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After an evening spent in white ties and tails at the Al Smith dinner gently ribbing each other, the tone of those jokes today turned much more pointed, as the two men readied for their third and final debate in Florida on Monday.

It's been more than five months since Russia's Vladimir Putin officially moved war planes and other military assets into Syria. The false talking point has been the Russians are there to fight ISIS, when in fact, they're in the country to prop up longtime Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad in the ongoing civil war and to gain influence and power in the volatile region.

H. L. Mencken, a columnist who gloried in the sweaty pageantry and funny-hat hokum of early-twentieth-century nominating Conventions, would surely have savaged the two-dimensional Presidential campaign of our pandemic summer. Mencken lampooned the quadrennial bacchanals of his day, but he clearly relished their madness. Writing of the 1924 Democratic National Convention, a sixteen-day affair

US forces conducted airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against five facilities the Pentagon says are tied to an Iranian-backed militia blamed for a series of attacks on joint US-Iraq military facilities housing American forces.

The strikes occurred at about 11 a.m. ET on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. They stand as the first significant military response in retaliation