Two key members of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff have tested positive for the coronavirus, less than a month after an outbreak of political staff from a superspreader event at the White House held September 26th, NBC News reports.

Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, reportedly began a quarantine after testing positive Saturday.  Pence’s senior political adviser, Marty Obst, also reportedly tested positive Saturday.  The Pence campaign and White House staff are said to be cooperating with contact tracers.

Pence and his wife Mother reportedly tested negative for the coronavirus.

Stood in rain for hour to early vote today. When I got home I filled in my stack of mail-in ballots and then voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me! #Trump2020 pic.twitter.com/n1tYx4JRue

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 24, 2020

Just one day after France topped one million coronavirus cases, the South American nation of Colombia became the eight nation to report one million confirmed cases during the pandemic, the Associated Press reports.

Colombia becomes the third South American nation to top the one million case mark, after Brazil and Argentina.

A plane towing a banner warned a crowd assembling for a rally in Wisconsin for incumbent republican presidential candidate of a “superspreader” outbreak prior to Trump’s arrival at the site, WKOW ABC-27 News reported.

“WARNING:  Superspreader Trump visiting WI.  Mask up!” the message says, encouraging people to take public health recommendations seriously.

The banner harkens to the September 26th White House event Trump hosted at the Rose Garden to introduce his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, after which no fewer than a dozen people tested positive for coronavirus.

Mother Jones: “Trump’s actions to undermine fair elections in order to hold onto power — sabotaging the Post Office, undermining mail voting, encouraging his ‘army’ of poll watchers to challenge Democrats at the polls, refusing to commit to accepting the election results if he loses or to a peaceful transfer of power—may be part of the reason Democrats are casting their ballots early in historic numbers. ‘We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can,’ Michelle Obama urged in her Democratic National Committee speech. ‘We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they’re received. And then make sure our friends and families do the same.'”

“Fifty-one million Americans have already voted, exceeding the total number of early votes cast in 2016, and Democrats have returned nearly twice as many ballots as Republicans in the 19 states that release voting data by party, according to Michael McDonald of the University of Florida. A quarter of ballots have been cast by people who didn’t vote in 2016, and these voters lean Democratic by 16 points, according to Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. ‘The surge of new voters is benefitting Democrats by fairly large margins,’ Bonier says.”

Politico: “In the final days of the 2020 race, MAGA world is trying to conjure up the same event that helped them in the home stretch of 2016 — an out-of-left-field FBI investigation into their opponent. The ingredients are all the same: a seized laptop, leaked emails, insinuations and vague allegations of malfeasance, a hype machine of ardent Trump supporters.”

“The difference, however, is that this time an FBI investigation is not supplying the ingredients. Instead, MAGA adherents are sourcing the ingredients and hoping they summon an FBI investigation. And, of course, the new target is Joe Biden, not Hillary Clinton. And the MAGA base is amping up the pressure on the authorities to investigate. Fox News and One America News Network hosts have dedicated entire segments breaking down the contents of Hunter’s purported emails. Further afield on the internet, conspiracy theorists are tying Hunter Biden to pizzagate-level plots. Trump himself is tweeting loudly about the issue, openly imploring Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Bidens and bringing up the issue whenever possible — at Thursday night’s debate, he even veered from a discussion about race to the ‘laptop from hell,’ with little explanation. So far, though, it hasn’t amounted to the dramatic moment that fueled Trump in 2016.”

Shocker: NYT writes a puff piece on Pete’s book.

Am sure it kills the NYT that my new SCOTUS book has sold a LOT more copies & has been on their Bestseller List 3 wks in a row….

You can watch Tiger King AND read my book!

Annoy a liberal, BUY it here: https://t.co/qts9gyKX1A pic.twitter.com/DGOmIHrKsX

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 24, 2020

“More than 6.8 million people have cast their vote in Texas, including the first 11 days of early voting, according to data posted on the Texas Secretary of State website Saturday morning. On Friday, 450,533 people voted in person, bringing the total in-person votes to 6,040,431. Cumulative ballots-by-mail so far this cycle were 816,828. Comparing early voting data from 2016 can be complicated for multiple reasons, in addition to the pandemic. Texas has three weeks of in-person early voting this cycle compared to two weeks in 2016. The state is also tracking early voting data from all 254 counties this cycle, but it only collected data from the top 15 most populous counties in 2016. Still, when looking at the data from the first 11 days of early voting in the top five most populous counties in both cycles, turnout has increased by 360,989, an increase of about 14%. It’s worth noting that those counties represent 42% of all registered voters” – CNN.

