AP: “A man described by U.S. prosecutors as a neo-Nazi and white supremacist pleaded guilty on Thursday to a hate crime for plotting to bomb a historic Colorado synagogue last year. Richard Holzer, 28, pleaded guilty to attempting to stop people from exercising their religion with an explosive or fire and attempting to destroy a building used in interstate commerce in a plea deal with prosecutors. While each of the two crimes carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, prosecutors in return promised not to ask a judge to impose a sentence of more than 20 years when Holzer is sentenced Jan. 21.”

“Holzer was arrested Nov. 1, 2019 after receiving phony pipe bombs and dynamite from undercover FBI agents he had been meeting with. One agent posing as a white supremacist had reached out to him online after seeing Holzer’s social media posts promoting white supremacy and violence, according to the facts agreed to by both sides as part of the plea deal.”

“Trump is belligerent when sick, just as he’s hostile when well. He sees plots when he’s dosed with dexamethasone and conspiracies when he’s gulping Diet Coke behind the Resolute desk. Days have passed since he apparently stopped taking the drug, and he sounds every bit as unmoored.”

“What’s been driving him in the final stretch of the campaign isn’t a medication that messes with his mood. It’s dread, people who’ve worked with him throughout the years told me. There are less than three weeks to go in a campaign that appears to be heading the wrong way. ‘He’s down and he’s likely to lose,’ a former White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk more freely, told me. ‘This is fear'” – The Atlantic.

AP: “The Trump White House has installed two political operatives at the nation’s top public health agency to try to control the information it releases about the coronavirus pandemic as the administration seeks to paint a positive outlook, sometimes at odds with the scientific evidence. The two appointees assigned to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters in June have no public health background. They have instead been tasked with keeping an eye on Dr. Robert Redfield, the agency director, as well as scientists, according to a half-dozen CDC and administration officials who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal government affairs.”

“The appointments were part of a push to get more ‘politicals’ into the CDC to help control messaging after a handful of leaks were ‘upsetting the apple cart,’ said an administration official. When the two appointees showed up in Atlanta, their roles were a mystery to senior CDC staff, the people said. They had not even been assigned offices. Eventually one, Nina Witkofsky, became acting chief of staff, an influential role as Redfield’s right hand. The other, her deputy Chester ‘Trey’ Moeller, also began sitting in on scientific meetings, the sources said.”

Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News https://t.co/JPmjOrKPcr via @TheBabylonBee Wow, this has never been done in history. This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this. Bringing more attention to Sleepy Joe & Big T

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2020

AP: “More than 17 million Americans have already cast ballots in the 2020 election, a record-shattering avalanche of early votes driven both by Democratic enthusiasm and a pandemic that has transformed the way the nation votes. The total represents 12% of the all votes cast in the 2016 presidential election, even as eight states are not yet reporting their totals and voters still have more than two weeks to cast ballots. Americans’ rush to vote is leading election experts to predict that a record 150 million votes may be cast and turnout rates could be higher than in any presidential election since 1908.”

“‘It’s crazy,’ said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who has long tracked voting for his site ElectProject.org. McDonald’s analysis shows roughly 10 times as many people have voted compared with this point in 2016. ‘We can be certain this will be a high-turnout election,’ McDonald said. So far the turnout has been lopsided, with Democrats outvoting Republicans 2-1 in the 42 states included in The Associated Press count.”

Midnight Sun: “The latest poll on the race for Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat gives Democrat-backed independent challenger Al Gross a one-point lead against Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan. Gross has the support of 47% of the 606 Alaska likely voters covered in the poll to Sullivan’s 46%, according to a polling memo released Harstad Strategic Research. The poll was conducted between Oct. 10 and Oct. 13 with a self-reported 4% margin of error and is the third such poll conducted by the firm. ‘This progress confirms Dr. Gross’ continuing momentum and steady climb in recent months to his first tiny lead over Sullivan,’ explained the memo by CEO Paul Harstad.”

“Deciding who gets to say what online is a complex business in the best of times, and the 2020 election is showing social media platforms just how messy it can get. Balancing concerns over misinformation, hacking and foreign meddling against free-speech principles is already hard enough. Tackling it in real time in the middle of a political knife fight is almost certainly going to go awry. Fast action Wednesday by Facebook and Twitter to limit the reach of a questionably sourced New York Post story about Hunter Biden showed the world what aggressive misinformation policing on social media platforms looks like — and much of the world didn’t like what it saw.”

“On the right, pundits cried ‘censorship’ while lawmakers demanded new in-person testimony from CEOs to defend their choices. On the left, observers worried about the ‘Streisand effect’ — the idea that trying to suppress or remove online information only draws attention to it” – Axios.

Daily Beast: “Weeks before the New York Post began publishing what it claimed were the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive, a Sept. 25 segment on a YouTube channel run by a Chinese dissident streamer, who is linked to billionaire and Steve Bannon-backer Guo Wengui, broadcast a bizarre conspiracy theory. According to the streamer, Chinese politburo officials had ‘sent three hard disks of evidence’ to the Justice Department and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi containing damaging information about Joe Biden as well as the origins of the coronavirus in a bid to undermine the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

“Three days later, a Twitter account linked to Guo and Bannon’s Himalaya movement subsequently amplified an edited clip of the segment alongside the pledge of a ‘Bombshell… 3 hard disk drives of videos and dossiers of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ. Big money and sex scandal!'”

President Trump hits final stretch with strength, resources, record & huge ground game needed to spread message and secure re-election.

Campaign, RNC & joint committees in September:

$247.8M raised
$251.4M cash on hand

POTUS has done more in 47 months than Biden in 47 years.

— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) October 16, 2020

Then Biden campaign meanwhile raised $383 million, meaning Trump got his ass kicked again.

After watching both the Trump and the Biden town halls Thursday night in their entireties, I really need to decompress with some general takeaways from the two events.  So here it goes:

• These two events were like night and day, 100% of which was caused by the two candidates.  It had absolutely nothing to do with the moderators or the questioners.  If Biden was facing Savannah Guthrie and Miamians, it would have been civil and informative.  If Trump was in Philly on stage with George Stephanopoulos, you’d still have a shit show worse than the one Trump had in Philly in mid-September.
• Trump’s debate coach is, by my estimation, Patches O’Houlihan from “Dodgeball.”  His entire strategy was dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge… adding deflect, deny and defile to the list.  Trump never directly answered a question.

NBC News: “Federal investigators are examining whether the emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News. The FBI seized the laptop and a hard drive through a grand jury subpoena. The subpoena was later published by the New York Post. The bureau has declined to comment.”

“The Post, a conservative tabloid, has published a series of stories based on emails the newspaper said it obtained from President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The first story highlighted what it called a ‘smoking gun email’ that suggested a meeting between Vice President Biden and a representative of a Ukrainian company that once paid Hunter Biden. The Biden campaign says there is no evidence the meeting happened, and the story was greeted with widespread skepticism. George Mesires, attorney for Hunter Biden, said in a statement, ‘We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the New York Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened.'”

NatZero will fact check the Trump town hall first.  The Trump town hall here on this article, followed by a recap of the Biden town hall posted here as well after that event concludes.

Meaning watch them on YouTube or on your own TV, because both NBC and ABC disabled the off-site embedding of their streams for Trump and Biden respectively (The idiots at The Hill posted both articles without actually testing the streams first).

BIDEN SECTION

10:32 p.m. ET:  Commenting on Trump’s unwillingness to say when he took a coronavirus test before the last debate September 28th, Stephanopoulos asked if Biden thought the next debate, scheduled for next week, would happen, and if he would debate Trump if Trump didn’t take a coronavirus test.  Biden noted that he took a test before that town hall–as well as being tested daily–and he wouldn’t have come if it was positive.  “It’s just decency,” Biden noted.

“I’m gonna abide by what the Commission rules call for,” Biden said.  “I was prepared to debate him remotely, which was supposed to happen, and he said he wouldn’t do that, a virtual debate.”

Biden said the Cleveland Clinic was the organization overseeing health safety.  “I don’t think they’re going to let happen what happened last time,” Biden said.  “They’re going to demand that it’s safe.”

10:30 p.m. ET: Stephanopoulos asked Biden what a Biden loss in the election would say about the country.  Biden said, “Well, it could say that I’m a lousy candidate and I didn’t do a good job.”  Thoughtfully, Biden said he hopes it doesn’t mean we’re “as racially, ethnically and religiously at odds with one another as it appears [Trump] wants us to be.”

“We have the greatest opportunity of any country in the world to own the 21st Century, and we can’t do it divided,” Biden said.

10:26 p.m. ET:  A Black man from Narbeth, Pennsylvania asked how Biden, if he loses, would use his platform to work to push Trump to the ideals of a more perfect union.  Biden was hesitant with his answer.  “Well, to be very honest with you, I think that’s very hard.  He is not… things have not lent themselves to him learning from what’s happened, what’s gone before.”  Biden noted that Trump’s actions didn’t change after impeachment (when he became the only president impeached who had a member of his own party vote to expel him); instead, Trump got emboldened.  Biden said he would do the same work that he did prior to the campaign, working to making decency and honor prevalent in the country again.

“We’re a diverse country,” Biden said.  “Unless we are able to treat people equally, we’re never going to meet our potential.  But I think the American people want to see that happen.  I think they’re ready to see it happen, and I’ll tell you one thing:  If I’m elected president, you will not hear me race baiting.  You will not hear me dividing.  You’ll hear me trying to unify.”

Washington Post: “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter. The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The intelligence raised concerns that Giuliani was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president, the former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and conversations.”

After spending seven days in a hospital intensive care unit due to COVID-19, Trump advisor Chris Christie has had a “come to Jesus” moment that puts him on the other side of the public health issue from President Trump.

“I believed that when I entered the White House grounds, that I had entered a safe zone, due to the testing that and I and many others underwent every day. I was wrong. I was wrong to not wear a mask at the Amy Coney Barrett announcement and I was wrong not to wear a mask at my multiple debate prep sessions with the President and the rest of the team,” Christie said in a statement obtained by NBC News.

My first thought was “Russia’s up to no good, retaliating for yesterday”. My second thought was “maybe they hired some of Disqus’s guys”. My third thought is I want to go order a chicken gyro.

Bloomberg: “Elliott Broidy, a former top political fundraiser for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, plans to plead guilty to participating in an illegal foreign lobbying scheme and cooperate with investigators in the matter, according to a person familiar with the situation. Broidy was charged on Oct. 8 with illegally lobbying the Trump administration to stop investigating the embezzlement scandal at the 1MDB Malaysian state investment fund. Jho Low, a Malaysian fugitive who was charged as the mastermind of the 1MDB fraud, initially paid Broidy $6 million to lobby the U.S. Justice Department to stop its investigation and promised an additional $75 million if the lobbying succeeded, prosecutors said.”

Which do we set up a WATCH LIVE for tonight?

— National Zero (@NationalZeroUSA) October 15, 2020

Let us know if you can do this without logging in to Twitter. This poll isn’t necessarily determinative, we’ll gauge your input from the comments as well.