President Donald Trump said Monday that he wants the Senate to prioritize confirming Dr. Heidi Overton, his nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, before the 2026 midterm elections, in which Republicans are defending a slim…
Page A5From§Eachthe early evening edition — 31 August 2026
CDC delays Pennsylvania measles deaths; judge delays abortion pill suit until after midterms; Senate rushes FDA pick first.
As it ran on the front
Sorry, one more thing before I let you go. I wrote some dates down here, just a second, let me find the page... here. Okay. So the CDC director delays adding the Pennsylvania measles deaths to the official count. That's one entry. Then a federal judge delays a mifepristone lawsuit — that's the abortion pill case — until after the midterms. That's entry two. And then, entry three, the same administration is telling the Senate to confirm its FDA nominee before the midterms. Before. Not after. Before.
Now, I'm not a numbers guy, I'm really not, but I kept looking at this one word — 'after' — because it shows up twice, and then it flips to 'before' on the third one, and that bothered me. So I did this thing, this little demonstration, at my kitchen table, with a calendar and two magnets. I put the measles-data magnet on the after-election square. I put the lawsuit magnet on the after-election square too. Both magnets, same square. Then I picked up the nominee magnet, and I went to put it on the same square, out of habit, and it didn't fit — it goes on the before square. Every time. I tried it maybe six times.…
…(cont) So here's my question, and I want to be fair about this, because maybe I'm missing something, my notes aren't always perfect — if the timing on these three things were random, unrelated, just how the paperwork happened to fall, wouldn't you expect the nominee to land on the same square as the other two, at least once out of three? Just once?
Because right now what I've got written down is: bad numbers, after. Bad lawsuit, after. Good nominee, before. And I keep asking myself what the odds are that a calendar just happens to sort itself that clean, all on its own, with nobody's hand on it.
Anyway — that's it, that's all I had. Oh, one more thing, sorry, before you go. If the dates I wrote down are wrong, which one is it?
“Bad news waits for the votes to be counted, good news for their side doesn't wait for anything. That's not a coincidence — that's a calendar built by people who write the rules and the schedule at the same time.”
“Timing is coincidental in all three cases, purely administrative — the measles data needed verification, the lawsuit needed additional briefing, and the nominee needed confirmation, which, yes, happens to be scheduled before the election, but elections shouldn't factor into personnel decisions, obviously, unless — no, they don't.”
The receipts
The US declared measles eliminated in 2000. The last two years carry more cases than the rest of the century combined - the worst count since 1991 The Hill / CDC measles data, July 2026
New CDC director delays adding Pennsylvania deaths to measles dataThe deaths have been at the heart of a bitter political dispute between RFK Jr. and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D).
A federal judge on Sunday paused a lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone until after the midterm elections. Judge Reed O’Connor, of the U.S. District Court for the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.