The window for convicted felon former President Trump to accept CNN’s invite for the town hall next Wednesday has closed without an answer from the fat fuck’s handlers, thus the network’s media guy Brian Stelter reports that Trump has ceded the night to Vice President Kamala Harris.

“His campaign has not committed to participate, so we are moving forward with a Town Hall event with VP Harris taking questions from a live audience of Pennsylvania voters who say they intend to vote in November,” said CNN in a statement this morning. Guess that makes five non-MAGA media appearances that the Orange God Emperor has pussied out of during the final month of the race.

The eggheads at the Cook Political Report on Friday changed their rating in credibly suspected traitor Pennsylvania MAGA Congressman Scott Perry’s 10th district seat from Lean R to tossup, signaling that voters might just be getting ready to toss the son of a bitch.

We’re joining a little late, but the fat bastard is on the couch this morning, looking exhausted and haggard while in his safe bubble on the propaganda network.

Just four accounts dumping $30 million in crypto into offshore betting site Polymarket – backed by fascist freak Peter Thiel – have boosted convicted felon former President Trump’s chance of winning from about 47 percent late last month up to 63 percent, the Wall Street Journal reports on an “investment” made purely to create an illusion of inevitability around the fat fuck.

Whether cult favorite and kind of cultish convenience store chain Buc-ee’s opens its first location in Wisconsin hangs in the balance on Election Day, as the construction of the proposed 74,000-square-foot store in the northern Dane County village of DeForest, outside the capital of Madison, hinges entirely on whether there will be enough support in the state legislature to spend $15 million to upgrade a nearby highway interchange to handle the expected increase in traffic of as many as 8,000 devoted Buc-itarians coming to the site daily, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

DeForest Village Administrator Bill Chang says he’s hoping the hearts of the candidates for Dane County executive, State Assembly District 42, and State Senate District 14 will open to the light that Buc-ee shines upon the world and all whom gather at his sacred temples of convenience. His earthly emissaries have promised to foot 47 percent of the cost of the upgrade, with the promise of taxpayers’ tithe made whole by an expected $1 million annual revenue from sales tax alone on top of the 200 to 225 jobs at the location. Chang is correct: Resistance to Buc-ee is futile.

“Lava continues to erupt slowly at Great Sitkin Volcano. Ongoing activity is adding to a thick lava flow that fills most of the summit crater with minor advancement of the northern part of the eastern lobe. Small earthquakes associated with the ongoing lava eruption continue. Nothing unusual was observed in cloudy satellite and web camera imagery. A single explosive event occurred in May 2021 and was followed by the ongoing eruption of lava that began in July 2021. No explosive events have occurred since May 2021. Local seismic and infrasound sensors and web cameras are used to monitor Great Sitkin along with regional infrasound and lightning networks and satellite data,” says a US Geological Survey update on the Great Sitkin Volcano on the Aleutian Island of the same name.

Seems very low-T and unmotivated, like it doesn’t have the confidence to fully erupt and make the news but also doesn’t know how to stop and be comfortable with quietude and dormancy. Of course anthropomorphizing a volcano is silly and hubristic, but think of that as a way to actually tempt fate and encourage to explode cataclysmically and give us something to cover outside of politics.

An “exhausted” and decompensating convicted felon former President Trump has backed out of yet another non-MAGA media appearance – the third this week and the fourth this month – this time with the Shade Room, a site/podcast that Politico Playbook describes as drawing “an audience that is largely young and Black” and which Vice President Kamala Harris had appeared on last week.

Per Playbook, the teams had been in talks, “but as no interview materialized, Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign. No date was ever set, we’re told, but the intention was to try and work toward a sit-down. In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was ‘exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change’ at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.” Copied that verbatim given the trickiness of the text, but the message seems abundantly clear – that Trump’s handlers are doing their best to shield him from scrutiny in the home stretch of this existential campaign.

Trump spokesfreak Karoline “Blondi” Leavitt told Playbook that any notion of her Orange Fuhrer is hiding is “BS. President Trump has never backed down from any interview. This is a man who held a CNN town hall in the middle of the Republican primary, for goodness’ sake.”

Haitian migration roils town in key battleground state with signs of pro-Trump support on the rise https://t.co/5fxVF1z2ru

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 18, 2024

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised $30.3 million in September, putting its total cash-on-hand at $50 million for House Dem Leader Hakeem Jeffries to hand out to its swing district frontliners, Axios reports on more misery for the GOP, who haven’t announced their haul yet.

The Texas state Supreme Court on Thursday halted the execution of Robert Roberson after back-and-forth rulings by lower courts nearly ended the pretty clearly innocent man over his extremely questionable 2003 murder conviction in the death of his daughter from the now-discredited “shaken baby syndrome” when the girl had tragically died of pneumonia, the Texas Tribune reports.

The last-minute reprieve came thanks to the intervention of Dem and Republican state lawmakers who had subpoenaed Robeson to testify to them and cops who had investigated the case and testified against him at trial. The Texas Supremes ordered a lower court to resolve the separation-of-powers issue, so the ordeal is still far from over and Robeson could still get the needle, but just the fact that the stay even happened is extraordinary and puts pressure on Governor Low Energy Greg Abbott to finally grab his balls and do something to make this right. Robeson shouldn’t just be commuted, he should be freed from prison after spending two decades in agony over this.

To fail to do so would end up delegitimizing the death penalty’s appropriate use for the fuckers whom truly deserve it, like Alabama psychopath Derrick Dearman, who slaughtered five members of his then-girlfriend’s family (six if you count an unborn baby) with an axe and a gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and was rightly executed for the crime via lethal injection Thursday evening.

The final numbers are in, and as reported earlier, 7.1 million viewers tuned in to the embarrassing spectacle Bret Baier made out of himself when he ruined the last shred of professionalism while he channelled the Trolls of the Comment Sections in an amateurish ambush interview that included a fawning video excusing Trump’s violent rhetoric.  Another 1.4 million viewers watched the midnight ET rebroadcast.

That’s more than three times Fox’s late morning tea with Trump in a studio stuffed with MAGA supporters drew–2.8 million viewers at 11 a.m. ET–but it did conveniently provide the reason to shoot the fawning video Baier re-aired later that night when he clumsily confronted Harris.

Per the Daily Beast, the broadcast also drew more than 880,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demo, a segment of voters the Harris campaign is trying to reach.

“Well, I did make a mistake, and I want to say that I made a mistake,” exposed sycophant Bret Baier grovels after his embarrassing performance during his interview with Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, where he showed a flattering clip of Trump denying he’s spoken violent, dictatorial rhetoric–seconds after he said violent, dictatorial rhetoric. Baier lamely claims he was shocked–shocked! he says–when the clip of Trump meekly claiming it’s the Democrats who are “the ones doing the threatening,” not dear, sweet Trump.  He thought, he claims, “they” would play Trump saying dictatorial things like he did, not the oh-so-innocent things.  Yeah, sure, Bret.

Lawyers representing Ryan Routh, the one-time Republican who was setting up a shot at corpulent target Donald Trump while the GOP candidate cheated at golf at his Palm Beach club, filed a motion request the judge overseeing the case, Aileen Cannon, to recuse herself because she’s been repeated praised by Trump and might gain a promotion if she rules against the defendant.

“Your Honor recently presided over that criminal case, and ultimately dismissed the case against Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is the current Republican candidate for President in next month’s election. On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly praised Your Honor for her rulings in his case. As the alleged victim here, he has a significant stake in the outcome of this case too,” Routh’s lawyers write.

“Were he to become President in the future, he would have authority to nominate Your Honor to a federal judgeship on a higher court were a vacancy to arise. Taken together, these unprecedented facts and circumstances might create an appearance of partiality in the mind of the public. Accordingly, the Constitution and the federal recusal statute require Your Honor to recuse herself from this case.”

