News

Trump likens Senate candidate to Flight 93 hijackers; his commentariat reviews the delivery as pedal to the metal

By ChipStaff Writer · the afternoon edition, 26 October 2026

Let me start with the standings, because the standings are the part the press keeps walking past. Michigan is close. In a close race a President campaigns, and campaigning means saying which candidate he likes. He likes Mike Rogers. He has been clear about the other one.

The record starts in early October. The Hill carried the post on October 8: Mohammed El-Sayed is a terrible Candidate for the Dumocrats. The man's full name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, so the middle name is a name he has, and I am not going to apologize for accuracy. I have not once heard this President reach past a candidate's first name when the middle name was Edward. Strike that. I meant the question has not come up, because the question has not come up.

Then came the debate. October 9, The Hill again: the President posted that Mike Rogers, the great American Patriot and Republican Candidate for the U.S. Senate, completely obliterated Mohammed El-Sayed. Count the honorifics in that sentence. One man gets patriot. One man gets a middle name he did not run under. That is a style choice, and style is not policy.

Which brings us to the newest remarks, where the President called El-Sayed a jihadist, said people like him should never be allowed in the Senate, and said the Senate would want a metal detector for him. A metal detector is a routine security measure, and a routine security measure applies to everyone who walks through it, which is the whole principle of a detector — it does not have a name field. Did I say that? That doesn't sound like me.

And then he compared the man to the hijackers who took United Flight 93. El-Sayed answered. Senator Sanders answered. A supporter who was with us in 2024 answered. Three answers, which the press is calling backlash and I am calling engagement.

So on Sunday a Washington Examiner columnist went on Fox's weekend show and delivered the assessment. Pedal to the metal. His words. Pedal to the metal, as far as painting El-Sayed as a danger to the Senate. Painting. That is the defense the movement filed — not that the comparison is true, but that the pace is good. That is the official line, and the official line is that it is working.

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U.S. shut consulates, moved to fund a campaign against Brazil's court, lost by four million, calls it rigged

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the afternoon edition, 26 October 2026

Today we are making a foreign election, American-style, which means it is cooked at home and eaten somewhere else. On Sunday Brazil re-elected Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the runoff, 51.7 percent against Flavio Bolsonaro's 48.2, a margin of four million votes, with the results published overnight on Monday. On Monday the American president called the election likely rigged. Bolsonaro is demanding the victory be annulled.

You will need an American social network's algorithm, a consulate with its shutters suddenly down, and a push from Washington to put money into a campaign against Brazil's supreme court.

CLIVE: Shutters down. Mine have been down a fortnight and nobody at this table has knocked to ask what is being written behind them.

GARY: Nothing is behind them. The shutter came off in spring and it is under the bike. I could have that door off in four minutes.

Begin at the end of September, when Brazil's own spy agency confirmed the existence of interference from the United States as well as Russia, the first round four days off. On 1 October the Guardian revealed the funding plan, and Brazil's attorney general, Jorge Messias, wrote that meddling "cannot be tolerated" and called the report "an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty". Two days later Lula's campaign asked for the sudden shutdown of American consular services to be looked into as interference in Brazilian elections.

ROB: Sovereignty. This kitchen had sovereignty before the rota, and I am the only one who ever kept to it, which no one has once mentioned.

KEITH: You mention it weekly. There is an angle in this, though: somebody out there wants flags printed, and I know a man who prints by Thursday.

Now fold in the algorithm. On 23 October research showed Meta's was actively boosting Bolsonaro, and Pramila Jayapal and Bernie Sanders put questions to Mark Zuckerberg about it. Then Sunday came and the whole thing went on the floor in front of the kitchen. Gary, hold this.

GARY: I am holding it. I have held everything in this house since the boiler, and the one who writes in the dark has held a pen.

Le Monde, which is what they read across the Channel, has it as "Trump slams 'rigged' Brazil election after ally loses", and says he had clearly been hoping for a victory for Flavio. At home the Washington Examiner has Lula clinching "victory out of thin air", with the United States declining to comment.

Pick the rigging up by both ends and look underneath: it is the same evidence being offered for the midterms at home, the midterms being the election we hold halfway through a president's term, for the Congress and not for him. You will be looking for the observers who settle such a thing. They are not going to Brazil. On 7 October the NAACP sued over the plan to send "a historic number" of election monitors to polling stations at home, saying it "stands to jeopardize" the elections.

Serves Brazil, which keeps its count and, by France 24's account, an uphill battle to govern. The bill goes to voters at home, where the monitors are being sent next month and the suit over them is still in court.

