See You Next Tuesday 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Sorpresa de Octubre:  The population of Puerto Rico is 3.2 million, at 5.8 million, the number of people of Puerto Rican descent living in the US mainland is far greater.  If Kamala Harris wins next week’s election, she may owe her victory to mainland Puerto Ricans’ outrage at having their home of origin referred to as an “island of garbage” because the repercussions from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s offensive warm-up speech at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally continue to reverberate.  Yesterday, Don Omar, another popular Puerto Rican musician, producer and actor who is known as the King of Reggaeton, endorsed Harris in a lengthy thoughtful statement in which he noted that 'Trump has shown us, time and again, what the thinks of us, and the thought of him and his administration back in power is deeply concerning.” El Nuevo Dia, Puerto Rico’s biggest paper weighed in with a Harris endorsement, saying that “The hearts of all of us who love this beautiful Garden of America, and of the world, clench with rage and pain. Puerto Ricans are a noble and peaceful people, who deeply love their island…. Is that what Trump and the Republican Party think about Puerto Ricans?” Jennifer Lopez who has got to be relieved to be getting press for something other than her most recent divorce, is now scheduled to appear with Harris at a rally in Las Vegas. Also, it turns out that the content of Hinchcliffe’s routine wasn’t a surprise to the Trump team, they prescreened it, and while they had him remove the part where he used the “C” word to refer to Harris before loading it on to their teleprompter, they left in the garbage smear. As to that “C” word, had it been left in, Hinchcliffe would have been in good company, assuming Elon Musk is still considered good company.  Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC posted a video, now taken down, that said “Kamala Harris is a C word…You heard that right.  A big ole C word.” To be clear the “C” word is just what you think it is, and was not, as Musk later tried to assert, a reference to Communism.  VP candidate JD Vance wants us to just get over the insults because of course he does.  Trump who can’t believe that insulting Puerto Ricans isn’t okay and probably still thinks that Puerto Ricans are deportable illegal migrants, brought his own token Puerto Rican supporters and one of his other broken toys, Cuban American Senator Marco Rubio, to an Allentown, Pennsylvania stage to prove that he really is an all-inclusive kind of guy and that the MSG rally, like the January 6 insurrection was all about love. While Trump was in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris was in Washington DC on the Ellipse delivering a widely aired, well received campaign speech to at least 75,000 supporters.  She combined her joy message with a warning about Trump’s plans, saying that while on day one he’ll be going after the people on his enemies list, she’ll be starting in on her to-do list.  The contrast between the two candidates couldn’t be greater yet the polls, at least the rather meaningless polling averages remain close. And of course, Trump and his acolytes are now claiming that Biden called the MSG rally attendees garbage, he didn’t, they misquoted his somewhat garbled Bidenesque statement but the “you are paper, I am glue taunt” works for children so why shouldn’t it work for Trump.  See you next Tuesday at the polls.

Admissions Against Interest: Mostly, Musk uses his money losing X social media platform to spew misogynistic slime and push election lies but yesterday in a moment of candor he agreed that Trump’s plans would cause a major disruption in the economy and “temporary” hardship to most Americans, or at least those who aren’t billionaires.  That’s an admission that Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, extend and add to his 2017 tax cuts, his promise to impose tariffs on almost all imported goods, and all of his budget slashing would be beyond disruptive, something that most economists have been saying for some time. Naturally, Musk thinks that Trump’s plans and the widespread pain they cause will be worth it, or at least worth it to him, assuming that Trump’s budget cuts don’t impact the billions in government subsidies he receives for his SpaceX and Tesla businesses or that he craves for Starlink.  Musk isn’t the only one making frank comments.  Though he didn’t broadcast his promises on X, Speaker Mike Johnson who has been hinting at his secret plan to overturn the election if Trump doesn’t win, told attendees at a GOP campaign event in Pennsylvania that if Trump wins or if he manages to steal him a win, his plans include massively overhauling health insurance, slashing and burning Obamacare because, really, who needs health insurance and why would anyone want to protect people with pre-existing conditions anyway? Remember when we thought that issue had been put to rest alongside John McCain’s thumbs up, forget about it.  Then there’s RFK Jr, he bragged in a Facebook post that Trump  who has said that he is going to let RFK “go wild on health” has promised him that he’ll be put “in control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA, which is – which, you know, is key to making America healthy.” We should take all that seriously, Endpoints, a pharma newsletter, reported yesterday that Trump’s embrace of RFK is raising major concerns in the industry because of his criticism of vaccines, his embrace of conspiracy theories and his threats to force out most of the FDA’s staff. To be clear, brain worms, excessive steroid use, dead bears, and whale heads are good, preventing communicable diseases not so much. Though he hasn’t weighed in on health care, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos did pen a justification of sorts for the paper’s decision not to publish its already written endorsement of Kamala Harris saying that though he never read the endorsement he believes that endorsements aren’t a good thing, or at least endorsements that might result in Trump taking a knife to his other companies’ government contracts are a bad thing.  Thus far more than 250,000 subscribers have cancelled their WashPo subscriptions, 50,000 of those cancellations came after Musk’s statement.

Shenanigans:  Apparently burning ballot boxes is now a thing or at least some people, mostly MAGAs, think so.  Two boxes, one in Washinton state and another in Oregon have been set on fire with hundreds of ballots damaged so much that they are no longer readable.  Election officials in many states are now equipping boxes with fire protective gear.  An unrepentant Steve Bannon whose acne appears to have been cleared up by his prison stay,  is now out of jail and has learned nothing from his time in the slammer.  He wants Trump to declare victory as soon as the polls close on Tuesday because why wait for all those absentee and mail-in ballots to be counted anyway. That’s not all that surprising given who he is and given that North Carolina Republican Congressman Andy Harris, wants his state legislature to just go ahead and award North Carolina’s electoral college votes to Trump now because who needs elections anyway?   

#BringThemAllHomeNow