Kansas.com: “A Wichita man has been arrested on suspicion of threatening to kidnap and kill Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple over frustrations with city’s mask ordinance, the mayor said Friday afternoon. Meredith Dowty, 59, was booked into Sedgwick County Jail at 6:05 p.m., Friday, booking reports show. Police confirmed he is the suspect and said he could face a charge of criminal threat. Whipple said he had been read a series of text messages received by another city official that asked about Whipple’s address and contained a detailed threat against his life.”

Georgia republican Senator David Perdue, in a fight for his political life in a tight race with Jon Ossoff, appealed to the ignorant base of Trump supporters by mocking the name of Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

New York Post: “A raw series of text messages show Joe Biden offering fatherly comfort as his son, Hunter, lamented from a rehab facility about being a ‘f–ked up addict who can’t be trusted’ and had damaged his dad’s political career. The intimate family exchange took place on February 24, 2019, two months before Joe launched his campaign for the White House. ‘Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love you. Dad,’ the elder Biden wrote at 6:57 a.m. Hunter responded with a lengthy diatribe about his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, and his father’s political advisers, and he also complained bitterly about a conversation with his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden.”

“‘For f–ks sake hallie for the first time [in] 17 days talks to me to say im an embarrassment. To MY family,’ Hunter wrote. He then admitted, ‘Well dad, the truth is as you and hallie point out — I am a f–ked up addict that cant be…Trusted relied upon nor defended.’ ‘If you don’t run ill never have a chance at redemption,’ he added. About three hours later, Joe sent Hunter an encouraging burst of short texts. ‘I’ll run but I need you. H is wrong. Only focus is recovery. Nothing else,’ he wrote. Joe also praised Hunter for raising his three daughters, Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy. ‘Your girls are so smart truly amazing. Very focused. Naomi very upset with K,’ he wrote. ‘When you can and feel like it call. Positive my text etc a target. Love.'”

Video taken by Twitter user Dan Moriarty.

NBC News: “Federal authorities in Utah announced a crackdown Friday on 21 white supremacist gang members and associates in the Salt Lake City area who allegedly distributed drugs or illegally possessed guns. The charges in 15 indictments unsealed Friday target Soldiers of Aryan Culture, Silent Aryan Warriors, and Noble Elect Thugs, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah said in a statement.”

“The U.S. Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force launched an investigation last year, concluding members of the gangs trafficked methamphetamine and firearms, according to the statement. Investigators said they purchased 1.65 pounds of meth and recovered 15 guns during the operation. ‘Many of the defendants have been involved in criminal conduct in Utah communities for many years,’ the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.”

Documents released from a Cambridge Analytica senior official disclose that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president illegally coordinated with one of the SuperPACs supporting Trump’s run for office, the Associated Press reports.

According to a complaint filed by the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, the Trump campaign, then led by Kellyanne Conway, coordinated with the Make America Number 1 SuperPAC to post advertising on social media using data Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained from Facebook. 

Washington Post: “A major Democratic group on Friday pulled its last remaining ads from Colorado’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, a sign that the party thinks its nominee has the crucial race in the bag. Senate Majority PAC said it will cancel $1.2 million in television ads and spend the money elsewhere as Democrats press a newly expanded Senate map, which Republicans on the run in GOP strongholds such as Alaska and South Carolina. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, 68, is challenging Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, 46, in Colorado, a state that has trended sharply to the left since President Donald Trump’s 2016 election. ‘We believe Gov. Hickenlooper is in good shape heading into the final stretch,’ Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Rachel Irwin said.”

“I’ve never seen hatred like we are seeing in our nation today. The mainstream media is so biased and will do whatever they can to attack or try to defeat President Donald J. Trump. There is never a positive story on the evening news about him, no matter how much good he does. He has done more for our country in four years than any president in my lifetime, but that doesn’t matter to agenda-driven media. I had hopes for fairness and balance in last night’s Town Hall meeting, but we saw a completely different side of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. She was rude, she interrupted, she talked over the President. This is the president of the United States, and there was no respect for the office. What has happened to our country and journalism? I pray for President Trump and other leaders who support life, religious freedom, and what we know as biblical values that are important to us. In the coming election, most importantly, I pray for God’s will to be done. Every follower of Jesus Christ needs to pray and to vote” – Rev. Franklin Graham via Facebook.

Washington Post: “The day began with news that the Trump administration had refused to grant California an emergency declaration that would make hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding available for areas devastated by the Creek Fire and five others. Federal officials said the most recent application did not meet the criteria for federal relief. But President Trump reversed the decision a few hours later after a direct appeal from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in a midday phone call. The declaration was approved, the hand-wringing over.”

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will take up a case that would allow President Trump to exclude undocumented immigrants from the Census counts that would determine the apportionment of House seats, the Washington Post reports.