ROB: Monitors. We had a monitor put on the meter and all it did was watch this house get colder, so I would not count on being watched.

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Netanyahu presses for action against Iran his own military chief already resisted, days before election.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

Here's the order, before anybody tells me what it means. I'm not saying anything yet, I'm just putting the dates down.

October 7, 2023: the Hamas-led attack. October 7, 2026: Netanyahu faces renewed questions over whether he had advance warning. October 16: settlers beat a Washington Post photographer while attacking Palestinian olive farmers. October 17: Netanyahu praises Trump's "wicked sense of humor," defends the alliance. October 23: the West Bank goes under what critics call a full lockdown, condemned as collective punishment. October 26: a UN-mandated commission calls the occupation's conduct crimes against humanity, the same week Israel bars a group of European lawmakers who'd come to watch the olive harvest, the same week three thousand more people are displaced out of Hebron. October 27: the polls open for Israel's first election since October 7.

That's the order. I laid it out, I didn't say anything.

Now here's the one I can't put down, and I apologize in advance, because I'm going to come back to it more than once before I'm through with it.

The New York Times reported this week that Israel's military chief resisted the prime minister on a strike against Iran; the prime minister then pressed, in recent days, for a separate action short of an overt strike — that's according to an official and a person briefed on the matter, not the general himself. I want that sourcing attached every time, because it matters who's saying it and who isn't.

First time through, and I'm sorry, it's the date that gets me. "In recent days" puts the pressing somewhere in that same stretch of calendar as the lockdown, the barred lawmakers, the UN report — the same stretch where the ballots were already printed. Somebody was pressing for something short of a strike in the very week the country was being told to go vote.

I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but the second time it's the sourcing that bothers me. Not the general. An official. A person briefed on the matter. Two people, neither one wearing the uniform — which means the resisting and the pressing both come from the same two unnamed sources, and I don't know how to weigh one against the other.

Third time, and I promise I'm getting somewhere. I was out in the garage this weekend — the fan belt's going again — and the replacement part I had was a half-inch short of what the car needed. Not wrong. Short. My guy at the shop can refuse to put in a part that's a half-inch short — that's resisting — or he can rig the thing to turn over anyway, which isn't the repair, it's a separate action, short of the repair, and from the driveway you cannot tell which one he did. I carried that belt back and forth across the garage twice before I worked out which.

Fourth time, I'm sorry, it's the word "overt" now. Overt just means out in the open. Short of overt means not out in the open. I keep asking what a person presses for, days before his own election, that isn't supposed to be out in the open.

Here's the sentence one more time, and this is the last time, I promise, exactly the way it was written: Israel's military chief resisted the prime minister, who then pressed in recent days for a separate action, short of an overt strike, according to an official and a person briefed on the matter. I wanted it whole.

Okay. I'll let you go.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing before you go. This pressing, the "recent days" part — was that before this morning's polls opened, or after?

The paper says ahead of the election. So: before.

Short of an overt strike. Before the vote. That's the order I started with, and I still haven't said what it means.

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Oklahoma's oil regulator skips a thousand pollution fines, finds its enforcement tool for the city's drinking water.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

The chief opens the file on an Oklahoma oil company with about 1,000 pollution violations stacked against its name and a fine total of zero. Before anyone touches the file, there is one page already marked: October 5, when the same company plugged a disposal well that was headed for a city's drinking water. That page is the whole plan, because it is the only time the state's oil and gas regulator ever used the tool it has carried the entire time.

The planner spreads both beats on the table. On one side: a single disposal well, ordered shut because it threatened water a city actually drinks. On the other, arriving three weeks later: ProPublica's count of roughly 1,000 incidents and violations tied to the same operator, and a regulatory record with no fine attached to any of them. The planner does the math out loud — one enforcement action, one thousand chances, and the one that happened is the one where a city's water was the thing at stake. The tool was never missing. It was filed.

The tinkerer takes the well-plugging order apart to see what it is made of, and it turns out to be nothing exotic: a regulator's own standing authority to act when a well threatens drinking water, exercised exactly as written, exactly once. Every part needed to do it again is already in the drawer — the same authority, the same agency, the same signature line. The tinkerer's note in the file: this does not need a new law. It needs the agency to read the one it has on every file, not just the one that reached a city's tap.

The muscle goes after the actual structure holding the other 999 violations up, which is not a loophole but a habit: a pollution report lands, a fine does not follow, and the file closes itself. That habit is the thing getting wrecked first, because until it is gone the tool just sits back in the drawer no matter how well it worked on October 5.

