“By a 5–3 vote, the Supreme Court REJECTS an effort to shorten North Carolina’s mail ballot deadline from nine to three days. Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas dissent” – Mark Joseph Stern.

Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers stated that the state is facing an “urgent crisis” due to a spike in coronavirus cases as hospitals’ ICU beds are close to filling, CBS News reports.

Currently, more than 10,000 people are hospitalized in the state with coronavirus-related conditions, and the state’s ICU beds are at 86% capacity.  Wisconsin is reporting 5,000 confirmed cases daily.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it—we are facing an urgent crisis and there is an imminent risk to you, your family members, your friends, your neighbors, and the people you care about,” Evers tweeted.

Incumbent republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, who was identified as being around coronavirus patients last week, is scheduled to hold a campaign rally in the state Wednesday night.  Trump campaign rallies do not enforce local mask regulations, social distancing guidelines or crowd limits.

The governor’s race is tied at 46 each for Dem Mike Cooney and Bodyslam guy. Read more here.

The Vermont Secretary of State has sent a letter to the Clerk of the Supreme Court requesting a correction to the opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in this week’s Wisconsin voting case.

We have formally requested that #SCOTUS correct the erroneous claim by Justice Kavanaugh that #VT has not changed voting procedures for the #2020Elections due to #COVID19. When it comes to issuing decisions on the voting rights of American citizens, facts matter. pic.twitter.com/cWvAJTuIEl

— Vermont Secretary of State’s Office (@VermontSOS) October 28, 2020

Kavanaugh had incorrectly stated in supporting limiting voting rights in Wisconsin that Vermont has made no “changes to their ordinary election rules.”  Kavanaugh used the state as justification for not extending the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Unable to find other examples, Kavanaugh apparently believed that Vermont was the only state to maintain previous election rules.

Hurricane Zeta, a Category 2 storm with winds estimated at 110 m.p.h., reached landfall Wednesday evening at 4 p.m. CT near Cocodrie, Louisiana, according to the Associated Press.  Zeta is the 28th named storm of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season.

Zeta will be the fifth storm this season to make landfall in Louisiana.  Although New Orleans has been spared much of the impact of the previous storms, Zeta is forecast to strike the city hard overnight.

The 2020 hurricane season is the second-most active on record, following the 2005 season when 31 named storms were formed in the Atlantic.

“The Supreme Court will not expedite a Republican request to stop an extended deadline in Pennsylvania for receiving mail-in ballots. The decision was 5-3. Justice Barrett did not participate in the case” – MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin via Twitter.

Read BuzzFeed’s epic piece on Herman Cain’s last days and legacy here. It talks a lot about how his 2012 run for the GOP presidential nomination – along with those of Sarah Palin and Ron Paul – as a clownish populist right winger presaged the rise of Trump.

WCVB Boston: “Hillary Clinton said Tuesday she is one of the 538 electors in the Electoral College. ‘I’m an elector in New York,’ the 2016 Democratic nominee told SiriusXM’s ‘Signal Boost.’ ‘I’m sure I’ll get to vote for Joe (Biden) and (Sen. Kamala Harris) in New York. So, that’s pretty exciting.’ New York has 29 electors, and 270 electoral votes are needed to capture the presidency. Clinton has previously called for the abolition of the Electoral College, where electors directly vote on the president and vice president of the United States.”

CNN: “Barack Obama held back his most biting critiques of President Donald Trump in the first years of his post-presidency, hoping the lack of constant attacks would make his voice even more powerful at a time he thought it was most needed. That time, Obama believes, is now. The former president, according to people close to him, sees his years of holding back on Trump as key to his ability to forcefully attack his successor on behalf of Joe Biden, his former running mate and the man running to unseat a President who has made sullying Obama’s legacy central to his political rise.”

“Obama is now joyfully castigating Trump on behalf of Biden, both laying out his policy differences with his successor and leveling biting indictments of some of Trump’s personal obsessions. Obama is paying close attention to Trump’s day-to-day actions and has begun to work those critiques into his speeches, needling the President for issues that Democrats know annoy him. And it is apparent to anyone watching that Obama is enjoying the cathartic release. ‘Can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for reelection?’ Obama jokingly asked, citing a New York Times report about a previously undisclosed bank account Trump holds in China. ‘They would’ve called me Beijing Barry.’ That strategy will continue this weekend, when Obama joins Biden on the campaign trail in the key state of Michigan on Saturday.”

CNN: “With the race for the presidency approaching its end amid a raging pandemic, Democratic nominee Joe Biden maintains a substantial lead over President Donald Trump nationwide, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS. Among likely voters, 54% back Biden and 42% Trump. Biden has held a lead in every CNN poll on the matchup since 2019, and he has held a statistically significant advantage in every high-quality national poll since the spring. Although the election will ultimately be decided by the Electoral College, Biden’s lead nationally is wider than any presidential candidate has held in more than two decades in the final days of the campaign.”

“More than two years ago, I published an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times about Donald Trump’s perilous presidency, while I was serving under him. He responded with a short but telling tweet: ‘TREASON?’ Trump sees personal criticism as subversive. I take a different view. We do not owe the President our silence. We owe him and the American people the truth.”

