A Long Island man who allegedly made explicit threats against Judge Emmet Sullivan, the jurist presiding over the Michael Flynn trial, was denied bail today and must remain in jail until his trial, Politico reports.

Frank Caporusso, 52, pleaded not guilty to threatening to assault or murder a federal judge in order to interfere with his official duties and one count of making an interstate threat.  The charges stem from a message Caporusso reported left on Sullivan’s office voicemail threatening the judge.

“You will not be safe,” the voicemail said. “A hot piece of lead will cut through your skull. You bastard. You will be killed, and I don’t give a fuck who you are. Back out of this bullshit before it’s too late, or we’ll start cutting down your staff.  This is not a threat. This is a promise.”

A woman has been knocking on people’s front doors in Chandler, Arizona asking if she could collect their mail-in ballots, claiming that she will mail them for the voter, AZFamily.com reports.

The unknown woman approaches the house and asks for the homeowner by name.  She asks if she can mail the resident’s ballot for them.  When the resident declines, she then asks who they voted for.

A city in Maricopa County, Chandler is a swing district in the state.  The precinct the woman was soliciting ballots voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections.

Voter history and addresses are typically publicly available, with campaigns using such voter registration information to coordinate door knocking efforts.  However, campaign officials must wear campaign identification badges.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe has announced that it is locking down its South Dakota reservation, blocking outsiders from entering the territory, due to the exploding number of coronavirus cases in the state, the Associated Press reports.

Since South Dakota hosted the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August, the state has experienced skyrocketing infection rates, with the 7-day running average for daily new cases jumping 800%.  Kristi Noem, the republican governor of the state, has refused to implement public health recommendations to curb the spread of the virus, citing liberty or freedom.

The tribe has reported nearly 400 active cases on the reservation, which is home to 20,000 people.  Non-essential business on the reservation were ordered closed, with only essential workers recommended to leave the reservation.

The state reported more than 900 new cases yesterday.

Trump leads Biden 49 to 43 in the state. Read more here.

A man from Forty Fort, Pennsylvania has been arrested on charges relating to forging his dead mother’s signature on a ballot application so he could submit an additional vote for incumbent republican nominee Donald Trump, the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reports.

Robert Richard Lynn, 67, has been charged with forgery and election interference for his scheme to get an election ballot for his mother, Marie P. Hannigan, who had died in May 2015.

Election officials flagged the application, which claimed Hannigan would be “visiting great grand kids Oct. 24-Nov. 10.”  The election office database had listed Hannigan as deceased since August 2015.  The database also listed Hannigan’s address in a different town, Dallas, Pennsylvania, approximately seven miles away.

“Actions such as those alleged here bring into question the integrity of our nation and cannot and will not be tolerated,” Luzerne County Manager C. David Pedri said. “As the nation is focused on northeastern Pennsylvania for this election, we are laser focused on having a fair election here in Luzerne County.”

The deliciousness is in the details. Enter for your chance to whiff at https://t.co/e5Mh3kGszI #breathablebacon pic.twitter.com/EuoDd6QNai

— Hormel Foods (@HormelFoods) October 22, 2020

“Trump spent months hammering “Sleepy Joe” or ‘Basement Biden,’ insinuating he was avoiding the campaign trail and the media because he couldn’t answer questions. Even many Democrats spent the summer wringing their hands about Biden’s low profile and what this suggested about his capabilities. The lynchpin of Trump’s strategy in both debates against Biden was to expose his supposed senility. In the first debate, he badgered and taunted his opponent in an effort to make him stammer and melt down. When that backfired on Trump, his strategists calculated they could produce the same effect by backing off. Their reasoning was that Trump’s constant interruptions rescued Biden from his own incoherence. If they allowed him to speak, he would disintegrate on his own.”

“It didn’t happen. Biden gave perfectly cogent responses to every question put to him, controlled his stammer, and displayed a far stronger command of facts and figures than his opponent. (To be sure, knowing more about politics than a man whose understanding comes almost entirely from Fox News is an extremely low bar.) Propaganda works through repetition. Trump invested almost the entire campaign driving a singular theme against Biden. Now the results of that work have just sunk below the surface without a trace” – Jonathan Chait.

Donald Trump has secured the support for his reelection from Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, the leader of Third First Lady Melania Trump’s home nation, the Washington Post reports.

