Good morning! Sad day. Fun suckers Safety regulators are forcing a small English town to stop its 500-year-old tradition of… thwacking schoolchildren’s heads onto large rocks. RIP to a real one.

ELECTIONS

🎃 Spooky season meets scandal season

The closer to Election Day you drop all the dirt that you’ve dug up on your opponent, the better. With the proliferation of early voting, the classic October Surprise is becoming a September affair.

CNN dropped a bombshell yesterday on the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. The story claims Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, left some wild comments on a porn site from 2008 to 2012. Robinson’s alleged bangers include wanting to bring slavery back (he’s Black), calling himself a “black NAZI,” and being really into “tranny” porn because, er, “It takes the man out while leaving the man in.” Alrighty then. Moving on.

• Robinson’s a bit of a controversy magnet, so the new claims fit the existing narrative. That said, he strongly denied everything and called the claims “salacious tabloid lies.”

Robinson refused widespread calls to drop out of the race yesterday and that decision is likely final — North Carolina’s drop deadline was last night. So Republicans are stuck with the guy who was already trailing in the polls by 9%.

• The Trump campaign is reportedly among those who wanted him gone. Winning North Carolina is key to Trump’s campaign strategy.

• The presidential race is razor-tight in the state and Democrats are optimistic.

Trump strongly supported Robinson, whom he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids,” over other, normie Republicans earlier this year. So Robinson’s continued presence in the race, well, just ain’t good for business.

Attorney General Josh Stein is the big winner in all this. He’s the Democratic nominee. But Kamala Harris’s campaign is also hoping for a leg up — they’re already posting videos of Trump praising Robinson.

UNITED STATES

🪙 The Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced on Wednesday that the Fed would slash interest rates by half a percent in the first cut since 2020. The markets loved it. Biden loved it. Harris loved it. Trump was less enthused. JPMorgan’s CEO doesn’t think it matters at all. The rate here is the federal funds rate. That's baaaasically the interest rate banks charge one another for overnight loans to boost their cash reserves to the legal minimum when they come up short. It'll trickle down to your car loan eventually, but that might take a while. For reference, the cut takes the rate down to the 4.75% to 5.00% range. It was about 0.10% during the pandemic. In the before times? About 2.50%.

🚢 The Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing the two Singaporean companies that own and manage the cargo ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge in March. The feds spent more than $100 million cleaning up the mess. Not surprisingly, they want that little chunk of change back. The DOJ’s lawsuit called the tragedy “entirely avoidable” and blamed the companies for cutting corners and running an “unseaworthy vessel.”

🗃️ Iranian hackers stole data from the Trump campaign over the summer. Now the FBI and two other intel agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — say the hackers tried to hand the goods off to what was then the Biden campaign. They also sent the info to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico. All refused to publish it.

POLITICS

🗳️ Let (some of) the voting begin

Election Day isn’t for another 45 days. But, since the rules vary by state, the voting has already begun in five states. Alabama, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Virginia have all either started mailing ballots to eligible mail-in voters or begun early in-person voting. An additional 12 states will begin mailing out ballots by tomorrow.

• States typically set their own rules. But federal law does require that ballots be mailed out by tomorrow to overseas military voters.

• You can even vote from space. Most American astronauts live near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, so Texas and NASA beam some remote ballots up to the Space Station.

Back on Earth, the Teamsters labor union declined to endorse either candidate for the first time since 1996. They’ve supported Democrats in every race since, so chalk this up as a loss for Team Harris. Teamsters President Sean O'Brien blamed it on Trump and Harris not being able to “make serious commitments to our union,” but the numbers may tell a different story.

• Teamsters members were big Biden fans — a poll in June showed them supporting the president by an 8% margin over Trump.

• But a poll taken last week showed they prefer Trump over Harris by a whopping 27% margin.

Kamala Harris’s relative silence on manufacturing issues may be to blame. Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell (D) noted that Harris is from California, so talking about industrial policy doesn’t come naturally. But “She’s learning.”

• Harris’s potential troubles in Michigan don’t end there. A recent poll of Muslim voters in Michigan — there are more than 200,000 — showed 34% of them supporting third-party candidates out of anger over the Biden-Harris Administration’s support for Israel. Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016.

• Harris held an event in Michigan with Oprah last night for a discussion on women’s rights, the middle class, and more.

Donald Trump was set to appear on Sunday near Philadelphia at an event with the president of Poland but it was canceled. Polish Americans aren’t a huge demographic. But the key swing state of Pennsylvania's got 800,000 of them.

• Trump campaigned this week in New York City's eastern suburbs on Long Island and said he was “going to win” New York. The state hasn’t voted Republican since 1984 and that’s not likely to change.

• But Republicans hold a few of Long Island’s swingy House seats. Holding those could prove critical as Republicans try to hold the House as a whole this year.

• He didn’t technically get the Teamsters. But Trump did win over the A-list endorsement of… Lady Gaga’s dad. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

TRIVIA

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell — hold the berry — won her husband John’s old seat in Congress when he retired in 2014. Rep. John Dingell was the longest-served member of Congress in American history. How long did John Dingell serve in Congress?

Hint: Dwight Eisenhower was president when Dingell was first elected.

WORLD

💢 Tensions rise in Middle East after Israel detonates more hidden bombs

Well. It happened again. A day after remotely blowing up thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah, Israel came back for round two. On Wednesday, hundreds of walkie-talkies used by the group exploded across Lebanon. Tensions, needless to say, are high.

• Hezbollah is a political and militant group based in Lebanon (Israel’s northern neighbor). The U.S. and many other countries have officially designated it a terror group.

• Wednesday’s operation with the walkie-talkies injured around 600 people and killed around 25.

Fear not. Your phone is safe. This isn’t some sort of malware attack making old batteries go “boom.” Israeli intelligence operatives intercepted and planted explosives in these specific devices.

• In the wake of the two attacks, Qatar Airways banned pagers and two-way radios from its flights out of Beirut, Lebanon. Probably a wise move.

• The Japanese maker of the walkie-talkies in question said the devices were discontinued in 2014.

Hezbollah is furious as expected. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, admitted in a televised speech that he’d been dealt a “huge and severe blow.” But he confirmed his belief that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had committed an “act of war.” As he spoke, Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over the Lebanese capital as a show of force.

• Israel kept things going on Thursday with airstrikes in southern Lebanon. That's the area from which Hezbollah's been launching rockets across the border at Israel for months.

• Israel’s defense minister called this “the beginning of a new era in this war.”

The United States is worried Israel is about to launch an all-out ground war in Lebanon. With that in mind, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin did what all of us would do and went ahead and postponed his planned trip to Israel.

BRIEFS

• DOJ claims Google tried to destroy evidence amid antitrust trial over ad dominance

• Conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson plans Zyn competitor after company slams his joke

• Florida Alaska Man charged with threatening to kill six Supreme Court justices

• Venezuela forces rightful presidential election winner to admit defeat before leaving country for exile in Spain

• U.S. drug overdose rate falls 10%, still up nearly 50% since 2019

• U.N. group offers seven proposals in final AI report, including global AI fund

• 23andMe CEO “disappointed” after entire board resigns in protest of her plan to take company private

• European particle physics lab CERN shows door to hundreds of pro-Russian scientist

QUOTE

ANSWER

John Dingell was elected to the House in 1955 in a special election after the previous congressman passed away. He served for a total of 59 years and 21 days. The congressman he replaced just so happened to be his father, John, Sr. Including the two Johns and Debbie, a Dingell has represented the Ann Arbor, Michigan area in Congress since 1933. And counting.