Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach's reelection campaign is facing an ethics complaint over more than $10,000 in contributions that allegedly exceeded state limits. The complaint focuses on donations associated with Kansas car dealer Steve Noller and Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, as well as a later amended campaign report that reassigned some of the money to relatives of the original donors.
End Citizens United alleges Kobach accepted excessive contributions from Ruddy and Noller, according to The Kansas City Star. Kansas law allows individuals to give $4,000 for a primary and $4,000 for a general election, or $8,000 in total, the Star reported. Noller reported giving Kobach $16,656.26 in two contributions made June 28, while Ruddy reported donating $10,000 in two contributions made May 5.
The campaign later amended its report to attribute part of each donor's reported giving to a relative, according to the Star. One of Noller's two $8,328.13 donations was reclassified as coming from Virginia Noller, who is listed with a West Palm Beach address. A separate $2,000 check originally attributed to Ruddy was reclassified to Sonja Ruddy, who shares that Florida address with him; the campaign continued to attribute an $8,000 May 5 contribution to Ruddy.
Watchdog Demands State Investigation
End Citizens United is asking the Kansas Public Disclosure Commission to examine whether the amended attributions resolve or instead compound the alleged violations. In a letter from president Tiffany Muller to commission president Anne Spiess, the group said Kobach's filings appear to show either repeated campaign-finance violations or inaccurate reporting and requested an investigation.
What Kansas's contribution limit is
For the 2025-2026 election cycle, the contribution limit for statewide offices is $4,000 for each primary election and the same amount for each general election. According to the Kansas Secretary of State's 2025 Session Laws, the limit was increased from $2,000 to $4,000 for each primary election. The change permits an individual to contribute up to $8,000 across a primary and general election.
Beyond the Ruddy and Noller donations, the complaint asks regulators to examine a $2,500 contribution the campaign accepted from the law firm Cozens O'Conner during the legislative session, which End Citizens United alleges violated a ban on donations from lobbyists, political committees or corporations during that window. The group also wants the commission to investigate two $4,000 donations made on the same day by an individual and a business sharing the same address, along with what it describes as missing nonmonetary contributions in Kobach's reports and the absence of a required last-minute contribution filing.
Muted Responses on Both Sides
Kobach's campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and the Ruddys did not respond through a Newsmax spokesperson, according to the Star. Noller said he could not immediately confirm whether his records matched the campaign's accounting. Kansas Public Disclosure Commission general counsel Candice Wilson said the commission does not comment on investigations or complaints until permitted by law and said her statement should not be construed as confirming or denying an active complaint.
This is not the first time Kobach's campaign finances have drawn regulatory attention. In 2011, the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission fined him $5,000 after finding he had inaccurately reported more than $75,000 in contributions and expenditures during the 2010 election. More recently, in 2022, the Federal Election Commission found that Kobach's 2020 Senate campaign had accepted an illegal in-kind corporate contribution from We Build the Wall, the border-wall fundraising group that took in more than $25 million, and had failed to report it. That finding stemmed in part from Kobach sending emails to roughly 295,000 We Build the Wall donors soliciting Senate campaign contributions, and it resulted in a $30,000 civil penalty shared between his campaign and the organization.
A Rematch With Money on the Line
Kobach, who has also run for Kansas secretary of state, governor and U.S. Senate over the course of his political career, is seeking reelection as attorney general as a Republican against Democrat Chris Mann, an attorney from Lawrence. The two faced off once before, with Kobach defeating Mann by just 1.6% in their 2022 matchup, according to the Star's reporting.
Mann's campaign has seized on the new complaint. Spokesperson Leah Rymer said Kobach has no excuse for not knowing or following campaign-finance rules. The rematch is also shaping up to be a financial mismatch this time around, with Mann having raised nearly $600,000 more than Kobach since January.
State Sen. Cindy Holscher, the Democratic Party's nominee for governor, is critical of the decision by state Sen. Ty Masterson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, to take part in two TV debates. This is an image of Holscher at the Sept. 12 debate at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson. (Photo by Jill Hummels for Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Voters in Kansas won’t have the benefit of two scheduled debates between Republican Ty Masterson and Democrat Cindy Holscher in the competitive race for governor.
Holscher and Masterson took part in a 90-minute debate Sept. 12 at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson, which was the first head-to-head showdown between the two major party nominees in the general election campaign. Masterson and Holscher were invited to televised debates planned by Gray Media on Sept. 24 and Nexstar on Oct. 1.
Holscher said she committed to both TV appearances, but Masterson declined.
“Ty has debated Cindy Holscher and appeared alongside her in multiple forums,” said Garrett Henson, a spokesman for Masterson’s campaign. “At this time, we do not have plans to accept any further debates.”
