IT’S POLITICAL: The lead story for many news outlets yesterday was President Biden’s blunder calling supporters of Donald Trump “garbage.” The White House later clarified that Biden was referring to the speakers at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, but the gaffe was already out of the bag. 

  Donald Trump says something astoundingly stupid or dishonest every day, so it was big news when the President slipped … and he’s not even running for re-election.

  Speaking of things Trump says, yesterday the man found to have committed sexual assault repeated his claim that he’s going to “protect women” over the advice of his staff who’ve told him to stop saying that. More than 55 million people have already voted and the turnout is heavily female, an ominous sign for Trump because the majority of women favor Kamala Harris. Yet Trump said at a rally that he told his advisers, “I said, well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” He was wearing an orange garbage collector’s safety vest.

  Harris has won over women particularly on the issue of abortion. In response to Trump yesterday on Twitter/X she said, “Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body. Whether you like it or not.”

POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT: Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters this week that Donald Trump has promised to give him “control” of several public health agencies, including the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture, if Trump wins next week.

  Kennedy said during a live stream event, “The key that I think I’m – you know, that President Trump has promised me is – is 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. Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture.” 

 Interestingly the health and environmentalist Kennedy is in bed with a presidential candidate who says climate change and global warming are a hoax. Climate change is a health threat to the world. Lisa Friedman points out in The NY Times that Trump has promised to end federal support for transition to clean energy and hamper conversion to wind and solar development while expanding oil and gas production. Trump has also said he would again withdraw the country from the Paris climate accord.

VOTER LOTTERY: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner sued Tesla billionaire  Elon Musk and his political action committee to stop their daily $1 million giveaway to voters in swing states who sign their petition to support the First and Second Amendments.

  “America PAC’s and Musk’s lottery is plainly not a lawful lottery,” the lawsuit charges. Pennsylvania law requires lotteries to be supervised by the government.

The lawsuit  also says, “America PAC and Musk are lulling Philadelphia citizens – and others in the Commonwealth (and other swing states in the upcoming election) – to give up their personal identifying information and make a political pledge in exchange for the chance to win $1 million.” 

THE WAR ROOM: North Korean troops have already arrived in Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine evidently getting ready to join the slaughter, according to the Pentagon.  Lee Woong-gil, a former member of the North Korean special forces unit known as the Storm Corps, told the Associated Press, “I think most of them won’t likely come back home alive.”

  The North Koreans have not seen combat and are mostly trained in their country’s mountainous terrain. Western Ukraine is wide open and flat. Another North Korean defector told the AP,  “I think they’re cannon fodder because they will be sent to the most dangerous sites and will surely be killed.”

THE BOYS OF OCTOBER: The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Yankees 7-6 last night to win their 8^thWorld Series title. The Yankees had a 5-0 lead but blew it in the 5^th inning with two errors allowing the Dodgers to tie it up. The Yanks never recovered.

  Freddie Freeman was named the Series MVP after hitting homers in the first four games and a crucial two-run single last night. 

  Parts of Los Angeles erupted into celebratory violence with looting and the burning of a city bus.

THE SPIN RACK:  The Supreme Court yesterday voted to allow Virginia to remove roughly 1,600 alleged noncitizens from its voter rolls just days before next week’s election. This comes despite a provision in the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to purge ineligible voters up to 90 days before federal elections. The three liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have denied the request by Virginia election officials. — A Republican-led House subcommittee has referred former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, accusing him of lying to Congress about his involvement in a state Covid report on nursing home deaths. They accuse Cuomo of a “conscious, calculated effort” to avoid accountability for his handling of nursing homes where thousands of people died of Covid. — Two Brazilian internet “influencers” drowned when the overloaded speedboat they were riding in capsized in rough weather. The skipper of the boat said that the two women declined to wear life jackets because they were taking selfies and didn’t want the life jackets to ruin their tans. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Russia has levied a fine on Google for refusing to pay previous fines for blocking pro-Russian channels on YouTube. The new fine amounts to $20 billion trillion trillion, more than the global economy.

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