🚨🚨🚨 OMG TUCKER IS GOING TO BE LIT AF TOMORROW. BOBULINSKI IS GOING TO PLAY RECORDINGS!!!

CANT WAIT FOR THE MEDIA TO NOT COVER THAT AND DESTROY WHATS LITTLE IS LEFT OF THEIR CREDIBILITY FOREVER!!! https://t.co/ewXYYrQIz4

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 26, 2020

Biden leads Trump 45 to 36 among independents. 7% of those who voted/will vote for Biden voted for Trump in 2016, while 3% of 2020 Trump voters voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Read more here.

ABC News: “A man was charged with setting a Boston ballot drop box on fire and damaging dozens of ballots, police said Monday. Worldy Armand, a 39-year-old Boston resident, was taken into custody late Sunday, hours after he started a fire inside a drop box outside the Boston Public Library in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood, authorities said. The box contained more than 120 ballots. Armand faces a charge of willful and malicious burning, police said. It was not immediately clear whether he has an attorney to speak for him. The FBI had said Sunday that it’s investigating.”

“Federal authorities urged members of the public to ‘remain vigilant and immediately report any suspicious, election-related activity.’ Massachusetts’ elections chief said he has directed local officials to boost security at drop boxes with guards and video surveillance, and to empty the boxes frequently. Armand was arrested after drug control unit officers on patrol saw a man who matched the description of the suspect authorities were looking for in the ballot box fire, police said. Police said he also had an active warrant for receiving stolen property.”

Picture an alternate history of the last two years where the National Popular Vote Compact was passed by enough states to reach 270 votes (and it withstood legal challenges). Suddenly this workaround means that every vote in every state does really count as much toward the outcome of the presidential election as votes in Florida and Pennsylvania will this year.

Now imagine Wyoming, a state with singular Republican party control over everything – the electoral commissions, ballot access, etc. In our universe, someone casting a ballot for Joe Biden in Wyoming isn’t the same as a ballot cast for Joe Biden in Georgia, where Brian Kemp’s goons will throw it in the shredder if the voter so much as sneezed on it. In Wyoming they more likely than not just don’t give a shit. But what if we’re in the Popular Vote universe? Are they really going to simply blithely count every Dem ballot that comes in the same way they did in 2016?

“In the state of Florida, former Vice President Joe Biden maintains a narrow two-point lead over President Trump. The latest PoliticalIQ.com poll there shows little change from two weeks earlier. The survey, conducted by Scott Rasmussen, shows that 1% plan to vote for some other candidate and another 1% are not sure” – PoliticalIQ.com

New York Times: “President Trump maintains a narrow lead in Texas, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll on Monday, as he faces a rebellion in the state’s once overwhelmingly Republican suburbs but survives with support from an unlikely ally, Hispanic voters. Over all, Mr. Trump leads Joe Biden, 47 percent to 43 percent, among likely voters. The majority of interviews were conducted before the final presidential debate on Thursday. In the Senate race, the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, holds a larger lead, 48-38, over the Democrat, M.J. Hegar.”

The republican Senate candidate from Minnesota, Jason Lewis, was rushed to the hospital for a emergency surgery due to a severe hernia in his abdomen, according to the Associated Press.

His campaign said that Lewis, a 65-year-old one-term Congressman and former talk show host, experienced severe pain in his abdomen Monday morning and was taken to the hospital, where he was rushed into surgery.

“Prior to being taken to the operating room, Jason was in good spirits, optimistic, and true to form, he was speculating about when he could resume campaigning, eager to continue fighting for his fellow Minnesotans,” campaign manager Tom Szymanski said.

The top advisor of the federal panel responsible for overseeing the pay and status of federal employees has resigned from the post in protest of President Trump stripping civil servant status from hundreds of thousands of federal workers, Politico reports.

An executive order Trump signed on Friday required federal agencies to place all employees in “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” that are “not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition” into a newly-created “Category F” which would put their jobs at the discretion of the president or any presidential appointee.

“[I]t is clear that its stated purpose notwithstanding, the Executive Order is nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process,” Federal Salary Council Chair Ron Sanders, a Trump appointee, wrote in his resignation letter.

Washington Post: “There is water on the moon’s surface and ice may be widespread in its many shadows, according to a pair of studies published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research confirms long-standing theories about the existence of lunar water that could someday enable astronauts to live there for extended periods.”

“One scientific team found the telltale sign of water molecules, perhaps bound up in glass, in a sunlit region. Another group estimated the widespread prevalence of tiny shadowed pockmarks on the lunar landscape, possible shelter for water ice over an area of 15,000 square miles. Moon water has been eyed as a potential resource by NASA, which created a program named Artemis in 2019, to send American astronauts back to the moon this decade. Launching water to space costs thousands of dollars per gallon. Future explorers may be able to use lunar water not only to quench their own thirst but to refuel their rockets.”

The president of the scientific council that advises the French government on the virus, Dr. Jean-François Delfraissy, has said that the nation the coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the country, spurring outbreaks in major cities around France, the Associated Press reports.

The statement echoes a similar statement by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who said yesterday, “We are not going to control the pandemic,” effectively announcing the Trump Administration’s surrender.

France passed one million confirmed cases last week, with the government declaring a state of emergency and reimplementing public health guidelines throughout the country and strict regulations in eight major metropolitan areas.

Rebecca Traister: “Through one lens, the shock of the past few years has been a right wing getting ever less apologetic about its commitment to authoritarian, anti-democratic minority rule. Trump and his party have surely broken some long-standing American norms and institutions, let others corrode, and encouraged the ones that were left to function as they were built to: keeping power in the hands of the few. But through another lens, what has actually undergone a startling change has been America’s people, their thinking about the Republic, and, in some cases, their places and responsibilities within it. Some significant portion of the population has been roused to protest, or at least awareness, at a scale that has been seen rarely in our past and that has historically had the power to bring social and political change so eruptive and transformative that those in power will do anything to quell it.”

