First Tuesday in October

Starting in March, this year has seemed like a weird anthology TV show, with each month written and directed by a different team. We haven't had Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme yet; I'm hoping that'll be the season finale in February. This month we seem to have Armando Iannucci running the show, as the President's antics over the weekend suggest.

So here's how I'm spending lunch:

• With only 4 weeks to the election, a new CNN poll out this morning has Biden up 16 points among likely voters nationally. The Economist has him at a 90% chance of winning the Electoral College with the Democrats at a 71% chance of winning the Senate. Nate Silver has Biden at 82% likely to win and the Democrats 66% likely to control the Senate.
• Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah summed up the insanity nicely.
• Fareed Zakaria says we have an historic opportunity to make the world better in the aftermath of the pandemic: "Great leaders such as Roosevelt read polls to understand the nature of their challenge, not as an excuse for inaction."
• A Republican-aligned think-tank has filed suit against the proposed Illinois constitutional amendment that would allow a graduated income tax, perhaps because they're terrified it will pass.
• Sweden and Switzerland have gotten snippy with each other over the successor to Crypto AG, the Swiss security company that was actually a CIA-BND front.
• Via The Daily WTF, the UK government lost tons of data about Covid-19 patients because they exported large .csv files to the obsolete .xls format, which only stores 65,536 rows per sheet.

Tomorrow night will be the vice-presidential debate, which I will again live-blog. I can't wait.