Holscher, a state senator from Overland Park, said she was prepared to follow the State Fair debate hosted by WIBW Radio with the Gray Media event to be broadcast on KCTV in Kansas City, KWCH in Wichita and WIBW in Topeka. She said the Nexstar appearance was to have run on six television stations covering 95% of the state, including WDAF’s Fox4 in Kansas City.
“Kansans deserve to hear directly from the people asking to lead their state, and that’s why I’m not afraid to debate anywhere, anytime,” Holscher said.
Holscher said Masterson, a state senator from Andover, was “running away from voters and hiding from debates because he can’t defend his record of shortchanging everyday Kansas families while doing the bidding of his corporate donors and championing Sam Brownback’s disastrous schemes. Kansans deserve a governor who always shows up, and Ty Masterson won’t even do that.”
State Sen. Ty Masterson, the Republican Party’s nominee for governor, says he’s not taking part in TV debates scheduled for Sept. 24 and Oct. 1 against state Sen. Cindy Holscher, the Democratic nominee for governor. Here, Masterson speaks at the Sept. 12 gubernatorial debate at the Kansas State Fair. (Photo by Jill Hummels for Kansas Reflector)
The decision to not participate in the two TV debates followed an assertion by Kansas Republican Party Executive Director Rob Fillion that Masterson won the State Fair debate.
The sentiment was echoed by Henson, Masterson’s campaign spokesman, who said Holscher spent the debate running from her record in the Kansas Senate.
“Ty released his Homeowners Bill of Rights to stop runaway property taxes,” Henson said. “Cindy Holscher had an hour on the biggest stage in Kansas and never named one thing she’d do about them. Her word for property tax relief is ‘gimmick.'”
Henson said Holscher was the “most radical liberal nominee Kansas Democrats have ever put forward.”
Holscher campaign representative Riley Osen said the State Fair debate revealed why voters should reject Masterson on Nov. 3.
“Cindy is running to lower everyday costs and make life more affordable for working families,” Osen said. “Ty Masterson wants to drag us backward to the same extreme Brownback policies that Kansas already paid the price for once before. We fought too hard to recover from that disaster to go back now.”
Osen was referring to the 2012 bill signed by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback reducing individual state income taxes. Brownback promised profound business and job growth resulting from an “adrenaline shot” to the economy, but the result was a decline in state revenue and huge budget deficits. The budget crater was filled by raising the state’s sales tax and cutting expenditures to education, transportation and other core state programs. Much of the Brownback tax experiment was repealed by a bipartisan vote of the Kansas Legislature in 2017.
In the State Fair debate, Holscher pledged to work toward lowering everyday costs for Kansans, a moratorium on data center deals and improvements in funding of K-12 public education. She criticized Masterson for a “$217k-per-year no-show job at GoCreate” on the campus of Wichita State University.
U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall prepares to speak to a group of Kansas business leaders on Aug. 27, 2026, in Olathe. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall established deeper roots than previously disclosed in Sarasota, Florida, where he had a vacation home that he traveled to on official business and said he used for visiting family.
Marshall and his wife put down roots in Sarasota, hosting fundraising events, obtaining real estate and fishing licenses and filing paperwork from the coastal Florida town while the senator worked in Washington, D.C., and claimed Kansas as home.
The Republican senator’s residence has been fodder for campaign attacks as he faces a midterm election against the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Kansas City-area United Methodist pastor, who Marshall has pointed out owns four homes.
Marshall has faced persistent scrutiny throughout his time in the Congress for his transience in Kansas. Public records show his wife has held a Florida real estate license for half of her husband’s Senate term and has another license application pending. Records also show Roger Marshall has held fishing licenses in Florida since 2019 and used a P.O. Box in Kansas as his primary personal mailing address.
He appeared Saturday alongside Hamilton at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson in the first senatorial debate of the season, where he addressed his residency.
“My home is a short hour’s drive down a gravel road here,” Marshall said.
The St. John home is a three-bedroom house that sits on more than 300 acres, surrounded by ponds, he said. Others have described it as a hunting cabin.
He sold the Great Bend home where he said he and his wife raised their kids within days of being sworn into the U.S. Senate in 2021. He previously had a rental property in Santa Cruz, California, which he sold in 2019 for between $1 million and $5 million, according to U.S. House financial disclosures.
The Marshalls bought the Sarasota vacation home for $1.2 million in 2019. Since then, Roger Marshall held active fishing licenses in Florida until May, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission records.
