The immutable laws of debating

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, on Sept. 29, was an unmitigated disaster for the president. He ignored all the pre-established rules for the affair and ended up looking and sounding like his Twitter feed come to life. Reportedly, his debate prep team is trying to convince him to take it down a notch this time around, as the debate, set to take place in Nashville tomorrow night, is one of the last opportunities for him to shift the dynamic of a presidential race that most polls say he is losing. But just in case he can't, this debate will feature a mute button for the first time.

• — Complaints, complaints. Trump, of course, has publicly aired several complaints about the debate, including with moderator Kristen Welker of NBC. "There are people out there that can be neutral. Kristen Welker cannot be neutral," he said, adding that she comes from a Democratic family. An official from the Commission on Presidential Debates defended Welker, noting that a Trump official had praised her just last week, and said both campaigns had agreed to the rules. The president has complained about previous moderators as well.
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• — But his emails. Trump's team has also complained about the selected topics for the debate, which include national security, the coronavirus pandemic, American families, race in America, climate change, and leadership. Trump will surely steer the debate toward the alleged emails from Biden's son Hunter, which were recently published in The New York Post. Since ignoring the matter altogether is not an option, there is some uncertainty about how Biden will address it. —The Washington Post
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• — A rare rebuke. "The president's apparent strategy is to challenge the validity of the election should he lose," John Danforth, a Republican, former U.S. senator from Missouri, and member of the Commission on Presidential Debates, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "We saw this strategy initially in his claims that mail-in ballots are the tools for massive election fraud. Now we see it as well in his assertion that the debates have been rigged by the commission to favor former Vice President Joe Biden." —CNN

Man arrested for Biden/Harris murder plot

In the latest example of violent political threats leading up to the 2020 presidential election, U.S. Secret Service agents have charged a Maryland man with threatening a presidential candidate, after he wrote a letter in which he warns of plans to kidnap, beat, rape, and kill Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris. The letter also describes in graphic detail violent actions its writer would take against Democrats, in an apparent scare tactic against voters.

• — "We are the ones your children have nightmares about." "We have a list of homes and addresses by your election signs. We are the ones with those scary guns," James Dale Reed wrote in a letter that he left on a doorstep in Frederick, Md., in the middle of the night last week. He was captured on home security footage.
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• — Reed confessed to writing the letter because he was upset by the current political situation. He claims he didn't know the homeowner, but delivered the letter to the first house he came upon with Biden/Harris yard signs. Reed was previously known to Secret Service agents for threatening someone in their protection in 2014.
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• — "Conduct like this that threatens major candidates and fellow citizens only undermines our democracy and the principles upon which America was founded," said U.S. Attorney for Maryland Robert Hur. "We will not tolerate threatening conduct that seeks to intimidate, harass, or dissuade Americans from exercising their right to vote." —The Baltimore Sun

Judge: QAnon must be thoroughly repudiated

"[L]et's hope today's GOP eventually follows the lead of William F. Buckley, Jr., who in the late 1950s took on the John Birch Society and helped eject the radical group from the early conservative movement for, among other wild claims, saying that President Dwight Eisenhower was a 'dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.' When Birchers tried to co-opt Buckley, he recoiled. When it comes to the ugly lies of QAnon conspiracy theorists, a similar recoil is merited." —Des Moines Register

MORE: Scott Wiener: What I learned when QAnon came for me —The New York Times

Beijing's best friend?

For months, President Trump has insisted that former Vice President Joe Biden is in hoc to China. "China is on a massive disinformation campaign because they are desperate to have Sleepy Joe Biden win the presidential race," Trump tweeted last spring. "Beijing Biden is so weak on China that the intelligence community recently assessed that the Chinese Communist Party favors Biden," Trump's son claimed this summer. More recently, Trump has seized upon hacked emails purporting to show financial links between Biden and China.

