what the document says: a senator accused a state of a scheme, named zero prosecutions under it, and a week later the department he was vouching for filed a case that fills the blank with a different crime. The docket exists now. It just isn't the one he was pointing at.

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Israel bars European lawmakers who came to watch the olive harvest its settlers are burning; it votes Tuesday

By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 26 October 2026

Before anybody votes tomorrow, could somebody walk me through the paperwork? Not the politics — I'm no good at politics. The paperwork. Somebody sat down on Monday and turned five legislators around at a bridge, and I would like to see how a person does that, step by step, because I have never done it.

I wrote the names down. It's in the raincoat — hold on — no, that's the inspection sticker... ah, here. "The Israeli government on Monday blocked a group of European legislators seeking to observe the olive harvest in the occupied West Bank." Clive Lewis, British Labour. Lara Bird, Scottish National Party. Kate Nevens, Scottish Green. Sam Tarry, formerly Labour. Josu Estarrona Elizondo, a Spanish senator. Denied entry from Jordan. They had a date: October 31st, the Qamar al-Balad Farm, in the village of Farkha.

So walk me through the morning. They come to the window with the passports. Somebody takes them. Somebody checks something — a list, a screen, a call to an office. Then somebody says no, and somebody hands the passports back. How many people is that, four? Does the one at the window know why, or do they just read what comes up?

I ask because of the toll plaza on the way in. The one in the booth has a job, and the job is not deciding. They can't turn me back over my fan belt. Somebody in an office decided what that booth does and wrote it down, and the booth does it. So I keep looking for the office.

And what were they coming to watch? Same page: "Earlier this month, Israeli settlers attacked the farm and attempted to burn its poultry shed before being repelled by local residents." On the 16th, roughly 80 masked men came down on an olive grove near Abu Falah, hurled rocks, torched the trees, and brutalized a Washington Post journalist, Heidi Levine. Eighty men in a grove, five legislators at a bridge, and the ones who got stopped were the five. Which window did the eighty come through?

The dates sit close together. On Friday the prime minister's own statement — I copied it exact — ordered the army to "immediately impose a lockdown on Hebron and prepare for a full lockdown of the entire" West Bank, after a gun battle that left two Palestinians dead and at least five Israeli soldiers wounded, which the statement blamed on Hamas. Since Friday, over 3,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in Hebron. And Monday — the same Monday as the bridge — a UN-mandated commission filed nineteen pages finding Israel has committed "war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, rape," and that genocidal acts continue in Gaza after what the report calls the so-called ceasefire. Israel condemned the report. Tuesday, they vote: the first election since October 7th, 2023, with Likud trailing in the polls.

Here's my trouble. In September the attorney general moved the E1 settlement deadline past the election — moved, not cancelled, and the finance minister fumed. In August a rights monitor counted more than 11 million tons of debris hauled out of Gaza, remains and evidence likely in it. This month the army ran a surprise-attack exercise big enough that an expert on the right's own network reached back to the 1973 war. And the big pro-Israel lobby, last week, turned out to be spending millions without putting its own name on it. Each of those took somebody at a desk with a form. Can you walk me through who sat at which one?

Oh — excuse me, before you take your coat. One word has been following me around since the bridge and I apologize for circling back to it. That Friday statement names everyone who ordered it: an emergency meeting, the security cabinet, the top military advisors, a post on social media. Is there a line anywhere on tomorrow's ballot where a voter is asked about the full lockdown?

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