We respect difficult, tragic personal life of @JoeBiden and some of his political achievements years ago. But today, if elected, he would be one of the weakest presidents in history. When a free world desperately needs STRONG #US as never before. Go, win, @realDonaldTrump 🇺🇸🇸🇮

— Janez Janša (@JJansaSDS) October 23, 2020

The tweeted endorsement adds to the list of right-wing national leaders who have endorsed Trump including Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

Trump’s lover, Kim Jong-un, has as yet abstained from issuing an endorsement.  Russian president Vladimir Putin has not publicly endorsed a Trump reelection, but he had directed Russian social media operations and hacking efforts to support Trump.

CBS News: “Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s former company landed a $5 million highway-shipping contract last month with the USPS. DeJoy continued to own a multimillion-dollar stake in XPO Logistics as of early October. The $5 million deal is the first regular contract for a postal route that XPO Logistics has signed with the USPS in more than a year. XPO’s last highway contract with the USPS was in December and it was temporary. The one before that was in signed in July 2019. XPO’s contract — to move mail for the next 18 months between Norfolk, Virginia, and Evansville, Indiana — has not been previously reported. The contract was negotiated in August and disclosed in mid-October as part of a quarterly update to a database of USPS suppliers.”

“With the election less than two weeks away, Donald Trump and Joe Biden participated in their final presidential debate tonight. A snap poll of 491 registered voters who watched tonight’s debate finds that 54% believe that Biden won tonight’s debate, while 35% believe that Trump won. Another 9% believe it was a tie between the two” – YouGov.

“As Election Day 2020 draws closer, the latest Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll finds former Vice President Joe Biden holding a 7-point lead (51%-44%) over President Donald Trump among likely Pennsylvania voters. Democrats hold a 6% lead among likely Pennsylvania voters in terms of congressional elections in the state, with 47% planning to vote for the Democrat candidate in their district, compared to 41% backing Republican candidates” – Muhlenberg College.

Lots of left leaning celebrities say shit like “If Trump wins I’m moving to Canada” like they did with Bush back in 2004. It’s a pretty stale cliche at this point, so I’m thinking there’s an untapped market for turning that around, and nudging the other side in a similar direction if Biden wins.

It’s time for us to spread the word to MAGA trolls and get them to start considering making an exciting change and putting roots down in the Conservative Paradise behind the former Iron Curtain. I mean, just look at these perks!

?? Many single women who don’t speak English.
?? Low cost of living
?? Cheap booze
?? Plentiful hunting opportunities
?? No “political correctness”
?? Nearly all-white population
?? High crime (fun for “good guys with guns”)
?? Powerful church/clergy
?? Rampant political corruption
?? No state-sponsored healthcare

Remember this URL too: mid.ru/en/migration_registration. That’s very important for showing our MAGA friends the door to a land of… well there’s not a lot of opportunity there. But it’s definitely conservative! They’ll be so much happier there than here in the “socialist nightmare” a Biden administration would turn the United States into. Right?

“President Donald Trump trails former Vice President Joe Biden by substantial margins in polls. COVID-19 cases have increased by more than 30 percent in the past two weeks. A second stimulus package is being threatened by his own party, and there are only a dozen days until the election that could make him only the second Republican incumbent in more than a century not to win a second term. It was in that context that Trump sought to change the conversation at the second and final presidential debate on Thursday night. But while he landed some rhetorical jabs, he also took as much he dished out—even on friendly territory like policing and China. And his inability to break out of the Fox News echo chamber that has engulfed his campaign seemed to prevent him from scoring the type of performance that would substantially shift the trajectory of the race.”

“Returning again and again to the latest thread in the vivid tapestry of conspiracy and innuendo about Biden’s surviving son, Trump was, at times, so caught in the lather of ultraconservative media that he seemed to lose sense of what polls show voters actually care about. In the most illustrative moment of the night, Trump concluded a lengthy diatribe about Hunter Biden and Russian mayors and secret slush funds paying for the former vice president’s retirement, only for Biden to turn to the camera and say: ‘This isn’t about his family or mine. It’s about yours'” – Daily Beast.