New York Times: “President Trump privately told donors this past week that it will be ‘very tough’ for Republicans to keep control of the Senate in the upcoming election because some of the party’s senators are candidates he cannot support. ‘I think the Senate is tough actually. The Senate is very tough,’ Trump said at a fundraiser Thursday at the Nashville Marriott, according to an attendee. ‘There are a couple senators I can’t really get involved in. I just can’t do it. You lose your soul if you do. I can’t help some of them. I don’t want to help some of them.'”

“The attendee shared the president’s words on the condition of anonymity as the event was a closed-door gathering. It was held before the last presidential debate between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden. The president — in a sentiment not shared by many of his party’s top officials and strategists — said he instead thinks the Republicans ‘are going to take back the House.’ And many strategists involved in Senate races say the party’s chances at keeping the chamber are undermined by the president’s unscripted, divisive rhetoric and his low poll numbers in key states.”

Product description, annotated: “Finally [really?] you’ll become a pro day trader [There are pros at day trading?] and start making good living [LOL] trading stocks from home! This course is designed to provide you with all the charting tools [You dumb fuck], trading strategies, and profitable hacks [Oooh hacks!] you’ll ever need to kick off your day trading career [They actually fucking call it a “career”]. In this course, you’ll master [bate] how to use technical analysis [whoever’s buying this piece of shit already bought it since it’s on Hannity’s website, no need to continue] the right way so you can easily make a good profit from your trade by just buying low and selling high. You’ll also master how to trade over 16+ profitable chart patterns along with the best performing indicators that will help you identify potential trend reversals as easy as counting 1, 2, 3 [That easy huh?]”

A Ukrainian associate of Trump attorney and Nosferatu cosplayer Rudy Giuliani told Politico that Giuliani was first informed of compromising information in May 2019 by a different Ukrainian contact seeking help to avoid legal action by the US Justice Department.

The claim throws additional doubt on the provenance of the laptop that mysteriously appeared at a Delaware computer repair shop and clouds the timeline Giuliani has outlined about his involvement of the information supposedly found on the laptop.

AP: “The one thing most likely to conjure nightmares of the 2016 election night for opponents of President Donald Trump is the Needle. A graphic on The New York Times’ website, the Needle measured in real time the probability of victory for Trump or Hillary Clinton as votes were counted. Its steady movement triggered anxiety for Clinton supporters, who repeatedly refreshed the page, and elation for Trump fans.”

“The Needle won’t be making a reappearance on Nov. 3, one change in the world of election probability gurus following the unexpected 2016 result. Nate Silver’s influential FiveThirtyEight blog used a number, not a needle, for the same task four years ago but won’t on election night 2020. Silver said the change had more to do with uncertainties created by the high volume of early voting this year than any failures in 2016. ‘I just think people need to be exceptionally careful,’ he said. Silver has been a pioneer in the specialized field of statistic experts who crunch the growing number of public opinion polls to put them in a broader context. Nate Cohn of the Times and his blog The Upshot, is also a leader. They amplified the shock of 2016 by predicting a high probability of a Clinton victory. Cohn went into election night saying Clinton had an 85% chance of winning, and that served as the Needle’s baseline. The graphic was a meter, shaped like a half-clock, with outcomes that ranged from a ‘very likely’ Clinton win to the same for Trump.”

Debate Poll Average: 89% Trump. 11% Sleepy Joe Biden!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2020

“The desire to fight a ‘culture war’ is the preserve of a small group on the political extremes that does not represent most British voters, according to a major new project on political polarisation in the UK. A disproportionate amount of political comment on social media is generated by small, politically driven groups, according to the analysis. It found that there was actually widespread agreement in the UK over topics such as gender equality and climate change – often seen as culture war issues” reports The Guardian.

