President rejects Iran's seven-day offer to reopen the Strait and reschedules the bombing for after the midterms; his U.N. ambassador goes on Fox to say the $6.48 diesel came from Ukraine

…(cont) That's the list. That's one Thursday.

The item I had to read twice is the letter, because a letter is what you send when you have already asked. The Hill called it largely symbolic. Eight months in, the Senate was writing away for a number.

Now — my car quit on the ramp at the toll plaza Tuesday. The belt. It was the belt in March, too. The shop towed it in, and before the kid put a wrench on anything he handed me an estimate: parts, labor, tax, total at the bottom, my copy of it in yellow. I keep those in the glovebox. Four years of them in there, folded around the registration, a couple of them with cigar ash on them, and every one of them says what the work would cost before the work happened. For three hundred and forty dollars a man I have never met itemizes it in advance. So I'm asking, and I'm not being smart about it: is there a sheet like that for this war that Congress has been handed? The only figure I have in the notebook is the Congressional Budget Office's, on the fifteenth — nearly forty billion, and the office called that conservative.

Friday, diesel closed at $6.48 a gallon, against $3.68 a year ago. That same Friday the United Nations ambassador went on Fox News Live and said, "What we're seeing in the war in Ukraine is that it is spreading to the global economy, and it's all the more reason that the president wants the war to stop." I wrote it down as he said it. Back on the fourth, when diesel set the record at $5.85, an economist wrote, "Trump did it! Diesel hits a new record high!" — and on the Saturday, Axios reported that the Republicans' own internal polling showed voters placing blame for the price hikes on the President, with one GOP operative saying, "Diesel's at an all-time high." Which war did the party's own polling name?

Friday in New York, Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters that a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was up to the United States, and that Iran was ready to make peace: seven days, then negotiations toward a lasting end. Saturday morning the President rejected it. From Doonbeg, Ireland, on September 13, he had already floated the post-midterm timeline, and on the 9th The Hill reported he had admitted the war would not end before the midterms. Seven days, answered with a schedule.

Hold the door one second, would you. Sorry. I do this. The letter asked the Secretary for the breakdown, and I don't have his answer in here. I have the one a private firm published, and forgive me for putting the same figure in front of you twice in one sitting: if I sit down tonight with the estimates out of the glovebox and total what this year took out of my house, whose paper am I working from — the Pentagon's, or Moody's, one thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars?