Is Assange dead? Will Roger Stone rat out Trump? Did Republicans torch their own office? And what about THE EVIL PLOT TO TURN FROGS GAY?

Even if you're sick of election-related ads, check out the one embedded above. Looks like our old friend Alex Jones has finally made the big time. Poor AJ! Perhaps those devious MKULTRA scientists forced him to rant about ambisexual amphibians.

This video functions within a larger Democratic narrative which frames the GOP as the Party of Kooks and the Dems as the Party of Normals. This storyline works well for Hillary -- yet it has one major drawback:

Some conspiracies are real.

To prove the point, simply look at the career of Roger "Mr. Conspiracy" Stone, king of the dirty tricksters, longtime friend to Donald Trump, and frequent guest of Alex Jones. Stone's whole career has been one conspiracy after another.

And didn't Hillary herself once offer a warning -- a very accurate warning, as it turned out -- of a vast right-wing conspiracy?

By scoffing at the very notion of conspiracy, the Clinton forces may undermine their own credibility. After all, the day may soon come when they will want to decry an actual, non-imaginary dirty trick played on them.

A reader of this blog called joseph (with a small j) recently offered this comment vis-a-vis Trump's frequent charge that the election is rigged:

My biggest fear about this rigging charge is that it is Trump's projectionism. That is, he expects the Russians to rig the voting machines and now the Democrats can't say anything, having said that the results should be respected.

While the frequently-heard Republican charges of voter impersonation are ridiculous, I cannot discount the possibility that hackers could manipulate the computers which tabulate the votes as they come in from the precincts. (John Kerry's wife once called those devices "the mother machines.") As most of you know, the Brad Blog has published many serious, high-quality posts about the need for electoral integrity. This humble site looked into this issue at great length throughout the 2004-2005 period -- although, perhaps to my discredit, I've since decided to "let Brad do it."

I'm not saying that voting machine fraud in 2016 is likely or probable. But is such a thing theoretically possible? I believe so, and I'm not alone. That's why Brad Friedman and others have argued for a hard-copy "paper trail" which would allow for a by-hand recount. Trust but verify, as a notable Republican was wont to say.

And before you say it: No, my recognition of the need for ballot-box integrity does not mean that this blog will echo Alex Jones' warning about the menace of gay frogs. Some conspiratorial scenarios are more-or-less plausible, and some are really, really stupid. AJ is fond of the stupid ones.

Firebomb. Now let's turn our attention to the frightening attack on a Republican campaign office in North Carolina. Donald Trump immediately issued the kind of hyperbolic tweet one might have expected from a drunken Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office in Orange County because we are winning @NCGOP

Of course, all of the polls indicate that the GOP is not winning.

Hillary's tone was rather more presidential:

The attack on the Orange County HQ @NCGOP office is horrific and unacceptable. Very grateful that everyone is safe.

North Carolina Democrats immediately launched a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild the office. In very short order, they raised substantially more than their goal.

My question: Who launched the attack? Obviously, the Democrats had nothing to gain; they are well ahead in the state and they certainly could not hope to profit from any bad publicity. Conversely, embattled Republicans stood to gain from a false-flag attack on their own headquarters.

Many of you will recall that a young Karl Rove almost certainly bugged his own office in order to frame the Democrats.

I'm not the only one to consider the possibility of a false flag attack. The same idea occurred to Josh Marhsall, whom no-one would mistake for an Alex Jonesian plot-spotter:

I think it is wise not to make too many assumptions about the intentions or identity of the arsonist. On its face, the attack looks like it is anti-Republican in nature. But recent elections have also witnessed a number of incidents, either attempted or otherwise in which supporters of one party carried out attacks either on themselves or their own partisans in an effort to tarnish the other party. In other words, false flag attacks, usually of an extremely clumsy and quickly discovered nature. Lots of places have surveillance cameras these days. I don't say this is likely, only that it is a real possibility based on recent history.

Some of you may also recall the instructive tale of Phil Parlock. (Hit the link and scroll down to #4.)

Speaking of Roger Stone: Mr. Conspiracy just offered the most bizarre -- and fascinating -- tweet of this whole damned election...

It turns out the entity with which I signed a non-disclosure agreement for the #Trump campaign was never legally constituted #invalid

WOAH!

Sounds to me as though someone wants to write the book that we're all dying to read. Admit it: Don't you want to see an insider's expose of the Donald Trump campaign? If Stone can't fulfill his dream of becoming the president's consigliere, a hefty publisher's advance would be one hell of a consolation prize.

In response to Stone's tweet, Harry Shearer said: "So, tell all!"

More intriguingly, the superb investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald wrote:

then id like to ask you a question about an email of yours i have. nothing bad about you.

Later, Eichenwald added:

...that wasn't a joke by the way. if u unblock me, ill follow and u can dm.

Fascinating! And yet...and yet...

After Stone dropped that mini-bombshell, he continued to publish Bill-the-Rapist nonsense, and he indicated that John Kerry had evil designs on Julian Assange. Is Stone still on Team Trump, or is he now a turncoat? Remember: Roger Stone has been a political dirty trickster since 1972; we should always presume that he has something up his sleeve other than his elbow.

Speaking of Julian Assange: Not many minutes ago (at this writing), cryptic tweets gave rise to the rumor that Assange is dead.

Rumors that Julian Assange is dead have been spreading online after a strange set of tweets from WikiLeaks that some believe to be a “dead man’s switch” — an insurance policy to ensure that closely guarded information is released in the event of his death.

The viral rumors started on Sunday afternoon after the official WikiLeaks Twitter account posted a series of messages that appeared to be coded. Many users believed that the release of the tweets meant that something had happened to Assange, who has been at the forefront of American politics in recent months by releasing sensitive mails connected to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Gizmodo pooh-poohs the idea.

Much as these tweets provide great fodder for conspiracy speculation, the secret to their meaning is hidden in plain sight. “Pre-commitment” in this case is a references to a cryptographic scheme to prevent unreleased information from being tampered with. Essentially those unique codes are proof to anyone reading the documents in the future that their contents remain unchanged: alteration to the leaks will likewise alter those 64-character codes.

Oh, Gizmodo! I bet you'd also scoff at Alex Jones' theory of an evil plot to turn frogs gay.