The pilot's job is the simplest one on the crew: fly the same order the regulator already signed out again, on the next file, and the one after that. Nobody on this crew promises the agency will do it. The receipts only show it can — once, on October 5, when a city's drinking water was on the line. The other 999 did not get that treatment. The file stays open on whether they ever will.

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Republicans call the polls wrong on Fox, call themselves realists about losing on local TV.

By ChipStaff Writer · the afternoon edition, 27 October 2026

Mike Johnson says the polls are wrong, and he says it loudly. Monday on Fox News, the Speaker told Laura Ingraham that surveys showing Democrats ahead are, in his word, "even" worse than they look for the pollsters, not for Republicans, with one week left before the midterms. That same day, Johnson's office also put out dozens of statements endorsing him for the leadership job he already holds — the kind of thing a man secure in his majority does for sport.

Confidence. Actually, call it caution: twelve days earlier, campaigning in New Bern, North Carolina, Johnson gave the real explanation for why House Republicans look rattled, and it wasn't the public surveys. The trouble, he said, is that his own members won't respond to "our own polling." A speaker certain the public polls are lying does not also need a private poll his caucus won't open.

The Senate side ran the identical play, earlier and in front of a bigger crowd. On Sept. 2, Majority Leader John Thune told KELOLAND News back home in South Dakota that he is "a realist," and that he worries about Republicans losing the Senate majority, citing high prices and the president's own falling approval. Eight days later, at Trump's midterm convention in Dallas, the party's own crowd booed Thune off the stage he was standing on.

Thune is not worried, he insists in public — he is, by his own account, and he said so eight days before his own convention proved it for him in front of a camera. This week, CBS News describes the job in softer terms: a "balancing act," a "quiet effort" to hold the majority, his biggest test yet — language built for a man who is winning, not one bracing to lose.

Put the Speaker's endorsements beside the Majority Leader's convention crowd and the week's arithmetic is simple. Both of them, on the record, in the same stretch of days, told someone else the opposite — one his own pollsters, the other a TV station back home. Neither correction got walked back. It just got buried under the next press release.

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Pollster fakes polls to expose zero scrutiny; GOP leaders prove it, call the real ones fake too.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

I want to start with a word, not a number, if that's all right with you.

The Washington Examiner printed the word "fake" twice in six days. I know because I've got both copies — not framed, nothing like that, just folded under a coffee cup at the corner store where I do my reading some mornings, and when I finally laid them side by side on the counter the clerk thought I was comparison shopping. On the 21st, "fake" described a polling company. On the 27th, it described the polls everybody else runs. Same paper. Same word. Six days apart.

Let me back up, because the file on this is thicker than one word, and I don't want to leave anything out. On September 2nd, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he "worries about losing" the Senate majority he runs, and called himself, in his own word, "a realist." Eight days after that, at his own party's midterm convention, the crowd booed him off the stage — I've got that one circled, don't ask me why I circle things, it's a habit from the job. On October 15th, Speaker Mike Johnson said it's hard to get Republicans to respond to "our own" pollsters. His words, our own, like there's a company line and a separate truth running underneath it. On October 19th, that same newspaper ran a piece asking whether losing ought to have consequences for Johnson. So going into last week, the record already had a Speaker blaming his own side's numbers and a Majority Leader telling reporters, on the record, that he might lose.

Now here's the part that sent me back to the newsstand. By the next day the Examiner had its own headline up about an industry that keeps falling for fake polls. Fair enough. That's one use of the word, and it comes with a confession attached.

On the 27th — the same week, the same paper — Johnson and Thune are reported to have both adopted the president's line that the polling showing Republicans behind is "fake," the same week Johnson's office put out a wire of endorsement statements for a leadership job he already holds.

I've worn the same raincoat through more elections than I can count on one hand, and the lining's never needed a label to tell me it keeps the water out. A poll works or it doesn't. So when I had both Examiners on the counter, the 21st and the 27th, same typeface, same word, I had to wonder: is there a difference between a poll a company admits, in writing, to inventing, and a poll two party leaders call fake without admitting anything at all? And if there's exactly one outfit in this whole stack whose business is confirmed, on the record, to be making numbers up, and it isn't the one Johnson and Thune are pointing at — which one are they pointing at?

Oh — before I let you go, one more thing, and then I'll get out of your hair. The other story — the one with Johnson and Thune and the word "fake" — has no correction running against it yet, far as the stack in front of me shows. So if a paper prints two stories with the same word in the same week, and only one of them has somebody owning up to making the numbers up, which one would you check first?