The Trump plan would decrease Congressional representation for urban and minority areas as well as federal funding based on population, thus giving more power and funding to rural areas.

The Constitution calls for the decadal Census to make a count of the population, thereby providing for the allocation of representatives “according to their respective Numbers.”  The Trump Administration argues that that means only citizens, while since the beginning of the Republic, it has been decided on overall population.

Business Insider: “Dangerous conspiracies are nothing new in politics. In previous presidential-election campaigns, people like Sabal were largely consigned to the sidelines, ignored by their parties and left to spin their tales on street corners and in remote internet forums. This year, in an unprecedented shift that will likely have profound implications for the future of American politics, key leaders of the Republican Party have openly sought to amplify and encourage the ravings of Trump’s QAnon supporters, placing the party’s radical fringe front and center.”

“Only a few Republican politicians have avowedly aligned themselves with QAnon, and even they have distanced themselves from the movement after facing criticism. But by openly spreading QAnon lies — and by discreetly adopting messaging that aligns with adherents’ obsession with false claims of child sex-trafficking — GOP leaders and institutions, including Trump, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and multiple GOP congressional nominees, are harnessing the energy of a violent cult for their political advantage.”

The topics for the second and final presidential debate, scheduled for Thursday, October 22nd in Nashville, have been announced.  The debate will be moderated by NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker.

The topics will be discussed in 15-minute blocks, in a format similar to the first debate.  Topics are:

• • Fighting COVID-19
  • American Families
  • Race in America
  • Climate Change
  • National Security
  • Leadership

No other format changes have been announced, particularly regarding protections to prevent the spread of coronavirus among the candidates or potential audience members.

New York Times: “As the presidential election headed into the final stretch in late summer, counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania worried that a deluge of absentee ballot requests would swamp their printing capacity. So 16 of them contracted with Midwest Direct, a Cleveland mailing company. But when it came time to print and ship Ohio ballots early last week, it was Midwest Direct that was overwhelmed. Several Ohio counties that expected absentee ballots printed by the company to land in voters’ mailboxes are now scrambling to print them themselves or find a last-minute contingency plan less than three weeks before Election Day.”

“In Pennsylvania, for instance, nearly 30,000 ballots sent to voters in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, went to the wrong addresses. The counties had provided the company with lists of tens of thousands of requests weeks in advance. The company’s inability to meet demand has underscored the stress that mail voting has put on the nation’s election process as the coronavirus pandemic curtails in-person voting. Midwest Direct is the primary outside provider of absentee ballots for 16 Ohio counties, though many also have their own in-house operations. Midwest Direct is owned by two brothers, Richard Gebbie, the chief executive, and James Gebbie, the chairman. This summer they began flying a Trump 2020 flag above Midwest Direct’s headquarters on the west side of Cleveland. It was a curious juxtaposition — a company in the business of distributing absentee ballots through the mail showing a preference for a president who has spent months denigrating the practice of voting by mail.”

“Faced with a consistent stream of polls showing U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner headed for a loss next month, national Republican groups are spending far less in Colorado than in other battleground states this fall. ‘There is no reason for either side to put another dime into this state. It’s over,’ said David Flaherty, a Republican pollster in Colorado who predicts ‘historic’ losses for his party Nov. 3.”

“‘It is undeniable. The train wreck and implosion of the president will bring a historic number of other Republican candidates down, and if you don’t believe that then you have your head in the sand,’ he added. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Gardner led two years ago, has spent $145,000 in Colorado in the first half of October, according to a Denver Post review of campaign finance filings through Wednesday. That is far less than in the other five states the NRSC has focused on: Iowa ($3.2 million), Michigan ($3.2 million), Montana ($2.2 million), Maine ($2.2 million) and Arizona ($1.7 million)” – Denver Post.

CNN: “Joe Biden’s town hall on ABC averaged 13.9 million viewers on Thursday night, easily surpassing the Nielsen ratings for President Trump’s town hall on NBC. That alone was a result virtually no one in the TV business expected. And that’s not even the most surprising part. The Trump town hall was simulcast by two of NBC’s cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, but even when those channels are included in the total, Biden — on only one network — still prevailed. The Trump town hall averaged 10.6 million viewers on the NBC broadcast network. On MSNBC, Trump reached 1.74 million viewers, and on CNBC, about 671,000 viewers. So Trump’s gross audience across the three channels was 13 million, about one million fewer than Biden’s audience on ABC alone.”

The Johns Hopkins COVID tracker data aggregator shows that the United States topped eight million confirmed coronavirus cases Friday afternoon.

The US has the most confirmed coronavirus cases and the most fatalities due to the virus in the world.

On February 26th, when the United States had just 16 confirmed cases, President Trump declared that the US would be “close to zero” cases “in just a few days.”  He missed it by *that* much.