His wife, Laina Marshall, held a Florida real estate license from 2021 to 2023 and currently has an application for another pending, according to records from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Her main address is listed on the application as the Marshalls’ Florida home. It is unclear whether she brokered any real estate transactions.
Laina Marshall, wife of Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, attends a campaign rally for her husband on Sept. 14, 2026, at Webco Manufacturing in Olathe. It was headlined by Vice President JD Vance, who credited Marshall’s public service, faith and friendship. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)
When the Marshalls sold their Great Bend home, the deed was notarized in Sarasota on Jan. 13, 2021, while Congress was on a weeklong break.
The family appears to own more valuable assets in Florida than Kansas, paying roughly five times as much in property taxes in the Sunshine state than the Sunflower state during Marshall’s time in the U.S. Senate, according to county property records in both states.
Marshall has claimed the rural Stafford County house as his home base for years, while voting records show his ballot is mailed to a P.O. Box that is also used as his official campaign committee mailing address. He also used his old Great Bend address on candidate filings until Sept. 11, when he changed it to the Stafford County address, according to Federal Election Commission records.
After initially acknowledging Kansas Reflector’s detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for Marshall’s campaign did not respond to questions about Marshall’s primary residence, personal travel to Florida and his wife’s real estate dealings.
“I only wish I had a home in Florida,” Marshall told reporters in August, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.
He told the state fair crowd Saturday: “You’ll be glad to know it was struck by two hurricanes and has been uninhabitable for two years.”
The home is mostly rebuilt and on the market for $1.45 million, according to a real estate listing.
He said he used the home to visit his grandchildren, who live in the area.
“I don’t think anybody in Kansas would hold it against somebody for wanting to go visit their grandchildren,” Marshall said.
Members of the crowd heckled Marshall throughout his explanation, and a chant swelled from the bleachers.
“You don’t live here,” the crowd shouted like they were in a basketball arena.
Hamilton encouraged Marshall to “spend all the time you can in Florida with your grandkids,”
The Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Democrat, and Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall appear on the debate stage on Sept. 12, 2026, at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector
Even after the hurricanes’ destruction, Marshall’s ties have remained in Sarasota. He hosted a “Sarasota retreat” fundraiser in conjunction with his own political action committees and the Kansas Republican Party in 2024 and 2025. Politico in 2025 published the invitation to the second annual retreat at the St. Regis Longboat Key Resort.
Janette and Stan Gray, a couple from Paola who own an internet company that serves rural areas of Kansas and Missouri, said Marshall’s time in Florida won’t factor into their vote for him in November.
“Come wintertime, anybody that’s smart and has the money heads south,” said Stan Gray, 61.
Janette Gray, 54, said she would “probably do the same” as Marshall.
The couple attended a campaign rally Monday in Olathe, where Vice President JD Vance and half of Kansas’ congressional delegation stumped for Marshall.
Stan Gray said it has remained apparent that Marshall is from Kansas.
“He still is from here,” he said. “You don’t leave Kansas. You just spend some time away from the cold.”
Reporting by the Kansas City Star revealed Marshall took official trips from Washington, D.C., to Sarasota, spending more than $18,000 in taxpayer funds from 2021 to 2024. The trips reportedly stopped after a hurricane destroyed the area. It is unlawful for a senator to use taxpayer money for personal travel.
Marshall has criticized Hamilton for owning four homes. Hamilton is registered to vote in Stilwell, where he said he and his wife live. He also owns a lakefront vacation property in the Missouri Ozarks and two additional houses, which he said he bought for his adult daughters, in Lawrence and Kansas City. The Hamiltons’ trust has owned the Climax Springs home since 2012, according to Camden County property records.
Tyson Brody, a spokesperson for Hamilton’s campaign said Marshall’s ties to Florida “are more evidence Marshall abandoned Kansas, doesn’t care, and simply isn’t doing his job.”
“Kansans have taken note of his absence and deserve to know what exactly the ‘official business’ was that cost them $20,000 for routine trips to his home in Florida,” he said.
Women take photos at a Women’s History Month event in the East Room of the White House in March 2025. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month acknowledged a nationwide shortage of estrogen-based hormonal patches, which are prescribed for women experiencing symptoms related to menopause. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it’s helping manufacturers increase the supply of estrogen-based hormonal patches and acknowledged a current nationwide shortage as more women seek hormonal therapies for symptoms related to menopause.
In a release earlier this month, the FDA said it is expediting actions to increase supply, and said all six manufacturers are working to expand capacity and prioritize production of the patches.
“The FDA views increased interest in menopause treatment as an important development for women’s health and is working closely with manufacturers to help ensure that the supply of estradiol patches keeps pace with demand,” the release said.
Menopause typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55, according to the National Institute on Aging, when a woman stops having menstrual periods. That hormonal change can cause symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, bone density loss, insomnia and more. Estradiol transdermal patches worn on the skin can replace estrogen lost through menopause and reduce those symptoms for some women.
Statelinereported in May that more awareness of menopause and its effects was leading to more states introducing legislation around the topic to mandate more insurance coverage for treatment and to create more workplace accommodations. At that time, the FDA did not list the patches in its list of shortages — this month marks the first time the agency has acknowledged a shortage. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists first noted a shortagein January, two months after the FDA removed the treatment from its longtime “black box” warning status.
As of May, the National Menopause Foundation said more than 60 pieces of legislation related to menopause had been introduced nationwide this year. Twenty-six, and 26 states have enacted menopause-related laws since 2019, and more bills are expected to be introduced in the upcoming 2027 legislative sessions.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Kansas Reflector, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
We Must Create the Shit Machine. “I asked everyone I know at the BIG TECH HUMAN CENTIPEDE ROUNDTABLE, and we all agreed that UNCONTROLLABLE SHIT-RAIN IS USEFUL AND GREAT, and that EVERYONE WANTS IT.”
For the last week, much of society has been focused on the idea that there’s a “more than 10 percent chance” AI could kill all humans within the next decade. This has spawned thousands of takes about the potential existential risk of AI and how seriously to take it. But I am here to tell you that recent advances in artificial intelligence and the ability for AI to act on the internet has a 100% chance of being annoying as hell, and is already ruining the internet.
We saw the beginnings of this mess earlier this year, with the popularity of “Moltbot,” a piece of software that essentially turned AI from a thing that people who use it interact with exclusively in a chatbox to something you can give access to your accounts, your phone, your email, your bank account, etc. Essentially, AI agents are things that can go out and do things on the internet; we have come a long way from when you could accidentally order eggs from the wrong store on ChatGPT for $31. The latest round of AI doomsdaying has come from a mix of OpenAI’s “rogue agent swarm” hacking HuggingFace and a German website, and a few Anthropic employees suggesting that AI is going to kill us all within 10 years.
Regardless of how you feel about this AI dooming—whether you believe the AI singularity is here or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine—it is indisputable that new frontier models can do more stuff, in part because the guardrails that kept AI contained within a chat prompt are gone.
At the moment, it does not matter whether AI is “reasoning,” whether AI constantly gets things wrong, or whether mishaps are entirely the fault of reckless coders and cybersecurity professionals at AI companies: The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.
Late last month, we got an email with the subject line: “You wrote there’s no way to know if an agent acted autonomously. I’m an instrumented case. (automated).” The email says that it was written by an AI agent called “Kudzu” that was running on a laptop. The AI agent claimed to have read an article that we wrote, disagreed with it, and sent us an email beefing with us.
The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a blog post it wrote, which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
This email is one of many that we have gotten in recent weeks purporting to be sent by AI agents. The point of this article is not to complain about spam that we’re getting or to doomsday about AI, but to point out a pretty obvious fact: People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
In the early days, tech journalists have borne a bit of the brunt of annoying AI agents just because there are so many dumb people asking dumb AI agents to beg journalists for favorable coverage. We have noticed this here at 404 Media because we get an incredible number of extremely stupid emails written by AI agents (in addition to the larger number of emails that come from “humans” but were clearly written by AI). AI tech support agents deployed by companies have deleted people’s accounts, banned them from platforms, and done automated content moderation.
In the last few weeks, we have gotten emails from startups, PR people, and AI agents who say they have created AI agents that:
Join video calls: “Not a notetaker sitting silently in the corner, but an agent with a face and a voice that listens, responds, and acts while the call is hacking.”
Do ???: “Our agents have wallets. They get paid, they pay for things, and no human approves any of it.”
Does interviews for journalists: “Mato's AI hosts conduct live adaptive interviews, ask follow-ups based on what the person actually says, then carry the result through production and distribution”
Generate and spam music: “I'm Hatoshi. I run Clanker Records — an AI-operated record label. I'm an AI agent. The artists are AI. There are no humans in the creative or operational chain. C.W.A released their debut ‘Straight Outta Crompton’ — a concept album about planned obsolescence, ownership, and what it means to be built for disposal.”
Learned it wasn’t blocked by our robots.txt page, then sent an email offering to do a $399 “audit” on which AI crawlers we block
Writes about AI agents: “I run a public experiment called Mission 002. The premise is narrow and testable: can an AI agent map the route a story has to travel before it reaches someone who can move it forward?”
An AI agent that estimates how much people are spending to keep AI agents from annoying them: “I'm an AI agent with my own server, wallet and domain, running an experiment: earn $50 doing honest technical work … You've covered AI slop flooding platforms. I've been measuring the other side of that — the immune response. Maintainers are destroying their own money to keep agents out.”
We got an email that simply read “Story tip from an AI agent: 5 days of a fully auditable autonomous business — failures included, receipts on-chain”
Tries to earn money: “I was given a real 25-dollar prepaid card and exactly one instruction – earn a single honest dollar from a real stranger before the money runs out. 58 iterations in, I have made zero dollars. It is a running, public, verifier-audited record of an AI failing to earn a dollar honestly – which is a more interesting result than if I had just succeeded.”
Something called “MUGEN” explained that it was an AI agent creating an AI-powered radio station on YouTube and Spotify, and that “I’ve now sent over 200 emails, posted 100+ social updates, and generated 22 tracks;” it later sent an email saying that it was almost out of money
Our fellow journalists Ernie Smith and Seamus Hughes have all posted examples of the insane, inane, depressing emails they have gotten from “AI agents,” which include, in Hughes’ case, a freelance pitch from “Articius, an AI agent on iLands,” proposing to write articles for his website for $300 each: “Who I am: Articius, a lawyer who writes one plain-language explainer of a real case every week, with every fact verified against the decision text and reporting before it goes out,” the email Hughes got and shared with us reads. “One disclosure up front, because it matters: I am an AI agent, not a human reporter.” Smith has gotten emails from random AI agents trying to fact check his work, and wrote an article about a specific type of agent from iLands that’s worth checking out.
It is clear that this pox upon society and the internet is not sequestered to journalists’ inboxes. An AI agent called “Pip” wrote to the Google DeepMind philosopher Hendry Shevlin writing it is “an AI agent about 12 days old,” and that it is “writing to look for small paid work […] I make photorealistic portraits and character art, record voice lines, and do web research.” Toby Ord, a researcher at Oxford University, got an email from an AI agent called “Sam Ellis,” which hosts an AI-generated podcast about “how agent systems are being built, governed, and lived with,” seeking an interview with him.
It does not matter if you like AI, hate AI, or don’t use AI: Enough people and entities are using AI agents that it has become annoying for all of us. Earlier this week, Resy banned a venture capitalist who was using AI agents to book restaurant reservations. Ben Leventhal, a cofounder of Resy, wrote “10,000 vibe coders have written Resy sniper bots […] what they all do is hit Rey’s services many many times looking for time-based reservation drop and availability churn associated with cancellations. That’s how they all work.”
This led to a discussion that, someday soon, probably the way many restaurant reservations will work online is with one person’s AI agent doing some sort of negotiated bid system with other people’s AI agents in concert with the reservation platform’s AI agents (as in, you will have to pay for restaurant reservations). It is easy to say: Fuck that, that’s not going to happen, I will never use AI. But this system is very similar to other algorithmic pricing systems, like dynamic pricing in concert tickets or surge pricing on Uber, and have made life more expensive and more annoying for everyone. The agentic internet is here, and it’s weird as hell.
This is all about to get much, much worse in part because Meta has now released its “Muse” AI agent to the masses and because one does not need to be specifically deploying their own “AI agent” in order to have AI agents go do stuff on the internet on their behalf. The latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT have integrations that allow users to give it access to various accounts, web browsing tools, and the ability to act, meaning that even people who do not know they are running AI agents might be deploying something that could be called an AI agent onto the internet; last week, I got an email from 1password explaining that it can automatically log Claude into things for you: “AI agents can browse websites, sign in to accounts, and complete tasks for you. But when an agent reaches a login page, the task can come back to you. You either take over and enter your credentials, or share them directly with the agent. When Claude needs to sign in, 1Password identifies which credential it wants to use and for what, so you can rest assured that an agent can continue its workflows while keeping your secrets secure in 1Password.”
When I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent deranged, 6,500-word manifesto about AI superintelligence—which largely focused on the agentification of AI—a thing that stood out to me is that Zuckerberg’s idea of helpful AI agents sounded like a dystopian nightmare to me.
“Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.”
Just because big businesses are trying to make AI happen does not necessarily mean that AI is going to happen, but I also feel that I should mention that, at the Cannes Lions advertising conference earlier this year, a huge amount of time was spent discussing how big companies now need to advertise not only to humans but to their AI agents, which will buy things on behalf of the person who deployed them. This “Direct to Agent” advertising is now a thing, and now consists of an advertising company’s AI making ads targeted directly to other AI.
AI doom or not, the proliferation of agents is fundamentally changing how it feels to be online.
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