“We have been encouraged to see the Trump years as a period of right-wing radicalization. But it’s hard to discount those who began in the moderate or merely apathetic center who have now considered, and in some cases strongly support, policies including the Green New Deal and Medicare for All; they have read, in mainstream publications, arguments for abolishing the police and prisons. So many Americans who had never before engaged actively — learning about, participating — in civic and political life and movements to expand liberty and justice have now done so. And, with all that, a shift toward the left (or something like it) and some recognition that we are tasked with acting on behalf of our own civil rights and liberties, are responsible for saving our democracy ourselves. We are wide awake now.”

Have they found the Monolith?  Is it really made of green cheese?  Did they find the remnants of the secret Nazi base?

NASA will hold a press conference Monday at noon to announce an “exciting new discovery” about the moon, which you can watch on the live stream above.

“This new discovery contributes to NASA’s efforts to learn about the moon in support of deep space exploration,” the agency’s statement says. “Understanding the science of the moon also helps piece together the broader history of the inner solar system.”

The superintendent of the Virginia Military Academy has resigned after stories of ongoing racism at the institution arose, with students and alumni detailing episodes that got little or no discipline from the administration, the Washington Post reports.

The 80-year old superintendent, J.H. Binford Peay III, a retired four-star Army general, tendered his resignation Monday from the 181-year-old military institution.

In a story published last Sunday, the Washington Post detailed ongoing episodes of racism at the university, which values its Confederate roots and the heroism of alumni who fought to preserve slavery in secessionist states.

“The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study. In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.”

“The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump. By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy. The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise. Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been ‘certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy'” – The Guardian.

Harry Enten: “The clock is running out on President Donald Trump’s chances for a comeback. He continues to trail former Vice President Joe Biden nationally and in the key swing states with just eight days to go. But perhaps most worrisome for the President: Trump’s clearly behind his 2016 pace. By this point four years ago, he was rapidly closing the gap with Hillary Clinton. No such advancements can be seen in the 2020 polling against Biden. Right now, Biden is up by about 9 to 10 points nationally, depending on the average you examine. He is, importantly, over 50%. Biden’s edge may be down a point or so from early October, though it is well within the historical average from the beginning of the year.”

“The 2016 campaign, on the other hand, was in great flux at this time. Among a bunch of factors, the James Comey letter ‘investigating emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop that were potentially related to a probe of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server’ had just been published by this point in the 2016 campaign. No such bombshells of that magnitude have come out this year. Clinton’s advantage was down to only about 4 points in the national average 9 days from Election Day 2016. Her advantage had been as high as 7 points with about 21 days to go. Clinton’s 45% vote share was low enough that it left Trump with a lot of room in the final week of the campaign to corral voters who favored neither candidate at this point. All Biden really needs to do right now to win is hold onto the voters that he has.”

First, Fox “News” turned down the “Hunter Biden laptop is full of kompromat” story.  Then the Wall Street Journal said it was a great big bunch of nuthin’.

Now add Russian President Vladimir Putin to the list of people who fail to see any scandal in Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son’s action, NBC News reports.

“Yes, in Ukraine he [Hunter Biden] had or maybe still has a business, I don’t know. It doesn’t concern us. It concerns the Americans and the Ukrainians,” said Putin.  “But well yes he had at least one company, which he practically headed up, and judging from everything he made good money. I don’t see anything criminal about this, at least we don’t know anything about this [being criminal].”

The Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the Election. Losers!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2020

Cases up because we TEST, TEST, TEST. A Fake News Media Conspiracy. Many young people who heal very fast. 99.9%. Corrupt Media conspiracy at all time high. On November 4th., topic will totally change. VOTE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2020

Axios: “President Trump has not laid out an economic agenda for his second term, despite the election being just eight days away. This is unprecedented in modern presidential campaigns, and makes it harder for undecided voters to make an informed choice. Trump’s campaign website doesn’t include a section on forward-looking policies, including the economy. Instead, it only lists first-term accomplishments. Trump’s 2016 campaign website had a ‘positions’ section that included economic priorities like boosting GDP to 3.5% per year and a ‘penny plan’ to reduce annual spending. He also made several speeches focused on the economy.”

We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores. https://t.co/1qqpgayUEX

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 25, 2019

“The FBI has failed to produce a legally required report detailing the scope of white supremacist and other domestic terrorism, despite mounting concerns that the upcoming election could spark far-right violence. According to a key House committee chairman, that leaves the country in the dark about what the FBI concedes is America’s most urgent terrorist threat, as well as the resources the U.S. government is devoting to fight it. In June, the bureau was supposed to release a report compiling a wealth of currently unavailable data on domestic terrorism, a category that includes white supremacist violence. The most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the FBI, in accord with Department of Homeland Security and consultation with the Office of Director of National Intelligence, specify not only known acts of domestic terrorism, but ‘ideologies relating to domestic terrorism,’ and what the FBI and its partners are doing to combat it all.”

“Yet the FBI is over four months late. While President Trump falsely portrays left-wing property damage as terrorism, suspicion is building that the FBI, whose director Christopher Wray is on the outs with Trump, will keep the public from seeing the scope of its premier terror threat before an election that may feature violence emerging from it. ‘I would hate to think that they are reacting to President Trump’s machinations about his dislike for senior leadership in the FBI,’ Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, told The Daily Beast. ‘This report probably would not be viewed favorably by this administration. That, I think, precipitates the report not being released by Nov. 3′” – Daily Beast.