Dr. Marc Siegel’s highly-promoted “medical evaluation” of President Trump on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show was simply an interview with the doctor in which no medical information was disclosed and no examination took place.

Trump noted that he was not taking any medication since eight hours before the pre-recorded interview.  He did not specify what medications he had continued to take, although it was reported he was taking dexamethasone, a corticosteroid.  Trump claimed he felt no effects from the steroid when asked by Siegel if he was feeling depressed or manic.

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Friday night that it has canceled the scheduled Thursday debate between incumbent republican Donald Trump and Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Trump has said that he would not participate in a virtual debate, made necessary by Trump contracting the coronavirus.  Trump has projected that Biden would be given the answers to staff positioned off camera and claimed the he would not “sit in front of a computer” to participate in the debate.

Post and Courier: “Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham and Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison will no longer debate Friday night after Harrison declined to participate unless Graham took a coronavirus test in advance and Graham denied the request. Instead of an hour-long debate, the two candidates will each participate in separate 30-minute interviews hosted by television station WSPA in Spartanburg. The forum will air live on channels in all the major media markets of South Carolina: WCBD in Charleston, WBTW in Myrtle Beach, WLTX in Columbia, WJBF in Aiken and WSAV in Hilton Head and Beaufort. It will also be streamed live online.”

Franklin County, Ohio–the location of Columbus, the state capital and largest city–mailed out 50,000 inaccurate requested absentee ballots, the Associated Press reports.   The mistake was caught by election officials, who promised new ballots would be mailed within 72 hours.

About 20% of people who requested absentee ballots receive the wrong ballots, an error caused by a worker who changed a setting on a mailing machine.  Some voters received ballots with incorrect information about a congressional race, while other received ballots for the wrong district.

Just one week since being admitting to the hospital with coronavirus, President Trump will address a gathering on the South Lawn, highlighting “law and order,” despite a COVID outbreak at the White House, ABC News reports.

Organized by conservative gadfly Candace Owens’ Blexit group, the event will urge Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party.  Trump will make “remarks to peaceful protesters for law and order,” according to an invitation received by ABC News.

Business Insider: “Peloton has removed tags related to the QAnon conspiracy theory from their at-home fitness platform in accordance with policies prohibiting ‘hateful content,’ a spokesperson told Insider. QAnon is the baseless far-right conspiracy theory that claims President Donald Trump is secretly fighting a ‘deep state’ cabal of human traffickers.”

“Questions surrounding whether Peloton permitted QAnon rhetoric on its platform came about after Drew Goins, an assistant opinions section editor at the Washington Post, tweeted a picture on Tuesday of class tags — which allow riders in Peloton’s virtual classes to connect — for ‘Q’ and ‘WWGOnePelotonWGA.’ The conspiracy theory movement’s slogan is ‘Where we go one, we go all’ or ‘WWGOWGA’ for short. According to Goins’ photo, the ‘Q’ tag had 63 members, while the other had only one. Within an hour of his tweet, Goins said in a subsequent post, the tags were unusable, meaning they had zero members.”

Between 80 to 90% of sexual assaults reported to the Chicago Police Department have not resulted in an arrest or a clearance in the last decade, a new study by an independent watchdog group found, reports the Chicago Tribune via Yahoo News.

The report, by the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, found that the vast majority of cases are left unsettled, leaving victims scared, frustrated and traumatized, lacking any help for closure to their assault.

“There is a sense of institutional betrayal,” said Christine Crow, a staff attorney at CAASE.  “They are trying to make sure they are doing everything in their own power to uphold the feeling of obligation they have.  It’s incredibly demoralizing. For some it can be re-traumatizing.”

“The U.S. is in a constitutional crisis. It began on the day of President Trump’s election, when unelected bureaucrats mobilized against his presidency. This is a crisis in the executive branch, perpetrated by subordinate officials who don’t see themselves as answerable to the president. They have effectively established a fourth branch of government—a permanent, unaccountable bureaucracy… blah blah blah bitch whine bitch whine … Unfortunately, uncovering the truth isn’t easy, and time may be running out. Should Joe Biden win the presidency, the truth may be hidden forever” – Sen Ron Johnson (R-WI), Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Zach Everson: “A ministry that trains young people to ‘champion a biblical worldview’ paid the Trump Hotel D.C. more than $180,000 to host a 2018 conference according to a filing the group made with the Internal Revenue Service. President Donald J. Trump still owns his hotel and can profit when political allies convert their donors’ contributions into a conference booking. In 2018, Trump reported that his share of the hotel’s revenue was almost $41 million. (The president doesn’t disclose his loses, so his profit that year is not public knowledge.)”

