IT’S POLITICAL: Fifteen million Americans have already cast their vote for president even as the candidates continue chasing voters.

  Wyoming’s former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney travelled with Vice President Kamala Harris hunting for the votes of suburban Republican women in battleground states while Donald Trump continued a campaign of fear mongering and lies.

  The unlikely Harris-Cheney duo appeared in town-hall-style settings before tight crowds at small theaters in the Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia suburbs.

  At times Cheney, the daughter of a former Republican vice president, took the hardest line against Donald Trump. “It’s not about party, it’s about right and wrong,” Cheney told audiences. From abortion rights to national security and foreign policy, Cheney called Trump dangerous for the country while describing Harris as the safer, reasonable choice. 

  Although she is anti-abortion, Cheney said abortion laws have gone too far in some states, endangering women.  “In places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing, to get access to women’s medical records,” she said.

  Cheney told Republicans who might secretly want to vote for Harris that, “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody.”

  In hurricane-devastated North Carolina Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration has spent money on migrants rather than hurricane victims.  “They spent a lot of money on bringing illegal migrants so they don’t have any money for the people that live here,” he said. Not true.

  Trump also rolled out a new big lie claiming that Harris plans to persecute certain religious groups. “They label Catholics as potential domestic terrorists and the fact is that they’ll be coming after you soon,” he said. “Christians will not be safe with Kamala Harris president of the United States.”

VERBAL ASSAULT: Members of the “Central Park Five” who were wrongly convicted of a 1989 assault and rape in the infamous “Central Park Jogger Case”  that inflamed New York  have sued Donald Trump for remarks about them during the September presidential debate with Kamala Harris. The five, one of whom is now a member of the New York City Council, claim that Trump knowingly spoke with “reckless disregard” for the truth when he said during the debate that they had pleaded guilty and had “badly hurt a person, killed a person” in the attack.

  Trump makes things up as he goes along. No one was killed in the attack. Although the five who were teenagers at the time confessed, were convicted and sent to prison, they were later exonerated through DNA evidence in 2002. They sued New York City and settled for $41 million in 2014.

  “He made it appear that they were guilty when in fact it’s been demonstrated that they are not guilty,” one of The Five’s lawyers told The NY Times. “It is devastating to be accused of these things all over again on national television to an audience of 67 million people.”

   Trump’s firebrand campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said the lawsuit was brought to “distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”

PRISONER of ZENDA: Former Marine Paul Whelan, recently released from Russia after spending more than five years in prison on trumped up espionage charges, spoke to The NY Times about his captivity, which started at the notorious Lefortovo prison.

  The Times reports: “At Lefortovo, he survived an emergency hernia surgery in the middle of the night at a hospital where, he said, half the overhead lights did not work, and when the doctors dropped instruments on the floor, they picked them up and kept going. Sent to a labor camp after his conviction, he endured a diet of bread, tea and a watery fish soup that seemed better suited as cat food, as well as once-a-week cold showers and long days sewing buttons and buttonholes on winter uniforms for government workers.”

  “It was tedious, monotonous and filthy,” Whelan told the Times adding: “You are somewhere you don’t necessarily want to be, you know, in miserable conditions, doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t really want to be with. You have absolutely no control over when you’re going to leave and go home.”

  At night, guards shined a flashlight in his face every two hours and he said he still has trouble sleeping. But Whelan was able to take some advantage of Russian corruption. Paying with cigarettes, he could buy meat, fruit and dairy products to supplement the miserable prison diet. He could also buy burner cellphones to keep in touch with his family.

SLEEPING WITH ELEPHANTS: New York Magazine’s star Washington political correspondent Olivia Nuzzi has been fired after an internal investigation of her “personal relationship” with former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi first met Kennedy when she wrote a profile of him and it turned into some kind of intimate messaging that Nuzzi said was never actually physical. 

  The magazine said its editors and a law firm pored over the Kennedy article and found no evidence of improper influence in it. A Kennedy spokesman had complained that the article was “a hit piece.”

  Whatever the Nuzzi-Kennedy relationship was, it ended her engagement to Politico writer Ryan Lizza. The two were writing a book together which is still headed for publication.

THE SPIN RACK: Disgraced and imprisoned former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has been diagnosed with bone cancer. — Four people were killed Sunday night in a fiery crash when a small single-rotor helicopter struck and collapsed a 1,000-foot radio tower in Texas. Reports say the tower’s lighting system had failed days earlier. 

BELOW THE FOLD: An airport at the South end of New Zealand has laid down the rule of limiting “goodbye” hugs in the terminal to three minutes in order to keep passengers moving.  The airport manager said that for those needing longer embraces there’s always the parking lot.

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