• — But Biden does not have financial ties to China. We know this because he released his tax returns. Trump has not released his tax returns, but The New York Times has obtained at least some of them. And they found that Trump not only has a Chinese bank account, but also has collected earnings from China while serving as president.
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• — The Chinese bank account belongs to Trump's subsidiary firm, Trump International Hotels Management. While the firm reported small sums in previous years, during Trump's first year in office, it reported $17.5 million in revenue, a large spike. The returns obtained by the Times don't show how much of that money came from China, and the Trump Organization, naturally, refuses to say. 
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• — He's projecting. Again. Trump's drumbeat of charges that Biden has secret ties to China—and that China is helping him win—appears intended to offset his own campaign's relationship with Russia, which is exerting itself on Trump's behalf (again) by openly cooperating with Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. But the accusation serves a second purpose as well: It obscures Trump's own undisclosed financial relationship with China. —New York Magazine

Carlson & Durenberger: The future of voting is ranked-choice

"In addition to mitigating the extreme negativity in our elections, ranked-choice voting fosters greater voter participation, inspires more candidates with more ideas to run, and elects candidates with the broadest support. It draws voters to the polls by empowering them with more choice and the opportunity to fully express themselves. Further, in municipal races, it eliminates the costly, low-turnout primary and combines the primary and general elections into one election in November, when turnout is higher and more representative of the community. We believe ranked-choice voting is the most effective tool to build civil, strong, reflective, responsive, and civic-minded leadership—at all levels of government—for the challenges that lie ahead." —The Sun Sailor

Ed. Note: Arne Carlson is a former Republican governor of Minnesota and Dave Durenberger is a former Republican U.S. senator.

545 migrant children still separated from parents

Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump Administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children. About two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing yesterday from the American Civil Liberties Union.

• — The Trump Administration officially instituted a "zero tolerance" policy in 2018 that separated migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program.
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• — Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 families separated from their children under the earlier pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found.
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• — The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms formed a court-appointed "steering committee" tasked with finding the families separated during the pilot program. The committee has been able to contact the parents of more than 550 children and believes about 25 of them may have a chance to come back to the U.S. for reunification. —NBC News

Krupnikov & Ryan: America's real political divide

"Hard partisans are...more likely to speak out about [their] political likes and dislikes. Almost 45% of people who are deeply involved say they frequently share their views on social media—in some cases, daily. It's only 11% for those without a politics habit. To put this in perspective, a Pew study finds that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 97% of all tweets about politics. This gap between the politically indifferent and hard, loud partisans exacerbates the perception of a hopeless division in American politics because it is the partisans who define what it means to engage in politics." —The New York Times

Ed. Note: Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, associate professors of political science at Stony Brook University, are the authors of a forthcoming book about polarization and disengagement in American politics.

MORE: Bokat-Lindell: Facebook and Twitter are still tinkering with democracy —The New York Times

Friends are the best medicine

The coronavirus pandemic is making everyone feel isolated, but for some families, it's an even bigger challenge. The Lookabaughs of Natrona Heights, Pa., are one such family. Eleven-year-old Camden is in remission from leukemia, and his dad has early-onset Parkinson's disease. Because of the health risks, Camden can't do any in-person learning at school.

• — So what did his teacher do? Tammy Buhr brought the classroom to Camden. His sixth-grade classmates from Harvest Baptist Academy took a field trip to Harrison Hills Park to surprise him with an ice cream party. The kids hid among the playground equipment and surprised Camden when he arrived.
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• — "He's on homebound schooling. [Buhr] doesn't have to do anything, [yet] she goes above and beyond in every single way. And just to see all the kids so excited to see him and see how excited he was to be a normal part of the class was just amazing," said Camden's mother, Chrissy Lookabaugh.
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• — "That's the one thing COVID has done, it's isolated people," said Buhr. "So the best thing we thought we could do is try to bring them together and play like kids usually do this time of year, except we have our masks on and we're social distancing." Camden was surprised and thrilled. "It means a lot because I haven't seen them in a really long time," he said. —CBS News
   
• Thank you to Jim V., New York, for suggesting this story!

Donald Trump's talk about keeping America great is as hollow as his soul. Trump is "great" at one thing—disrespecting those who actually do make America great. People like Dr. Anthony Fauci. If Trump thinks by insulting Fauci he is winning Americans over, he is sorely mistaken. Every one of us has had at least one good doctor in our lives, and often many. Unlike Trump, they don't just point out problems and tell you they'll "magically disappear." They use their skills and expertise to repair them, or at least compassionately do all they can to help you through a diagnosis they can't fix. Trump is obviously deeply envious of Fauci and others doing the hard work to manage the pandemic, so he lashes out at them. Instead of celebrating American greatness, he maligns it. How sad. —Carol M., Pennsylvania

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