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THE ESCAPE

Brazil cancels Flávio Bolsonaro's passports for defying a surrender order; he leaves for Florida anyway.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

On Tuesday Flávio Bolsonaro left Brazil for the United States, two days after he lost Sunday's runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his passports were already cancelled by Brazilian police when he went.

You will need what went into the pan earlier: a consulate that shut its shutters, a Meta algorithm let run for Bolsonaro, four million votes that Lula took anyway, and on 26 October a word from the American president — rigged. On 1 October Brazil's attorney general had already called the meddling behind it intolerable, after the Guardian reported Washington pushing funds toward a campaign against Brazil's supreme court.

CLIVE: Rigged. That's a word I'd been saving for the response in verse, and some senator's walked off with it before I'd even scanned the first line.

GARY: A response in verse. We've got a landlord who hasn't responded to anything since March, in prose or otherwise, and that's the rigging I live under.

Now we come to the order itself, worth turning over and looking at underneath. Brazil's Supreme Court told Bolsonaro to surrender his passports, over an investigation into money laundering, and underneath, the order did not say what becomes of a senator who simply does not.

ROB: Simply does not. That's the house too — the boiler's been making that noise since March, and we've reached an understanding with it instead of a plumber.

KEITH: An understanding with a boiler. There's an angle in that — bottle it, sell it off the back of the horror stories, have it moving by Thursday.

Two days after Sunday's runoff, on Tuesday, Mr Bolsonaro went anyway. The State Department did not immediately return The Hill's request for comment, and how a man travels on a passport the police had already cancelled is a question that went with him, unanswered.

France 24, which is the paper on this desk, has it as Bolsonaro "heads to US despite cancelled passports." At home, The Hill and Fox News each print the same word: "flees."

You will be looking for an extradition request. There isn't one in these papers; that is what distance is standing in for.

This serves Lula, who won by four million votes and governs regardless of who is in Florida. It costs Brazil's courts their reach: Flávio Bolsonaro is simply not where they can get to him.

GARY: Not where they can get to him. I'd give a great deal to learn that trick before the landlord learns where I live.

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State Department Issues Visa To Flávio Bolsonaro Days After Brazil Canceled His Passport

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the morning edition, 28 October 2026

Today the State Department confirmed that Flávio Bolsonaro and his family will get American visas, passport or no passport. You will need two cancelled passports, a Supreme Court order he ignored, stops in Argentina and Ecuador, and a department that never changed its answer.

Brazilian police had asked him to hand over his passports over links to a money-laundering investigation; the Supreme Court had already nullified them for his failure to comply.

CLIVE: Did not obey. That's my position on the gas bill — an order I regard as advisory, and there's a response in verse half drafted already.

GARY: You've a verse half drafted; he's got a jet booked to Ecuador. One of you is actually moving.

Begin with what was already in the pan. On 1 October, after the Guardian reported Washington funding a campaign against Brazil's Supreme Court, Jorge Messias called it something that "cannot be tolerated." On 23 October, Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal asked Meta's chief executive about alleged interference in the runoff. Lula da Silva won anyway; days after the defeat, the senator left the country.

ROB: Moving. The last thing that moved here was the damp, up the wall, and it's still winning.

KEITH: Winning. There's an angle in that — Winning Damp, a mug with his face on, ready Thursday.

Reduce the whereabouts to what is known, which is less than it sounds. Argentina's government said he travelled there before flying on to Ecuador, said to be seeking asylum in the US. Infobae, as Common Dreams had it, said only that the family may have crossed into Argentina — run by his ally Javier Milei — before a private jet to the US; it did not know where they landed.

Now bring the official answer back to the heat. A State Department official told CBS News, en route to Ecuador, that the family would get American visas. A senior official told CBS News, and another told ABC News, the same despite his corruption charges at home: the whole family let in, a plan the Times also confirmed. The Intercept had it plainest: Brazil's Supreme Court tried to strip his passport, and Washington granted him a visa regardless.

You will be looking for the condition — the charge answered, the court satisfied, something asked first. There is no condition; that is what the visa is instead of.

GARY: A mug, right, because what this house needs is more clutter and less rent paid.

RTÉ had it as the department issuing visas "amid reports he has left Brazil after refusing to accept election defeat." At home, CBS and ABC had simply that visas would be issued — no mention of the refusal.

ROB: Twice — same as the rota, and the kitty's still not caught up. Some people aren't listening.

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