“Make no mistake: I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to succeed. That’s why I came into the Administration with John Kelly, and it’s why I stayed on as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. But too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives. I witnessed Trump’s inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years. Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals” – Former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor’s self-serving bullshit blog post on Medium.

Long and dumb story short, a guy who already spoke out against Trump publicly has revealed himself to also be the guy who spoke out against Trump anonymously.

“Police in Catalonia, Spain today launched Operation Volhov, to take down the support infrastructure for Carles Puigdemont, the independence leader now in exile in Belgium. The judge has pointed out that Putin offered Puigdemont 10,000 soldiers and to pay off Catalan debt… Putin offered to put 10,000 soldiers at Puigdemont’s disposal to help gain independence and to pay off Catalan debt. Officials have recordings of these offers (which they obtained during a secret investigation). Russia also offered to help with a disinformation and destabilization operation, aimed at creating the perception that the EU was weak and at risk of collapse.”

“Judge points out that the disinformation campaign that swirled around the independence referendum in Catalonia was coordinated with Assange and Russian outlets like Sputnik and RT. One of the men arrested today visited Assange at the Ecuador Embassy in London. Victor Terradellas, according to the judge, was the main go between for Puigdemont and Russia in the run up to the independence referendum. Those arrested are being charged with embezzlement, money laundering, influence peddling, and more” – Politico writer and former CIA officer Alex Finley describing a report in a Spanish newspaper on a police crackdown on Catalan separatists.

Jonathan Chait: “The right-wing intelligentsia has formed three broad categories of response to Trump. The most enthusiastic, on the right, have defended the president unreservedly. The most disgusted (‘Never Trumpers’) have denounced him and often his enablers as well. In the broad middle of conservatism is a third category of conservative I have in mind here. These are the conservatives who will occasionally acknowledge Trump’s flaws even while supporting him broadly. They will ruefully and sarcastically bemoan his childishness, egotism, and self-destructive habits without ever urging a course of action that might stop him (Democratic control of Congress, enforcement of congressional oversight, impeachment, voting for Joe Biden).”

“These conservatives have spent the last four years mostly directing their energies attacking Trump’s opponents or dissecting the flaws in the arguments against him. They are most comfortable discussing something else. Usually, that something else is the excesses of the cultural left. If you read National Review, or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, you find them filled with ghastly tales of obnoxious progressives unfairly calling something racist or sexist. I happen to believe that the use of witch-hunt tactics on the left is a problem — not as important a problem as racism, but a problem, and have made this point repeatedly. Conservatives clearly (almost by definition) consider the left’s response to racism worse than racism itself. But even conservatives who take this position acknowledge that racism is bad. Or, at least, they acknowledge it in the abstract. Trump’s emergence onto the national scene has complicated matters for them. Their position requires dismissing racism as a vestigial prejudice whose once-doleful influence has waned to the point of irrelevance. Trump’s insistence on reminding people that racism and sexism remain alive and well makes a mockery of their pat dismissal.”

Germany will shut down non-essential businesses starting next Monday as the country has seen a 500% increase in new daily coronavirus cases over the last month, Reuters reports.

Private gatherings will be limited to ten people, and only two households will be allowed to gather.  Restaurants, bars, theaters, cinemas, pools and gyms will be shut.  Concerts will be canceled, and sporting events must be held without spectators.

Schools and day-care centers will remain open, and shops can stay open as long as they implement social distancing and masking regulations.

The German government has passed emergency funding that can provide small companies, those with 50 or fewer employees, up to 75% of their revenue if they must shut down.  The measure sets aside 10 billion euro to fund the companies.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “Four months before Legal Marijuana Now Party candidate Adam Weeks died in September, sending the pivotal Second Congressional District race into a legal tailspin, he told a close friend that he had been recruited by Republicans to draw votes away from Democrats. In a May 20 voicemail message provided to the Star Tribune, Weeks told a longtime friend that Republicans in the Second District approached him two weeks before the filing deadline to run for Congress in the hopes he’d ‘pull votes away’ from incumbent DFL Rep. Angie Craig and give an advantage to the ‘other guy,’ Tyler Kistner, the Republican-endorsed candidate.”

“The recording, underscoring the intense battle in one of the state’s most competitive elections, has come to light just as the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner’s Office listed Weeks’ death as a result of substance abuse, caused by ethanol and fentanyl toxicity. The death was ruled as accidental. The message, left on the answering machine of his friend Joey Hudson, indicated that Weeks planned to meet with some GOP operatives in May, but he did not identify them other than as ‘CD2 [Second Congressional District] Republicans.’ The Craig and Kistner campaigns declined to comment on the recording. Second District Republican Chairman Jeff Schuette said no one in his organization met with Weeks about running in the race but other conservatives in the district could have recruited him.”

CNN: “President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner boasted in mid-April about how the President had cut out the doctors and scientists advising him on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, comments that came as more than 40,000 Americans already had died from the virus, which was ravaging New York City. In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was ‘getting the country back from the doctors’ in what he called a ‘negotiated settlement.’ Kushner also proclaimed that the US was moving swiftly through the ‘panic phase’ and ‘pain phase’ of the pandemic and that the country was at the ‘beginning of the comeback phase.’ ‘That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work,’ Kushner said. ‘Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.'”