“Over three days in September 2018, Summit Ministries, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that helps 16 to 25 year olds ‘connect biblical truth to everyday relationships,’ held its annual conference at the Trump Hotel D.C. Per the group’s 2018 IRS Form 990, the ministry paid the Trump Hotel D.C. $180,824 to host the conference (making the president’s business the ministry’s second largest contractor that year). The group reported its total revenue for 2018 was $7.76 million, meaning 2.3 percent of its revenue that year was spent at the president’s business.”

The Hill: “Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads President Trump by 5 percentage points nationally, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds. Forty-five percent of registered voters in the Oct. 3-6 survey said they’d cast their ballots for Biden if the election were held today, a 2 percentage point drop from a Sept. 30-Oct. 1 poll when Biden lead by 7 percentage points. Forty percent of respondents said they’d vote for Trump. Three percent of voters said they prefer someone else as their presidential candidate while 4 percent of voters said they do not plan to vote.”

This could do some serious damage to Hillary and maybe even stop her from becoming president of the United States in 2021. So many voters could decide not to vote for her if these emails show anything potentially compromising. Just absolutely catastrophic.

In a head-spinning turn, President Trump declared during his stint as a disc jockey on the Rush Limbaugh show that he wants a bigger coronavirus than either Democrats or republicans are proposing, Politico reports.

Though Trump declared that he was canceling all coronavirus relief negotiations until after the election, he’s repeated retreated from that politically untenable position.  “I would like to see a bigger stimulus package than, frankly, either the Democrats or the Republicans are offering,” Trump said during his turn as a radio talk show host.

The World Health Organization announced that the world set a new high of 350,000 new coronavirus cases on Friday, including more than 109,000 cases in Europe alone, marking a new surge in the pandemic across the globe, ABC News reports.  The US has averaged more than 40,000 cases daily.

“The majority of people in the world are still susceptible to this disease,” WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan warned. He said countries should focus not just on restrictive measures, but also on bolstering their surveillance systems, testing, contact tracing and ensuring populations are engaged.

A Tennessee company placed ads around the United States to recruit retired military special operators for a “large contingent” to protect Minnesota polling places from potential attacks from antifa, the Washington Post reports.

Atlas Aegis, a year old private security firm run by people who claim military Special Operations experience, started recruited on defense industry job sites for “security positions in Minnesota during the November Election and beyond to protect election polls, local businesses and residences from looting and destruction.”

George Packer: “‘We’re not a democracy,’ Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted in the middle of Wednesday night’s vice-presidential debate. He was reacting to something he’d heard onstage there, in his home state of Utah. Another tweet: ‘The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.’ Hours after the debate Lee was still worrying the thought: ‘Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.'”

“Why did Lee choose this moment—less than four weeks before an election in which his party seems likely to suffer defeat—to make the familiar, even pedantic, point that we live in a republic rather than a pure democracy? Why did he insist on the point so vehemently that he neglected to mention that power in the American system ultimately lies with the people, which means that our system could also be called a representative democracy? My guess is that Lee wasn’t just being pedantic. Worried about an election in which the people can express their will, Lee was laying the groundwork to contest the results or block an elected majority from governing.”

Every time Trump has a rally, a tweet storm, a press conference, or some long ass “interview” on right wing media it just sucks. He rambles, says stupid shit non-stop, and yet the media have to stay attuned to it because there’s an outside chance he may say something worthy of coverage on its own – be it outrageous, worthy of mockery, or – more rarely – somehow consequential for policy or the campaign. Looking at my Twitter feed, there probably are at least a dozen individual news items I could make out of this Trump “guest host afternoon” on Limbaugh, but do I really want this site to become TRUMP-WATCH-247.NEWS?

It just sucks how this degenerate clown hijacked America’s attention and turned it into an election win four years ago. At least it probably won’t work out again – and what was an asset last time is a liability these days. People are really sick of this shit.

I’d write more but I have an actual toddler hijacking my keyboard right now.

Daily Beast: “Rep. Jason Smith (R-MI) was so incensed by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s get-out-the-vote efforts that he penned a letter to Britain’s ambassador to the U.S., demanding the U.K. government strip the couple of their titles due to election ‘interference.’ ‘By allowing the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to retain their titles, and these political comments to continue, the British Government is effectively condoning interference in the 2020 United States Presidential Election from officials at the highest level of the British establishment,’ he wrote. ‘I respectfully request the British Government ensure The Duke and Duchess of Sussex no longer attempt to interfere in our election or be stripped of all titles, styles, and privileges which they currently retain.'”