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Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz said this on The Rachel Maddow Show last night: "I don't think President Trump realizes it. Many of the Puerto Ricans that are moving to the states, about a hundred thousand in the past few weeks, are going to Florida. So they're going to change the landscape of the election for 2018. And we're going to make sure that they vote. And we're going to make sure they remember who didn't help when the time came."

I got a lot of grief on Twitter—not complaining, that's what Twitter is for—when I tweeted this...

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I got grief for calling people from Puerto Rico "refugees." Puerto Rico is an American territory and Puerto Ricans are American citizens and by definition a "refugee" is someone who flees their own country for another country and Puerto Ricans are brown and speak Spanish and only racism could explain why I would describe Puerto Ricans as "refugees" in their own country. I have frequently used the same word—refugee—to describe gays and lesbians and bisexual and transgender men and women who flee small towns and red states for bigger cities and blue states without complaint. But as others pointed out after an earlier hurricane that disproportionately impacted people of color...

Hurricane Katrina created thousands of refugees who were forced into states throughout the South, and beyond. But not so fast. Media outlets have been deluged with complaints about the term "refugee." Civil rights activist Al Sharpton said, "They are not refugees. They are citizens of the United States." (NPR has adopted a policy of not referring to them as refugees.) In some dictionaries the definition of refugee is simply "one seeking refuge." But other dictionaries include the qualifier that the word is usually applied to a person crossing national boundaries because of persecution.

Others said it was too soon after the hurricane—and perhaps it was—to think about who would resettle where and registering Puerto Ricans to vote in their new homes and encouraging them to punish the Republicans who failed and have continued to fail the people of Puerto Rico, American citizens one and all. But with the heroic mayor of San Juan saying the same thing on national television it would seem that now is the time to make this point.

Anyway, Donald Trump won Florida by 112,000 votes.