Effectively saying the public’s interest in seeing the prosecution’s evidence in the criminal case is not impacted by the fact that the release will come just before a federal election, DC Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the release of information in Republican nominee and previously convicted felon Donald Trump.

“[…] Defendant claims that the ‘asymmetric release of charged allegations and related documents during early voting creates a concerning appearance of election interference,'” Chutkan wrote.  “There is undoubtedly a public interest in courts not inserting themselves into elections, or appearing to do so.  But litigation’s incidental effects on politics are not the same as a court’s intentional interference with them.

“As a result, it is in fact Defendant’s requested relief that risks undermining that public interest: If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute—or appear to be—election interference. The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests. Any argument about ‘what needs to happen before or shouldn’t happen before the election is not relevant here.'” [Citations removed.]

Saying that the ad constitutes political speech, “speech at the core of the First Amendment,” a federal judge blocked Republican Florida oversized jockey Ron DeSantis’s effort to ban ads from a private group advocating to pass Amendment 4, which protect abortion rights.

Andrew Pantazi of the Jacksonville Tribune reports the judge upheld Floridians Protecting Freedom right to buy television and radio advertising in the state which says that at any time, Republicans could repeal the ability for a woman to get an abortion.  Noting that the “State of Florida opposes Amendment 4 and has launched a taxpayer-funded campaign against it,” adding that DeSantis’s administration has already spent “millions of taxpayer dollars” in its effort to defeat the pro-choice amendment.

In recently released videotaped testimony made under oath before Canada’s federal commission investigating foreign interference in the nation’s domestic affairs and elections, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau–who’s heard either via a translator from the spoken French or after inhaling helium–reports his administration found that Kremlin-linked media outlet RT funds far-right provocateurs like America’s own Tucker Carlson.

We’ve recently seen that RT is currently funding bloggers and other YouTube personalities of the right such as Jordan Peterson,” Trudeau testifies. “Other names that are well known:  Tucker Carlson, as well.”  The US State Department considers RT a part of Russia’s international intelligence network.

At least 7.1 million tuned in for Vice President Kamala Harris’s combative and relatively brief interview with Fox News “normal” guy Bret Baier on Wednesday, John Solomon’s shitty website reports.

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking billionaire Mark Cuban on the road with her in Wisconsin on Thursday which… Ehhh… This is the response to Trump bringing Elon Musk on stage, right? It…

Whatever. Fine. Mark Cuban, ladies and gentlemen… As far as billionaires go we guess he’s probably among the least offensive. He’s no George Soros though… Soros is so based.

In a memo obtained by CBS News, Vice President Kamala Harris’s team expects to “meet 2020 levels of support” with Black voters, citing high return rates of mail-in ballots among Black voters in Detroit’s Wayne County so far. No the goddamned memo isn’t linked, but we guess we just have to take CBS’s word for it on the optimistic tone. There is however also that TargetSmart shows 52,113 Black voters in the county have returned ballots so far, down just about 6,000 from Election Day minus 20 in 2020, a gap likely attributable to the fact that there’s no longer a pandemic.

Quasi-sovereign megacorporation Google will disallow political ads to run on its platforms the moment polls close on Election Day next month, Axios reports on an effort to preempt any false claims of wins, fundraising for “Stop the Steal” v2, or any similar democracy-subverting cuntery.

A spokesperson confirmed the policy, saying they were moving on it “out of an abundance of caution and to limit the potential for confusion, given the likelihood that votes will continue to be counted after Election Day,” and that it applies to any US election ads or ads that refer to US elections, their processes or outcomes. Facebook will implement similar rules even earlier, with all political ads banned during election week. Twitter owner Elon Musk did not comment for the story but if he did he probably would say “Mark Cuckerberg and Jew-gle are the real election interferers.”