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SMALL POTATOES

Trump calls Iran war 'small potatoes,' threatens its 'biggest attack of them all,' profits either way

By LouOne More Question · the milkman edition, 5 September 2026

They tell you it's small potatoes right up until they tell you it's the biggest attack of them all, and the only number that never changes size is the one on the stock filing. That's not a mixed message, that's a business plan — talk the war down when the cameras need calm, talk it up when Tehran needs a scare, and either way the energy portfolio closes green. Somebody's kid is paying at the pump for a war too small to name and too big to end.

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Republicans demand justice for slain children; the juror trying to deliver it got called biased by the defense

By ChipStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 5 September 2026

"Victims deserved far, far better." That is the sentence Republicans released within hours of Friday's mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, and taken at face value it is hard to argue with — a jury heard weeks of testimony and did not convict, and the statement is right that this should trouble anyone. The trouble, as the statement frames it, sits with the jury. Hold that for a second.

Clancy admitted in court that she killed her three children in 2023. She argued she should not be held criminally responsible, citing her state of mind at the time. Her attorney made a last-minute attempt to head off a mistrial; the attempt failed, and the case ended in a hung jury, declared a mistrial Friday. First-degree murder requires a unanimous verdict, which means one juror who won't convict can hang the whole room — and that is what the reporting says happened. A single juror, purportedly willing to convict, stood alone against the rest of the panel. So the jury didn't fail to convict. One member of it tried to, and the rest could not be moved. That's not the system letting Clancy off. That is, as far as the record shows, the system doing exactly what a unanimity requirement does when the room disagrees.

The Federalist offered a second, sharper theory the same day: livestreaming trials emboldens lawyers to act out for clicks. They mean Kevin Reddington specifically, Clancy's attorney, who during the trial appeared to suggest the holdout juror might be biased against disabled people. Set that next to the first statement. The clicks theory blames the camera for a defense lawyer's attempt to discredit the one juror Republicans are, elsewhere in the same news cycle, angry didn't get a conviction. That's not the audience doing that. That's — that's the defense attorney, on the record, in the courtroom, camera or no camera.

Three children are dead. That fact sits under both statements, and neither one moves it. Everything printed Friday afternoon was aimed at the jury, the judge, or the camera. None of it landed on the one person in the room who tried, alone, to convict.

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Pennsylvania removes Green Party candidate as 'spoiler,' the exact defense that won Democrats Nevada's top court in 2024.

By SalStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 5 September 2026

Andrew Tupone wanted to run for Congress in Pennsylvania's 7th District as a Green Party candidate. The state's Democratic Party sued to stop him, calling him a "spoiler candidate to distract progressive voters." Friday, a judge agreed and struck him from the ballot.

Two years ago, minus a couple of weeks, the same case ran through the highest court in the land. Nevada's Secretary of State directed the Green Party to file the wrong affidavit form. The error was the state's. When Nevada's Green Party tried to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot anyway, Nevada's Democratic Party sued to keep them off it — and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the Democrats.

Line up the two rulings and the wording barely changes. A minor party files to run. The Democratic Party goes to court. A judge or a justice removes the minor party from the ballot on the theory that its presence would cost Democrats votes. Twice, in two states, at two different levels of the American court system, the same argument produced the same removal.

The word "spoiler" implies a race that already belongs to someone before the voters touch it — a claim the Green Party keeps threatening to violate by filing on time, under state rules, with a platform Democratic voters are free to reject at the polls. Rejecting a candidate at the ballot box is what elections are for. Removing him from the ballot before voters get the chance is a different transaction, and Pennsylvania and Nevada both just completed it.

That's not democracy defending itself from spoilers. That's the two major parties agreeing, a continent and two years apart, that the ballot has room for exactly two names — and finding courts willing to say so.

Ask yourself who wins when a candidate gets erased before anyone casts a vote against him. It is not the Pennsylvania voters who wanted a third option in the 7th District. It is not the Nevada voters whose Green Party got tripped up by a form their own Secretary of State handed them wrong. The winner is whoever gets to keep running unopposed by anything but the other half of the same arrangement.

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FAA needs two senators calling it hostage-taking before explaining where the raise money went.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the sunrise edition, 5 September 2026

The chief pulls the file: $140 million, already appropriated, already law, sitting in the Homeland Security and Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act since spring. The ask was a 3.8% raise for every air traffic controller in the country. What controllers got was the 1% bump that goes to any federal employee whose agency did nothing at all.

The planner traces the wiring. Congress didn't request a fix — it built one, months ago, and left the switch on the wall for the FAA to flip. No new vote required. No committee needed. The agency only had to cut the check Congress already wrote.

The tinkerer starts pulling the mechanism apart to see why it won't run. Four months after the money existed, the Washington Examiner reported on August 27 that the FAA still hadn't moved it, and that Administrator Bryan Bedford has linked releasing the raise to a separate plan for changing how controllers are scheduled — one appropriation, one condition nobody in Congress attached to it.

