Polio in every pot; Smallpox in every garage

“Whoever wins the White House next week will take office with no shortage of challenges,” he said Wall Street JournalThis is Greg Ip write this morning, “but at least one huge asset: an economy that puts its peers to shame”:

With another solid performance in the third quarter, the US grew 2.7% over the past year. It outpaces every other major developed economy, not to mention its own historical growth rate. More impressive than the rate of growth is its quality. This growth did not just come from the use of scarce labor and other resources, which could fuel inflation. Instead, it came from making people and businesses more productive.

A year from now, when Donald Trump makes his million victory lap to single-handedly save the economy from ruin, this will be a fun one to remember. happy thursday

by Andrew Egger

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did something remarkable this week: He made his brain worm contagious.

Last night, Howard Lutnick, co-chairman of Trump’s transition team, he was interviewed on CNN. Host Kaitlan Collins asked him about RFK Jr.’s explosive claim, made in a video call with supporters this week, that Donald Trump promised him “control” of America’s public health agencies.

Now that’s the kind of question any political hack of the Mendoza line could dodge in their sleep. You know: These conversations are ongoing, we have not made any personnel decisions, and so on. This would have been especially easy since RFK Jr. skied out on this very thing in 2016, boasting that Trump would make him president in a committee on vaccine safety which never materialized.

Lutnick, however, was not interested in ducking. “So I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr. and it was the most amazing thing,” he said. It turned out that Bobby had left him in on some things:

What he explained was that when he was born we had three vaccines and autism was one in 10,000. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines because in 1986 they waived product liability for vaccines. And here is the best one. They started paying people at NIH, right? I pay them some of the money for the vaccine companies. . . So what happened now? Autism is one in 34.

To be clear: the question of whether there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism it was exhaustively studied; not found to exist. The idea of ​​putting a lunatic conspirator in charge of America’s federal health agencies is almost too bleak to contemplate.

But what’s most fascinating about this interview is Lutnick’s tone of childlike wonder; atmosphere of: Kaitlan, you’re not going to believe this. We are all learning the most REMARKABLE new things from RFK.

Remember that Lutnick should be one of the adults in the room.

Yesterday, me wrote an article for the site examining the curious breakdown of messaging discipline surrounding the Trump campaign this week. RFK Jr.’s laudatory comments about his upcoming cabinet appointment were a big part of it. But there was also Elon Musk, who made inexplicably vague predictions of severe economic turbulence in the early months of Trump’s second term. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, who this week opened a new debate on health care policy with comments to donors, promising that Trump plans to “go big” with a “massive overhaul” of the structure of Obamacare.

Why all these losses over time, after Team Trump spent the entire campaign season pretending to be vague on so many key policy issues? The Lutnick interview offers a clue. It is a striking picture of a campaign team that rose hopelessly from its own supply. Or, you know, it could just be that worm in the brain.

by William Kristol

Charlie Kirk is angry.

Of course, Kirk is often angry. He’s a minor MAGA celebrity, and a prerequisite to being a MAGA celebrity is being mad at America today. And a key element of your job is to make other Americans angry—much more than they have any real reason to be—about the country in which they live.

Why is Charlie especially unhappy now? For women to lie to their husbands – for their own good. (Can you believe it? Who ever heard of such a thing!?)

What am I lying about? Their vote.

Charlie is deeply worried—he he said yesterday in an interview with Megyn Kelly — that women can “undermine their husbands” by letting them think they’re right next to them, side by side, sitting comfortably on the Trump train. But then, in the dark and dangerous secret of the voting booth, some of these women might vote for Kamala Harris, even though the husband is “working his tail off to make sure he can have a nice life.”

Betrayal! Subversion! Feminine tricks! Poor husbands of America, wool pulled over your eyes! It’s terrible.

Charlie seems to have been particularly provoked by an excellent Vote Common Good ad featuring Julia Roberts. A crazy husband, who apparently just voted, instructs his wife: “It’s your turn, honey.” As the woman enters the voting booth, the voiceover reminds us that this is a place where she still has the right to choose, that women can vote for whoever they want, and that no one else ever has to know.

Wife votes for Harris. Afterwards, the husband can’t resist asking in a slightly creepy, masculine way, “Did you make the right choice?” The wife replies, “Sure, honey.”

It seems that others besides Kirk are outraged by this ad. Some on the left are unhappy that the ad seems to accept that in today’s America, some women would feel they have to lie about their vote. But given the actual family structures in America today, it stands to reason that some women would choose to lie—or at least not be completely honest—about their votes in order to keep the home quiet.

Maybe this ad won’t be necessary in twenty years. By then, perhaps most American men will understand that crying is no substitute for thought, nor howling for persuasion. But this is a long-term agenda.

For now, this is a good ad. I trust that a number of women will follow her advice. (And some men, too, who may be unwilling or unable to be fully honest with relatives, neighbors, or co-workers.) The message is a solid one: Do the right thing, even if you choose not to announce it from the rooftops. The secret ballot exists for a reason.

Your husband may think it’s fine, as Donald Trump said yesterday in Wisconsin, that Trump will “protect” the women of this country “whether the women like it or not.” But here in America in 2024, women have the right to think for themselves and make up their own minds and the country’s interests.

They will exercise this right on Tuesday. Whether Trump — or, in some cases, their Trumpy spouses — likes it or not.

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SERENITY NOW: A New York Times title to grit his teeth: “Inflation is basically back to normal. Why do voters still feel blah?”

“Persistent pessimism is also a kind of puzzle,” he said Times reports. “The labor market has evolved, albeit more slowly, overall growth has been healthy and even inflation has more or less returned to normal. New data to be released on Thursday is expected to show prices rose 2.1% over the past year. Confidence has rebounded as inflation has cooled, but remains much lower than it was the last time the economy looked as solid as it does today.”

This is not rocket science. We’ll just speculate that the last time the economy looked as solid as it does today, half the country wasn’t told “we’re in the middle of the worst economy in history” by their cult leader. We are not fortune tellers here. But if Trump wins, we expect economic confidence to rise among Republicans in a matter of weeks, for no other reason than to tell them it’s all fixed.

WHO APPEARS EARLY? Trump had better hope that his… ah…unorthodox the appeal to female voters is paying off. Political rEPORTS this morning that “women are voting early in large numbers, far outnumbering men”:

Across the battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women make up about 55 percent of the early vote, while men make up about 45 percent, according to one study. Political analysis of early voting data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women vote earlier than men. But the high female voter turnout is encouraging for Democratic strategists, who had expected a surge in Republican turnout to result in greater gender parity among early voters.

Behold a compensating data point, though: Greg Bluestein from Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes today that “Georgia’s biggest early voter turnout isn’t in Democratic strongholds like DeKalb County or the hotly contested suburbs that surround metro Atlanta. It’s in sparsely populated rural counties where Republicans often reign supreme.”

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