Two members of the Kamala Harris campaign staff, a flight crew member and her e director, have tested positive for the coronavirus, prompting the campaign to halt travel plans for two days, CNN reports.

According to the campaign, Harris was not in immediate proximity to either person so she is not at risk for contracting the virus.  The campaign, however, canceled an event planned for Thursday in North Carolina and other in-person events will be postponed until Monday.

“Neither of these people have had contact with Vice President Biden, Senator Harris or any other staffers since testing positive or in the 48 hours prior to their positive test results,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said.

Harris has had two PCR tests since October 8th, the campaign reported.  Both returned negative results.

A Kentucky Hospital Association report states that up to 28 rural hospitals in the state are at risk for closure due to increased expenses from the coronavirus and decreased funds from Medicare and Medicaid.

With just 68 hospitals serving Kentucky’s rural communities, the 28 at-risk hospitals represent 41% of the hospitals serving those areas.  Kentucky hospitals have lost $2.6 billion in revenue from canceled elective surgeries due to the coronavirus pandemic; federal financial aid has provided $1.3 billion in financial aid to cover some of those losses.

“What if Trump does not concede—and he continues not to concede, even as he packs his suitcases, swipes some White House–branded complimentary toiletries, and walks onto the South Lawn and into Marine One and waves farewell to the presidency?”

“I think this scenario is in fact the most likely one, if Trump loses the election. And it may even be his preferred scenario, better than an outright victory (which would require another four years of onerous employment), better than showing up on Inauguration Day and having to duel Joe Biden for the right to be sworn in. As for the prospect of civil war: Trump is a coward, and all evidence suggests that he would run from the responsibility, even more burdensome than normal service as president, of overseeing the violent fracture of America. A civil war sounds like a lot of work. The easiest path is also the most lucrative. Get on Marine One, protesting all the way, and spend the rest of your days fleecing the 40 percent of Americans who still think you are the Messiah, and who will watch you on cable news, spend their money on whatever hypoallergenic pillow you endorse, and come to see you whenever you visit their town.”

Weekly first time unemployment claims released by the Department of Labor increased last week, to 898,000, the highest they’ve been since August, yet another sign that the economic impact of the coronavirus is not waning.

With the previous week’s number revised up by 5,000, that increased the weekly claims by 6.3%.  The four-week moving average also increased to 866,250.

More than 25 million Americans are taking some type of unemployment benefit, down less than 1% from the previous week, another sign of consistent job losses. One year ago 1.4 million people were getting unemployment payments.

Swing states in the election saw some of the largest increases week-over-week in first time claims.  Georgia (+8,526), Florida (+2,489), North Carolina (+3,546) and Wisconsin (+2,914) saw significant increases week-over-week.  Indiana saw the largest increase (+18,788), while Michigan (-4,793) saw the largest decrease in first time claims.

“After an ambitious expansion of the safety net in the spring saved millions of people from poverty, the aid is now largely exhausted and poverty has returned to levels higher than before the coronavirus crisis, two new studies have found. The number of poor people has grown by eight million since May, according to researchers at Columbia University, after falling by four million at the pandemic’s start as a result of an $2 trillion emergency package known as the Cares Act” the New York Times reports.

“Using a different definition of poverty, researchers from the University of Chicago and Notre Dame found that poverty has grown by six million people in the past three months, with circumstances worsening most for Black people and children. Significantly, the studies differ on the most recent month: While the Columbia model shows an improvement in September, the Chicago and Notre Dame analysts found poverty continued to grow.”

“In an electorate that agrees on little, there is one thing that nearly every voter here in Southwest Wisconsin feels: Exhaustion. That fatigue with politics, aimed primarily at President Donald Trump but also Democrats in Washington and the overall tone of discourse in America, is coursing through the minds of many voters in one of the most politically volatile parts of this swing state, where counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 swung substantially to Trump in 2016 before swinging back to Democrats and Gov. Tony Evers in 2018.”

“Wisconsin played a central role in Trump’s victory in 2016, with rural and working class voters leading the rejection of Democrats throughout the Upper Midwest. Four years later, however, the state remains a key battleground, but one where Trump is trailing in the most recent polls. The hyper-partisanship that has consumed the rest of the nation has not missed the counties that lie along the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers. But exhaustion is one of the few things that crosses those hardened party lines. Even people who voted for Trump four years ago and top Republican operatives in the area told CNN that the chaos surrounding the President has left voters beleaguered weeks out from the 2020 election” – CNN.

Daily Beast: “President Trump’s influential supporter Rupert Murdoch is telling close associates he believes Joe Biden will win the election in a landslide. The Australian-born billionaire is disgusted by Trump’s handling of COVID-19, remarking that the president is his own worst enemy, that he is not listening to advice about how best to handle the pandemic, and that he’s creating a never-ending crisis for his administration, according to three people who have spoken with Murdoch.”

“In response to an email inquiry for this story asking him if he believes Biden will win in a landslide and his thoughts on Trump’s handling of coronavirus, Murdoch responded, ‘No comment except I’ve never called Trump an idiot,’ referring to a 2018 report that the media mogul called the president a ‘fucking idiot’ following a chat about immigration.”

“Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups raised $1.5 billion through ActBlue over the last three months — a record-smashing total that reveals the overwhelming financial power small-dollar donors have unleashed up and down the ballot ahead of the 2020 election. From July through September, 6.8 million donors made 31.4 million contributions through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s favored online donation platform, averaging $47 per donation. More than 14,223 campaigns and organizations benefited from the surge in donations, the largest single quarter in the platform’s 15-year history, according to figures shared first with POLITICO. Just in September, ActBlue processed $758 million” – Politico.