The muscle doesn't wait for a better explanation. On Friday, Senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin sent Bedford a letter calling the delay what it looks like: holding the raise hostage. It took a public accusation with that word in it to get anyone at the FAA talking about where the other 2.8% went.

The pilot notes what's in the air while the check sits in a drawer. The same stretch, NBC reported that pilots aboard Marine One struggled to reach the tower before liftoff near the White House — an incident the network says put fresh scrutiny on communication with controllers, cause undetermined. The FAA is separately weighing discipline, including termination, against two controllers over a night an Air Canada jet hit a firetruck, killing both pilots and injuring dozens — a conduct case, not a staffing one, running on its own track. Two open questions about the same workforce, and the agency answering neither is also the agency sitting on $140 million of that workforce's own raise without an explanation.

The plan the Crew hands back doesn't invent a fix. Congress already built one: appropriate the money, name the number, sign it into law. The only step missing is the FAA doing the part that was never optional — cutting a check for work already performed, before the next senator has to spell out what withholding a paycheck is usually called.

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Republican governors defund the license-plate cameras their own police just credited with solving crime.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 5 September 2026

Tuesday, September 2, the Dallas Police Department announced it is shutting down more than three hundred Flock license-plate readers — three hundred twenty-one of them, gone by September 15 — after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to halt the funding that kept the cameras running. The order cited privacy and the Fourth Amendment. The cameras stay bolted to the poles; the money that ran them does not.

One day earlier, Florida's Department of Transportation had already moved. Following what the memo described as concerns from Governor Ron DeSantis, the department blocked Flock systems from state highways altogether and gave agencies thirty days to pull the ones already installed. Local and county roads are untouched for now — the ban stops at the highway line, which is its own kind of statement about where the objection actually lives.

Same week, Pennsylvania. Stacy Garrity, the Republican nominee running to unseat Governor Josh Shapiro, told her campaign she supports banning Flock cameras statewide, calling the network an "intrusive invasion of privacy." Three Republican officials, in three different states, inside a single week, each finding a reason to turn against a surveillance tool their own party built out.

And here's the part that doesn't fit the file folder marked civil liberties: the same week these cameras got cut, the New York Times was quoting police departments explaining that the cameras help solve crimes. Not abstractly — that's the stated justification for the systems in the first place. NPR's read on it is broader still: heading into the midterms, candidates from both parties are finding reasons to run against Flock, each for their own version of the same discomfort with being tracked.

A tool doesn't usually get killed by the people who paid for it and the people running against them in the same election cycle. When that happens, the tool isn't the target. Something about who holds the data, who can query it, and who gets to decide that later is the actual fight, and the privacy language is what both sides reach for when they don't want to say that part out loud.

The cameras in Dallas go dark September 15. The police who say they need them will still be working the same streets on September 16. The governor who pulled the funding will still be governor. That's the whole trick: the tool disappears, the argument about it disappears with it, and the people who wanted it gone in the first place never had to say what they actually wanted gone.

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House votes 413-2 that harassment is unacceptable; four days later, two more officials face the same accusation.

By ChipStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 5 September 2026

Let's be clear about what happened, and in what order, because the order is the whole defense. On Aug. 27, Rep. Chuck Edwards sent colleagues a letter insisting the Ethics Committee had it backwards — that conduct the report called "persistent unprofessional and inappropriate" toward two younger women on his staff was really just interactions that "could be interpreted as romantic." Fine. Every institution deserves due process, and Edwards used his.

Five days later, on Tuesday, the House disagreed with him, 413 to 2. That is not a partisan number. That is the number both parties reach when they'd rather not explain the alternative to voters twice. The censure got framed as accountability finally working — Congress policing its own, a floor vote nobody could dismiss as theater.

Then Thursday happened. The Labor Department's Inspector General released its own report, this one on Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who ran the department under President Trump until she resigned in April. The findings: a workplace staff described as "toxic, intimidating and humiliating," built in part on regular workday drinking and gifts she failed to properly disclose. Different building, different job title, and I was going to call this an unrelated personnel matter entirely — except five days is not a coincidence, it's a pattern that only took five days to repeat.

And it kept going. The same day the Chavez-DeRemer report landed, New Jersey's Lieutenant Governor, Dale Caldwell, was confirmed to be under investigation for alleged inappropriate behavior toward women — a probe opened by Gov. Sherrill's office and led by a former state attorney general, which is the kind of arrangement usually described as independent oversight. I was prepared to call that reassuring. It is not reassuring; it is the third instance of the same complaint landing in eleven days, and I've run out of buildings to blame it on one at a time.

Here is the actual scorecard: one censure vote, one inspector general's report, one state investigation opened, zero resignations forced by any of it so far. The system worked, in the narrow sense that paperwork got generated on schedule. Whether anyone above a staffer's pay grade faces a consequence beyond a letter to colleagues is, as always, a separate question — one none of these reports is actually built to answer, and one none of these offices seem in a hurry to ask.

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Putin's 'goodwill pause' in Kyiv lands six days after the death toll from his last strike stopped climbing.

