IT’S POLITICAL:  In the final days of the presidential campaign it’s down to “he said, she said.”

  Kamala Harris is capitalizing on Donald Trump’s claim that as president he would protect American women, “whether the women like it or not.” Harris called that “very offensive.” She said in Phoenix yesterday that, “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly.”

  The Trump campaign meanwhile  is pushing back at Harris supporter Mark Cuban who said on the ABC morning show “The View” that Trump is never surrounded by “strong, intelligent women.” The Trump camp denounced that as “condescending.”

  None of this has anything to do with the primary issues, the economy being number one with voters. Inflation has returned to normal but voters are suffering higher prices. Trump is hammering away at fear of immigration and Harris is focused on women’s rights … the right to abortion … to win the female vote. Tangential to that, she says Donald Trump is a threat to Barack Obama’s healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act. “Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” Harris said.

  Trump made repeated efforts to repeal Obamacare while he was president and yet he posted on his Truth Social website that, “Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act. I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing.”

  The candidates are zipping around the battleground states in their final efforts to win what may end up being a thin majority for either one of them. More than 58 million people have already voted in what is an impassioned election.

UNINHIBITED: Donald Trump said last night that former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney who endorsed Kamala Harris should be shot. “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” Trump said in an Arizona rally with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

  Dhruv Khullar writes in the latest New Yorker that Trump’s angrier, longer and rambling rally speeches and his increasing use of obscenity are signs of “age-related disinhibition.” He says, “His behavior has grown unnervingly bizarre, prompting new questions about his mental fitness and his emotional stability.”

YEAH, HE SAID THAT: Appearing on the right wing Joe Rogan podcast, Republican Vice presidential candidate JD Vance said this: “If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like, obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids. But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”

THE SHOOTING GALLERY: Two people were killed last night and six others wounded in a shooting at a large Halloween street celebration in downtown Orlando. Tens of thousands of people were there. Police tackled and captured a 17-year old male with a record of grand theft.

  The police said it was an event at which they formerly checked for weapons but Florida’s concealed-carry law now prevents that.

THE RAP: After 20 months of trial, Atlanta rap star Young Thug changed his plea to guilty on gun and drug charges in a deal that avoids prison time. 

  Prosecutors had deployed the controversial tactic of using Thug’s song lyrics to prove his criminal activity.

INSTAGRAM FAME: New York wildlife officials have seized P’Nut, a squirrel with half a million Instagram followers that lived with a family outside Elmira for seven years after his mother was hit by a car. It’s illegal to house wildlife in New York State. 

  Mark Longo and his wife Daniela say they run a wildlife sanctuary financed in part by online squirrel videos. It seems P’Nut became too famous and wildlife officials investigated.

  “Officers ransacked my entire house,” Longo told The NY Times.  “They made me sit outside for five hours. They wouldn’t even let me feed my horses.”

THE SPIN RACK:  A New York appeals court disbarred Kenneth Chesebro, 63, a lawyer who was a designer of the scheme to use false electors to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump. Chesebro had already pleaded guilty to a felony in Georgia. — Heavy rains and resulting torrents of floodwaters and mud have killed at least 159 people in eastern Spain. — The recently appointed head of Chicago’s school board resigned after the discovery of antisemitic and sexist posts on his social media, as well as a 9/11 conspiracy theory. On the latter, Mitchell Johnson wrote, “3,000 experts agree: 9/11 really was an inside job.” — North Korea launched a new intercontinental ballistic missile yesterday in continued testing of a weapon designed to threaten the US mainland. The missile achieved its longest flight time. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Satirical statues mocking Donald Trump and his followers have been mysteriously appearing in Washington, DC and other cities in recent days.

   The first was a replica of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, adorned with a pile of feces installed within view of the Capitol. Its plaque says the installation honors the “brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election.”

  The second statue was a replica of the torches carried by white supremacists with the dedication to “Trump and the ‘very fine people’ he boldly stood to defend when they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

  Another statue installed in a Philadelphia park behind a famed nude statue of a woman portrays Trump in a suit with a smirk on his face and his right hand in a lewd gesture.

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