“The findings come from a study that attempted to map the mood of the country before and during the Covid-19 pandemic by the More in Common think tank founded after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox. Based on a 10,000-strong political polling panel, academic interviews and focus groups over an 18-month period, the report split British voters into seven distinct “tribes”, based on their core beliefs. It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. The two ‘tribes’ most oriented towards politics, labelled ‘progressive activists’ and ‘backbone Conservatives’, were least likely to agree with the need for compromise. However, two-thirds of respondents who identify with either the centre, centre-left or centre-right strongly prefer compromise over conflict, by a margin of three to one.”

New York Times: “With election day looming, Nikolai Loktev was in a panic: The mayor of a tiny village of log houses, wood-burning stoves and rutted dirt roads 300 miles east of Moscow, he was running for re-election unopposed. In a Western democracy, this would not necessarily set off alarms; it might even be welcomed. But in Russia, where elections are rigged and the ruling United Russia party virtually always wins, the bedrock political principle is to create the illusion of democratic choice. For that, Mr. Loktev needed an opponent.”

“But it was proving difficult to find one in the village. He had already asked a number of Povalikhino’s residents, including his assistant at city hall and a member of the Communist Party who had run and lost in elections in 2011, but both declined. When he finally found who he thought was a willing patsy in the person of one Marina Udgodskaya, who cleans city hall, he thought his troubles were over. But then she won.”

The Fake News is talking about CASES, CASES, CASES. This includes many low risk people. Media is doing everything possible to create fear prior to November 3rd. The Cases are up because TESTING is way up, by far the most, and best, in the world. Mortality rate is DOWN 85% plus!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2020

Jonathan Chait: “The 2020 election is the first presidential contest since perhaps 1864 in which the principal question is democracy itself. The reelection of Donald Trump, unlikely but terrifyingly possible, would hasten America’s evolution into an oligarchy along the lines of Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, whose illiberal leaders Trump admires and who are, in some cases, working to help him secure a second term.”

“School civics lessons have boiled democratic values down to inoffensive mush that we associate with clichés expressing supposedly universal values (‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’). But democracy is a radical concept, especially in a society as unequal as ours. The tension between an economic system in which power is concentrated in a few hands and a political system in which power is distributed equally places special stress on the political forces aligned with the rich. In Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt traces the origins of democratic government in Western Europe, arguing that choices made by the right have an outsize role in the success or failure of a fledgling democracy. States where the aristocratic elite accepted majority rule had peaceful and stable transitions (the para-digmatic case is Great Britain). States whose aristocratic elite resisted democratic intrusions emerged fitfully or violently (the paradigmatic case being Germany). The Republican Party appears to be a special and troubling case, in which the historical pattern has been thrown into reverse. In its original form, the GOP was a radical anti-slavery party, but it abandoned its progressive impulses and has evolved into a wildly reactionary and increasingly authoritarian formation.”

“President Donald Trump’s top advisers have plunged into a bitter round of finger-pointing and blame-shifting ahead of an increasingly likely defeat. Accusations are flying in all directions and about all manner of topics – from allegedly questionable spending decisions by former campaign manager Brad Parscale, to how White House chief of staff Mark Meadows handled Trump’s hospitalization for Covid-19, to skepticism that TV ads have broken through. Interviews with nearly a dozen Trump aides, campaign advisers and Republican officials also surfaced accusations that the president didn’t take fundraising seriously enough and that the campaign undermined its effort to win over seniors by casting Democrat Joe Biden as senile.”

“Finger-pointing is a common feature of campaigns that think they’re losing, but it’s happening at an uncommon level in this campaign. Shifting responsibility has been a staple of the Trump presidency — and his lieutenants are now following suit. Top Trump advisers insist they remain confident, with campaign manager Bill Stepien saying privately the president still has a path to victory. On Friday, Trump’s team boasted about his improved debate performance, and said the president had zeroed in on a clear line of attack for the final week: That during his five decades in Washington, Biden had failed to fulfill the promises he’s now making. But senior Republicans say a culture of paranoia has developed in the waning days of the race, with fears mounting that they will be the targets of post-election attacks if Trump loses, which could damage their careers going forward” – Politico.