Get Out the Vote: President Trump was in Pensacola, Fla. last night for a rally that was really a campaign stop for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore without actually going to Alabama. Pensacola shares the local television market with Mobile, Ala.

The president came right out and said Alabama voters should elect Moore, who’s been accused of molesting teenage girls.

“Get out and vote for Roy Moore” in Tuesday’s Senate special election, the President urged the crowd. “Do it. Do it,” Trump said, adding that, “We cannot afford — this country, the future of this country — cannot afford to lose a seat in the very, very close United States Senate. We can’t afford it, folks. We can’t.”

Polling puts the race between Moore and Democrat Doug Jones so close that it’s within the statistical margin of error.

In his speech, Trump also railed against his old opponent Hillary Clinton aide with the crowd chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!” and took credit for the rising stock market. He denounced Abraham Lincoln as “a regulation guy,” repeated his claim that President Obama had his phones tapped, and claimed America has “a rigged system.”

The Russia Thing: The FBI warned presidential aide Hope Hicks twice that Russian agents had tried to make contact with her during the transition period, according to a report in The NY Times.

There’s no indication that Hicks did anything wrong. The report says she was the recipient of several introductory emails from suspicious sources. The paper says, “Senior F.B.I. counterintelligence agents met with Ms. Hicks in the White House Situation Room at least twice, gave her the names of the Russians who had contacted her, and said that they were not who they claimed to be.”

Econ 101: In a sign of a strengthening economy, employers added 228,000 jobs last month. For the first time ever, employers have added jobs for 86 months in a row. Unemployment held at 4.1 percent.

How long this will last is beginning to be a question. The economy is within the historically statistical range of entering a recession. The Republican tax plan, intended to be a stimulus, could be the tipping point.

Nick Bilton writes in Vanity Fair, “My colleague William D. Cohan, who spent more than a decade on Wall Street before joining Vanity Fair, told me on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive that the Dow’s run could soon be coming to an end. Cohan predicts that the culmination of Republicans’ tax plan could signal the beginning of a recession similar to 2008, which could slow the economy, facilitate a drop in housing prices, and crater Wall Street.”

Storm Deaths: Although the official number of Hurricane Maria deaths in Puerto Rico is 62, the number is actually 1,052, according to an analysis by The NY Times.

  The paper says, “The Times’s analysis found that in the 42 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Sept. 20 as a Category 4 storm, 1,052 more people than usual died across the island. The analysis compared the number of deaths for each day in 2017 with the average of the number of deaths for the same days in 2015 and 2016.”

Getting little attention in the news, Puerto Rico is struggling to recover. More than 30 percent of the island is still without power.

Police Beat: A day after a former Mesa Arizona police officer was acquitted of murder in the shooting of an unarmed man in a hotel corridor, the judge in the case released graphic video of the incident.

Philip Brailsford made repeated threats to shoot Daniel Shaver if he did not follow instructions. Shaver, who was on the floor, made some mistakes positioning his hands and feet, but he was crawling on hands and knees begging for his life when Brailsford fired his assault rifle five times.

Brailsford testified that he believed Shaver was reaching for a gun.

The Weinstein Effect: After first saying he would leave in January, Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks abruptly resigned yesterday after a report surfaced that he had offered a staff member $5 million to have a surrogate baby for himself and his wife.

He’s reported to be one of the richest members of Congress. He and his wife have two children born by surrogates.

“After discussing options with my family,” Franks said in a statement, “we came to the conclusion that the best thing for our family now would be for me to tender my previous resignation effective today.”

It’s Winter: An early winter storm dropped a snow from as far south as Brownsville, Texas — near the border of Mexico — up through southern Louisiana and parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the southern Appalachians. The storm is expected to keep moving all the way up the East Coast through Maine today and tomorrow.

Breaking: Following the Matt Lauer disaster, NBC News announced Friday that it will require sexual harassment-prevention training for all its employees. Evidently the men at NBC need to be told not to drop their pants in front of female employees.

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