Politico: “Democrats have opened up a yawning gap in early voting over Republicans in six of the most crucial battleground states — but that only begins to tell the story of their advantage heading into Election Day. In a more worrisome sign for Republicans, Democrats are also turning out more low-frequency and newly registered voters than the GOP, according to internal data shared with POLITICO by Hawkfish, a new Democratic research firm, which was reviewed by Republicans and independent experts.”

“The turnout data does not mean Donald Trump will lose to Joe Biden. Both sides are bracing for a close race and a giant wave of Republicans to vote in person on Nov. 3. Yet the turnout disparity with new and less-reliable voters has forced Republican political operatives to take notice. ‘It’s a warning flare,’ said veteran Republican strategist Scott Reed. ‘Some Republicans are stuck in a model that we always run up the score on Election Day to make up the difference,’ Reed said. ‘I think running an election in a superpolarized electorate, you want to win early voting. Let’s go. Let’s stop talking and making excuses.'”

I’m going to call this The Melania Debate:  it’s the third debate, but nobody remembers that the second debate, The Marla, was canceled.  The first debate, The Ivana, will be remembered as the debate equivalent of a monkey on acid with a pitching machine filled with cow patties.

My takeaways:

• Celebrate the fact that we will never have to watch or listen to Trump on a debate stage again, regardless of the election outcome.
• The most damning moment happened early on:  Trump claimed “we’re living with the virus.”  Biden responded (paraphrasing), “We’re learning to live with it?!  C’mon!  We’re dying with it.”

Toni Blonicalewinsky, a former business or cocaine associate of Hunter Biden sat in the front row of the debate in Nashville tonight, invited as a special guest of President Trump. Bopaloobopbinky is supposedly very important because he knows a lot of stuff about how the mayor of China paid Biden $3.5 billion dollars for crack cocaine when Biden was still Vice President back in 2017, according to right wing sources who have read the Wall Street Journal article that was published on Tuesday or something.

Apparently however though this Wall Street Journal article about Troy Bubbledinky is not an article at all – it’s actually an opinion column – so that means the “facts” in it, including the laptop and the emails that were found at the repair shop in China owned by Burisma and emails are actually subjective statements by the writer and not, you know, actual facts.

What’s even more interesting is that the Tommy Buttkentucky guy wasn’t ever pointed to by President Trump during the debate. I don’t think the camera even showed his face. I’m struggling to understand why I should care about this guy when nobody can even explain clearly what his significance is. In conclusion, I don’t think we’ll be covering Timmy Bobafettsky any more here on National Zero. It’s all just way too difficult to spend any time or energy on.

Republicans love America!

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) October 23, 2020

The second and final debate will be streamed live here tonight on National Zero, with fact checks and reactions right here as the shitshow progresses.

(11:30 p.m. ET):  Asked what they would tell people who did not vote for him in his inaugural address, Trump said he would say we have to make our country successful again, like it was “before the plague came in from China.”  (He failed to not that his administration has lost 3.7 million jobs since taking office.)  Trump again went on with the story that people were calling him, including “people on the other side,” yet he can give no examples of how he leveraged that good will in the last nine months.  Trump then went on to give a different version of his American Carnage speech.

Biden said “I’m an American President.  I will represent all of you, whether you voted for me or against me, and I’m going to make sure you’re represented.  I’m going to give you hope.  We’re going to move.  We’re going to choose science over fiction.  We’re going to choose hope over fear.  We’re going to choose to move forward because we have enormous opportunities to make things better.  We can grow this economy.  We can deal with systemic racism.  At the same time, we can make sure our economy is being run and moved and motivated by clean energy, creating millions of new jobs.” 

Business Insider: “Jared Kushner has been talking up the idea of starting a Donald Trump-themed news outlet or some other media company, possibly as soon as after the election, five Republicans familiar with the discussions told Insider. Kushner has floated the idea to Republicans and media types throughout the year, according to three of the people. But the increased chatter about the rise of another conservative media outlet, possibly branded under the Trump name, has kicked up even more over the past few weeks as the president’s reelection chances continue to sink.”

“The timing so close to Election Day has Trump advisors wondering if Kushner himself is anticipating a defeat much like he and others did before the president’s upset White House win in 2016. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that Jared’s future is in building a media empire of some kind,’ one of the Republicans familiar with the nascent talks said. ‘He believes that controlling the media means controlling the policy, controlling the people.'”