Washington Post: “Less than three weeks before Election Day, President Trump’s lack of a consistent and coherent closing argument is alarming some Republicans, raising fears among his allies that his undisciplined approach to campaigning could render him a one-term president. With more than 10 million Americans already casting their ballots and millions more beginning to tune in to the race, Trump is engaged in a frenetic attempt to define his Democratic rival Joe Biden, win over skeptical voters and delegitimize the election results if he is unsuccessful. In the final stretch of the race, a trio of long-standing challenges have converged to create a daunting barrier to Trump’s reelection: the inability to drag down Biden’s favorability ratings, the lack of a clearly articulated ­second-term agenda, and a pandemic that continues to upend American life.”

“The farther behind Donald Trump has fallen in the competition for campaign dollars, the more he’s milked government resources to make up the difference. Millions of boxes of food doled out to needy families — with letters signed by the president taking credit stuffed inside. An $8 billion program for drug-discount cards to seniors featuring Trump branding — intended to arrive before the Nov. 3 election. A $300 million advertising blitz to ‘defeat despair’ over the coronavirus pandemic — the biggest threat to Trump’s reelection.”

“Each of those initiatives have two things in common: They’re paid for with taxpayer money, and they are plainly intended to help Trump’s flagging reelection campaign. The actions are just the latest examples of how the president has eviscerated the traditional boundaries separating politics from government. His heavy reliance on federal resources and his own executive powers to win reelection come as Trump has fallen more than $100 million behind Joe Biden in TV ad spending, and slipped to a double-digit deficit in national polls” – Politico.

Wall Street Journal: “Joe Biden holds a double-digit lead over President Trump less than three weeks from Election Day, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of registered voters finds. Mr. Biden is ahead by 11 points in the national survey, 53% to 42%, following a tumultuous few weeks that included Mr. Trump’s nomination of federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; the candidates’ contentious, televised debate and the president’s Covid-19 diagnosis and hospitalization.”

A US District Court judge ordered the Federal Election Commission to investigate a complaint that Iowa republican Senator Joni Ernst coordinated campaign activities with a dark money group, the Quad City Times reports.

The case, filed by the Campaign Legal Center, a left-leaning Washington watchdog group, alleges that the FEC failed to act on a complaint the group filed against Ernst and her campaign’s coordination with Iowa First, a non-profit Political Action Committee backing Ernst.

Any coordination between a campaign and a PAC is forbidden by federal election law.  A dark-money PAC does not disclose who is funding it. 

According to a report by the New York Times, as President Trump was telling the nation on February 24th that the coronavirus was “very much under control” and just two days before his infamous statement that the nation would have “close to zero” cases in a couple days, Trump’s administration was briefing Hoover Institution board members about the increasing threat of the virus.

Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, was far less confident than Trump, saying they couldn’t estimate the impact of coronavirus on the nation, leading the board members to understand the Administration didn’t have a handle on the crisis.

Larry Kudlow, a senior economic advisor to the president, went on television to tell the public the virus “was close to airtight.”  Hours later, he told the Hoover Institute the coronavirus “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know.”

(It should be noted that Dr. Scott Atlas, the neuroradiologist who made frequent appearance on Fox “News” and now Trump’s preferred advisor on the coronavirus, was on staff of the conservative Hoover Institution.)

It’s pretty safe to say MAGA Nation is freaking the fuck out over Twitter and Facebook “censoring” the New York Post story about Hunterghazi and Burisma and whatever the hell it’s supposed to be. Seems that these emails were hacked by Russians and Rudy Giuliani is such a drunken dumbass that the story he came up with for how they made their way to the New York Post couldn’t even last until noon before it fell apart under scrutiny. Yet another tale of MAGA malevolence undone by stunning incompetence. Same old, same old. The aftermath is the interesting part.

In an interview with Lawrence O’Donnell on “The Last Word”, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lambasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and republicans for their cavalier attitude to dealing with the coronavirus.

Pelosi recalled that laughed off the May coronavirus relief package passed by the House by saying “OK, let’s have all the states declare bankruptcy.”

She also noted that Mnuchin said Wednesday, “We don’t want to bail out pensions, we don’t want bad practices,” in a completely unironic way given Trump’s six business bankruptcies and the $3 trillion deficit racked up by the current Administration.  The pension bail out would have assisted state pension funds who lost hundreds of billions of dollars in investments due to the stock market crash.

Rachel Maddow: We could see [the fly on Mike Pence's head] at home. Could you see it next to him?
Sen. Kamala Harris: … pic.twitter.com/Iu0LwOGPfL

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) October 15, 2020

Shattering a previous all-time monthly record for a presidential campaign, Biden-Harris 2020 raised $364 million in August. In September, they broke the record again, adding another $19 million for a grand total of $383 million, Biden announced personally to a supporter Wednesday.

The Trump campaign waited until the absolute last minute to admit they were beaten in August (they took in $210 million), and it’s probably safe to assume the same will end up happening with their September fundraising total too.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the likelihood of a coronavirus relief package passing before the election is virtually nil, denying President Trump something to boast about on the campaign trail.

According to the Washington Post, Mnuchin has been negotiating with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, but the two sides are still far apart, even given a newly-found commitment from Trump to “go big or go home” and spend more than even the Democrats proposed.