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Real Republicans would kiss this ghouls thumbs.
Real Republicans would kiss this ghoul's thumbs. WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY IMAGES

He's back in the White House, horned-up and ready to infect: President Trump embarked on a dramatic return to the White House this evening, ripping off his mask, even though he's infectious and not fully "out of the woods" for another week. "Don’t be afraid of COVID," he tweeted this afternoon. "Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge." Will you shut up, man?

What do you do when your patient is the president? You let him do whatever he wants, apparently.

"Many students of Trump’s life and career have warned that he would be prepared to sacrifice anyone—even those closest to him—to spare himself the humiliation of a one-term presidency," writes Julian Borger in a smart essay for The Guardian, "but even they surely could not have anticipated how literal that sacrifice would be."

The man's a menace. The new Republican purity test is if you can survive being spit on by a COVID-positive Trump.

Can't wait: Still in the throes of COVID, he's out and proud and ready to show the nation just HOW STRONG HE IS!!!!!

Maybe this explains it: via the New York Times:

Nearly a third of hospitalized COVID-19 patients experienced some type of altered mental function—ranging from confusion to delirium to unresponsiveness—in the largest study to date of neurological symptoms among coronavirus patients in an American hospital system.

And patients with altered mental function had significantly worse medical outcomes, according to the study, published on Monday in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. The study looked at the records of the first 509 coronavirus patients hospitalized, from March 5 to April 6, at 10 hospitals in the Northwestern Medicine health system in the Chicago area.

Good luck, Joe: Make sure to bring that plexiglass.

Biden's busy wooing Cubans in Florida: He's in the middle of a live town hall in Miami. There's, uh, plenty to talk about!

đŸŽ”Closing time đŸŽ” 536 Regal cinemas in the U.S. are temporarily shuttering. This isn't a huge surprise, but it sure looks like the final nail in the big-budget movie theater chain coffin. I expect smaller cinemas and art house theaters to still have audiences, albeit small ones.

The Seattle Bike Blog is downsizing: The long-cycling blog is going part-time. The start of today's message from the editor:

I have been putting off this post for a couple weeks now, but I can’t avoid it any longer. The rigors of parenting during a pandemic have reached a point where I cannot keep up with the demands of running a full-time news site. So for the foreseeable future, I am pulling back to part-time.

I am not quitting, and Seattle Bike Blog is not going away. But I am letting go of the drive and pressure to have posts every weekday. And that necessarily means that I am also letting go of my vision of Seattle Bike Blog as a comprehensive news source about biking and safe streets news.

Read the full note here.

A little housekeeping on our end: We're in the middle of a fall donor push. The Stranger would like to reach its goal of 1,500 new donors by the end of fall! Help us get there here.

Seattle Parks is reopening Capitol Hill area playgrounds: But make sure to wear a fucking mask, kids.

I guess Gov. Inslee has to debate against Democracy-hating Republican gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp: It will happen live at 8 pm on Wednesday. This is their only announced debate.

Speaking of debates, we're hosting one next week.

A good point: If Inslee wins a third consecutive term as governor, he'll be the first person to do so since Republican Dan Evans in 1972.

Another good point:


We've got a date for Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination hearing: The Senate Committee on the Judiciary will hear the nomination beginning next Monday, October 12, at 9 am, and lasting through Thursday, October 15. They're gonna push that nomination through even if it kills them.

Seattle is getting a first-of-its-kind stand-alone facility designed for testing treatments for COVID-19: The facility is opening up on Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Seattle campus and will partner with multiple COVID-19-related clinical trials, reports Geekwire.

Tonight's spoopy movie pick: I'm attempting Scarecrow Video's 2020 Psychotronic Challenge, and tonight's challenge is to watch a psychotronic film that has "something involving the postal service or shipping or getting a delivery." I'm stealing Molly's pick and watching The Zodiac Killer (1971).