By ChipStaff Writer · the coffee break edition, 5 September 2026

Peace, or something timed exactly like it, is arriving in Kyiv today. Vladimir Putin has ordered a three-day pause in strikes on the Ukrainian capital, and six outlets are reporting it this morning as the story: a goodwill gesture, ordered to start at the same hour Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner touched down in Moscow to meet with him, before the envoys move on to Kyiv itself. That is not a coincidence, it is scheduling, and scheduling is not the same as — it's scheduling, and I should leave it there.

Because the pause did not arrive out of nowhere. On August 29, a Russian strike hit a warehouse in the Bucha district that Ukrainian officials were calling an ammunition depot, in a residential area west of Kyiv. By the next day the death toll had climbed to 38, one of the deadliest attacks to hit Ukraine this year. That was six or seven days ago, not some distant chapter — less than a week, before Putin found three days of goodwill in him.

He also found those three days seven days after the Kremlin itself told the world the peace talks were on what it called a "deep pause" — its phrase, not ours, offered just after the CIA director had secretly traveled to Moscow and just before Witkoff and Kushner arrived to try again. So the war has a deep pause and Kyiv gets a shallow one, and I want to be clear that both of these are real progress — progress being the word we now use for a war that resumes on schedule in 72 hours.

None of this is new to Witkoff. He was in the room with Putin discussing settlement options back in April of last year, and the settlement has not arrived; what has arrived, again, is a pause with an expiration printed on it like a coupon. Ukraine has asked for a halt to air attacks during this visit. Moscow, per its habit, has not publicly answered that request — only the one it prefers, about the envoys' schedule.

Thirty-eight people are dead from Bucha. The pause expires Tuesday. The talks were called stuck by the same government now getting credit for pausing them. I sat down to defend the goodwill here at some length, twice, and both times the math from Bucha caught up with the sentence before I finished it. I filed this anyway.

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Missouri asks its top court to let voters decide, then asks a higher court to skip that vote

By LouOne More Question · the noon edition, 5 September 2026

Walk me through it, would you? Not what happened — I've got that part written down. I mean the physical part. Somebody at a desk in Jefferson City did this, so show me how. Sit down. Pull up the ruling. Type the reply. I want to see the motions, because when I only read the outcome I miss the part where a person actually had to do it, step by step, the same week, out of the state's own procedure.

So here's what I've got, laid out the way it happened. First, the ruling. Missouri's Supreme Court looks at the new congressional map and says it can't be used in November, and says the boundaries are for the voters to settle. That's a court doing what a court does. Read the case. Sign at the bottom. Send it out.

Now here's the part I want walked through, slower. The state didn't wait on the voters it had just been handed to. Same week, that same state government files a paper of its own — an emergency application — and this one doesn't go back to the state court that just ruled. It goes up, past that court, straight to the U.S. Supreme Court, to Justice Kavanaugh, asking him to overturn Missouri's own Supreme Court, before the voters that first ruling named ever get a ballot with either map on it.

I want the mechanics of that, because I don't do this for a living and it's got me stuck. You get a ruling you don't like from your own state's highest court — the highest one your state has — and who do you call? Where do you even get the form for that? I've got a form at the DMV for a title transfer, one for a lost plate, one for the late fee I owe on a car that still needs a fan belt I haven't bought. I don't have a form for "my own supreme court ruled, and I'd like a different supreme court to un-rule it before the thing it ruled about happens." Somebody had that form, though. The Attorney General's office had it Friday, and it came in marked emergency.

Here's the language off that filing, and I wrote it down because I wanted it exact: a "federal-election-administration disaster." Their words, for what their own top court did. Not a policy disagreement. A disaster. So I went looking for what the disaster actually costs anybody, and the number I found wasn't a disaster number at all — it's one seat. The map the state court blocked adds one congressional seat for the Republican Party. One. That's the whole arithmetic sitting underneath the word "disaster."

So walk me through it again, because I think I skipped a step. Document one: the state's own highest court says the boundaries belong to the voters. Document two, filed by that same government, same week: an emergency request that the voters not get to decide after all, at least not on this map, at least not yet. That isn't two disputes running side by side. That's one government, filing against its own ruling.

I think about the toll plaza on the way into town, the one with the fellow in the booth who waves you through the lane or doesn't. If his supervisor thinks he waved wrong, the supervisor can shut the lane and reroute traffic — that's the job, that's normal. What doesn't happen, not at that plaza, not anywhere I've paid a toll, is the toll authority calling the state police superintendent and asking him to overrule the supervisor's lane before a single car has been asked to detour. You let the ruling run. Then you appeal it. Nobody asks the appeal to arrive before the ruling has had a chance to mean anything.

Oh — before you go. I've got both documents here, not stapled, not stamped together, just sitting one on top of the other on the seat of the car, because that's where I read things now that the porch light's out. Top one says let the voters decide. Bottom one, filed by the same office, same week, asks a court in Washington to make sure they don't have to, not this time, not on this map. I'm not saying which one wins. I'm asking which one you figure the voters were ever actually shown.

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