Puerto Rico

And guess why :

BECAUSE PUERTO RICANS KNOW THEY CAN'T VOTE IN THE GENERAL ELECTION.

"Most people in Puerto Rico, I would venture to guess, they are not even aware that there's a primary going on," said Luis Pabón-Roca, a local political analyst.

He said the political atmosphere on the island this week is subdued compared to the fever that sweeps the island before local elections.

Some poll workers in small towns started abandoning the polling stations because turnout was so low, he said.

Part of the reason for the lack of interest, he said, is because voters feel the primary isn't meaningful since Puerto Ricans cannot vote in the general election.

The Democratic and Republican parties run the primaries and caucuses, and they allow U.S. territories, such as the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, to take part in the process.

But only the 50 states and the District of Columbia vote in the general election.

El Nuevo Día reports the Board of Elections expected to have 600.000 voters. The Clinton campaign bargained on a million and more. Less than 400.000 people woke up this morning with the primaries in their minds.

CNN called the island for Hillary Clinton based on exit polls five hours before the closing of the primaries.

They used exit polls.

To call a win for Clinton.

So what does Terry "am a bigger douchebag than Harol Ickes" McAuliffe say on TV, on CNN, while talking to mini-douchebag Wolfe Blitzer about the Michigan decision and Ickes threat to take their grievances to the convention floor?

Terry "Lord Of Douchebaggeoisty" goes on record as saying that exit polls are flawed and should not been used in deciding Michigan. That what the Rules and Bylaws Committee did was akin to what happened in Florida in 2000 and that in the end, they stole the delegates from Hillary Clinton.

Roland Martin, who's full of awesomeness, just said that McAuliffe needs to make a decision because he had just used exit polls to say that Hillary Clinton can beat John McCain in November.

The Clintonites are just fucking crazy.

My mother just called me from Lares after just casting her primary vote for ... I don't have to tell you who. She said that the local Univisión station, Noticias Teleonce, have said it doesn't look like Clinton will win the local primary.

Yet CNN here in New YORK is already calling the elections for her based on exit polls.

I'll give updates as I get them from the island.

Geezus fruggin cryst, the insanity of the Hillary Clinton campaign is just unbelievable.

She has a guy on CNN saying that tomorrow's primary in Puerto Rico is important because it will determine for sure that she is winning the popular vote. Not anybody in CNN has corrected this douchebag and told the audience that Puerto Ricans live in a commonwhealth, not a state and thus they have no executive, no senatorial and no congressional representation in the US government.

What does this mean?

Puerto Rico is a commonwhealth, a "free associated state". PUERTO RICO IS NOT A STATE. Puerto Ricans cannot elect a president. Citizens of the United States do not elect a president. The states are the only ones that get to elect the President of the United States.

This from the US Constitution, Article II, Secion 1 :

Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows:

Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.

The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list the said House shall in like manner choose the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each state having one vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice President.

The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.

So stop it, Stop It, STOP IT!

PUERTO RICO'S POPULAR VOTE DOESN'T NOT COUNT!

Sometimes you have to look into yourself to truly appreciate was around you.

While I was hanging out in NYU's CLACS department with economists working at the UN Cuban Mission, advisors to the Sandinists, and your run-of-the-mill academia babes and nerds, Puerto Rico was starting to see the bounty that came out of the assimilation wars of the 1980s.

As a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico during the 1980s you had to make a choice between the rockeros or cocolos.

As a rockera, I would have had to hold myself up as an English-only, gringo loving, boricua denying, wanna-be whitey. As a cocola, I would be reaffirming my negritude, paying homage to my family and my country's salsa roots and more importantly, upholding my country's cultural heritage as a Spanish-only creation.

I was one of those, just like the founders of Puya, who didn't see it as an either/or proposition.

Yet this cultural tension was very real and it happened for a very specific historical reason.

Mi silla en El Alambique, Isla Verde (Puerto Rico)

after i come back home from going home, i get this melancholy limbo of a feeling : that i have left a home behind in search of a home that is not there and yet is familiar and welcoming and soothing and incomplete for the lost years and the lost house because i have no real place to be home but the few couches and extra beds to crash on my families places and even my mother's house is this foreign, mold controlled zone in which my lungs collapse, my heart stops with the toxic molds that makes me feel unwelcomed and pushes me into the asceptic living of hotels with their climate controlled hells drowing the sound of coquis and the rustling of platain and palm trees in the middle of the night and making my body remember how to go to sleep.

after i come back home from going home, the place i come back to is so familiar and yet so removed missing the little bit of heart and soul and pain and laughter i left back in spanish with its ay benditos and ave marias and its tu sabes and its bochincheo with arroz con gandules and alcapurrias and habichuelas and sancocho de medio día and el cafecito para empatar.