Nor Gloom of Night: Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general who’s been dismantling his agency, promised in a Senate hearing that mail ballots will be delivered on time to count in the November election. “We will scour every plant each night leading up to Election Day,” DeJoy said in questioning by Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney. 

  DeJoy has slowed mail delivery, removed high speed sorting machines, and taken many mailboxes off the streets in the name of efficiency. He bridled at the suggestion that he’s been acting to affect the election or that he’s working at the direction of the President. “The insinuation is quite frankly outrageous,” he said, adding that he had “never spoken to the president about the Postal Service, other than to congratulate me when I accepted the position.”

  He did say he has “dramatic changes” in mind for the Postal Service, which will come after the election. DeJoy had planned to remove and destroy 671 high speed sorting machines across the country, many of which are already sitting outside in the weather.

  Even as the postmaster guaranteed delivery, President Trump continued to assail the integrity of mail ballots. He said yesterday that voting by mail “will be a tremendous embarrassment for our country, it will go on forever and you will never know who won. This is a very serious problem and something has to be done about it.”

  The big question is how and why DeJoy, a man with no experience with the Postal Service, got the job. Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that, “A full background check might also have revealed DeJoy holdings worth at least $30 million in USPS competitors and contractors. In June, DeJoy also purchased options on Amazon stock that might rise in value if the USPS’ ability to compete with Amazon is hamstrung.”

Going Negative:  After a party convention that was mostly a multi-cultural love fest, Joe Biden leads President Trump by eight points in the polls, leaving President Trump a big hole to climb out of if he wants to win. The NY Times  notes that George HW Bush was in a deeper hole against Michael Dukakis before he turned to harshly negative attacks and won the Presidency.

  Trump’s problem is that he’s been negative all along and has nowhere to turn. Yesterday Trump said in a speech to the Republican-aligned Council for National Policy in Arlington that, “Over the last week, the Democrats held the darkest and angriest and gloomiest convention in American history,” he said, “They spent four straight days attacking America as racist, a horrible country that must be redeemed.”

  The Democrats did spend a lot of time attacking Trump and they lined up die-hard Republicans to say they’ve abandoned the President. In particular, former President Barack Obama broke previous-president protocol criticizing the current President.

 Trump’s game has been to portray Democrats as socialist enemies of democracy who actually hate America. Yesterday he said that if he loses, “no one will be safe in our country and no one will be spared.”

Viral News: By the end of the day, and probably within hours, more than 800,000 people around the world will have died of the coronavirus.

  The United States has had 5.6 million cases, over two million more than Brazil, the country hit second hardest. 

  As of this morning, 175,416 Americans are dead of the virus.

Spycraft: A former Green Beret has been charged with delivering military secrets to Russian agents, the Department of Justice announced. 

  Peter Rafael Dzibinski Debbins is accused of releasing details to Russian intelligence about a chemical and Special Forces unit he worked with in the Army. Prosecutors say Debbins met with Russian operatives from 1996 to 2011 and was even assigned a code name, “Ikar Lesnikov.”

Flunked In: Actress Lori Loughlin, who paid money and passed off her daughters as varsity quality rowers to get them into USC, was sentenced yesterday to two months in prison in the college admissions scandal. Her husband, the designer Mossimo Giannulli, got five months.

  The couple had paid $500,000 to get their daughters special consideration. Laughlin said during her online sentencing hearing,  “I thought I was acting out of love for my children. But in reality, it only undermined and diminished my daughters’ abilities and accomplishments.”

The Bulletin Board: Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has been moved to a German hospital for treatment of what appears to have been poisoning. Navalny fell ill Thursday on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he had met with local opposition candidates. He’s in a coma. His family and aides claim he was held in a Russian hospital until traces of the poison in his body dissipated. — President Trump held a funeral yesterday at the White House for his brother, Robert. — Joseph DeAngelo, the former police officer who was once anonymously known as the Golden State Killer in the 1970s and 80s, has been sentenced to life in prison for at least a dozen murders. He’s 74.

Awwww. Mei Xiang, the 22-year-old giant panda at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, has given birth to a cub. Zookeepers say Mei Xiang picked the cub up immediately and began cradling it. The sex of the baby bear takes months to determine.

  It’s always a miracle when a panda cub is born. The species is in great danger and a female is able to become pregnant for only 24 to 72 hours each year. Mei Xiang was impregnated by artificial insemination.

  As part of the Zoo’s cooperative breeding agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, all cubs born at the zoo are sent to China when they are 4 years old.

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