Managed to hold on to the Senate by a wafer-thin margin, but the Globe starts with the governor:
"Charlie Baker wins second term as governor" by Joshua Miller and Matt Stout Globe Staff | Globe Correspondent November 06, 2018
Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican who has spent years carving a reputation separate from his party and the president, won a decisive reelection victory Tuesday, buoyed by a strong economy, his embrace of comity and bipartisanship, and an opponent whose message — that Massachusetts needs to aim higher — fell flat with an electorate content with Baker’s leadership.
Turnout was on track to exceed any recent midterm election, lifted by antipathy for President Trump, but Baker wasn’t punished for being a member of the GOP: Voters in every region of the state gave him a strong mandate for a second term. Even in reliably blue Boston, he doubled his vote total from four years ago.
I voted for him because his running mate was the only woman among the four.
Democrat Jay Gonzalez conceded to Baker around 9:15 p.m. and echoed a similar message in defeat. He told the crowd at the nearby Fairmont Copley Plaza that in a time of divisiveness in national politics, Baker “deserves credit and our thanks for the civil, respectful, and collaborative approach he has taken to governing.”
As in almost all political contests across the country, President Trump, who is deeply unpopular in Massachusetts, loomed over the gubernatorial contest, but Baker, who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and has criticized his party leader on multiple fronts, managed to craft an identity a world apart from the New York billionaire.
While Trump thrives on explosive confrontation and incendiary attacks, Baker, a former state budget chief and health insurance executive, leaned into his reputation as a wonky technocrat. He reveled in being called boring, labored to avoid public conflict with the Democratic-controlled Legislature, and delivered public statements that were odes to pragmatic, bipartisan, and courteous governance.
Gonzalez, hoping to tether himself to the national anti-Trump movement, nevertheless flogged the incumbent for his promised support of a Republican ticket. Gonzalez’s attacks, however, never found a home with Massachusetts voters, many of whom happily quarantined Baker from the Trump-fueled backlash that helped drive turnout.
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Like Trump and supporters are is some sort of virus or disease in which he needs protecting from!
It meant Baker and Polito will remain the red rock in Massachusetts’ lapping blue waves. Democrats declared victory in races for every other constitutional office Tuesday, with Attorney General Maura T. Healey, Galvin, Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg, and Auditor Suzanne M. Bump all taking reelection.
I voted Republican for the other three, including two women, and found out I am one of the 25-percenters in Ma$$achu$etts.
Truth be told, I'm starting to feel a little scared.
For Baker, few political headwinds formed to buffet his reelection bid. The economy has hummed during his first term, the state’s public schools have kept their lofty rankings among the country’s best, and Baker did not stand in the way of several major initiatives, such as a new paid family leave program, even as they rubbed up against his past-campaign pledge of no new taxes and fees.
He also avoided sharing the ballot with a hotly debated measure that would have asked voters to create a surtax on the state’s wealthiest residents. It was felled by a legal challenge months before Baker seriously campaigned for reelection, or took a public stance on it. The court decision also robbed Gonzalez of a potentially potent political prod in what became a key tenet of his campaign pitch: Those who have more should pay more.
Gonzalez proposed taxing the endowments of wealthy colleges to the tune of $1 billion a year and pursuing an additional $2 billion in revenue through the extra levy on the state’s millionaires. That, he said, would pay for a number of promises that lacked details, including delivering more affordable child care and moving the state to a single-payer health care system, but a Gonzalez upset was always improbable. An obscure political newcomer when he launched his campaign 21 months ago, he struggled to generate the money needed to challenge Baker.
Baker has said, if reelected, he wants to focus on building more housing in Massachusetts, lamenting how many middle-class families are being crowded out of once-affordable neighborhoods, nd he’s said tackling climate change at the state level would be a major focus.
Comes as home sales have slowed.
This week, he also said he would serve a full four-year term if reelected, no small question given that recent GOP governors either decamped the corner office to seek US ambassadorships or turned toward presidential aspirations.
The Globe says he needs to spend his political capital in his second term and forget about 2020.
The apparent allergy to national office and focus on local needs feeds into how one political scientist last year framed Baker’s unyielding popularity: “He strikes folks as a decent guy and a good manager.”
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Related:
Incumbents win governor races in N.H., R.I.
Turnout is heavy as voters stream to polls in Mass.
Emma Watson even braved the snow to vote (I wonder how much state tax loot she is being paid).
Trahan defeats Green in Third Congressional District
Rachael Rollins wins Suffolk DA race
Elizabeth Warren beats Geoff Diehl to win second term in US Senate race
Was no sweat. Even I voted for her.
She was at the top of the ballot but the Globe put Baker above her.
"Voters reject Question 1, which would have mandated nurse staffing levels" by Priyanka Dayal McCluskey and Andy Rosen Globe Staff November 06, 2018
CANTON — Massachusetts voters rejected a ballot measure Tuesday that would have set strict limits on the numbers of patients assigned to hospital nurses, following a bruising and costly campaign that pitted nurses against hospital administrators — and nurses against nurses.
In resounding fashion, which was a complete shock to me.
Maybe something was wrong with the machines, and what was noticeable by its absence no matter where you watched the returns was not one reference to Russian influence or hacking.
The ballot question was as passionately fought as it was difficult for many voters to decipher. The result was a blow to the Massachusetts Nurses Association, a labor union.
Yeah, a real gut punch.
A coalition led by the hospital industry fought Question 1, saying it was overly rigid and would come with enormous costs. Opponents warned that hospitals would have to scale back on important medical services — or perhaps, close altogether — if the question passed.
About 70 percent of voters rejected the ballot question, while 30 percent voted in favor.
The nurses are “all disappointed, some teared up, others hugged,” but the Globe is happy.
Opponents quickly started working toward reconciliation. As the votes appeared to be heading in their favor Tuesday night, campaign staff at the hospital association headquarters in Burlington pulled down signs imploring voters to vote “No on 1.” In their place, the workers paneled a wall with signs that said, “Working as 1 For Patients.”
I don't know how replacing a sign with a subtle in-your-face one is going to help reconcile much.
A few minutes later, a cheer erupted inside the room where campaign workers had gathered.
The election result was not a complete surprise, as polls indicated that most voters opposed the measure.
An independent state watchdog agency, the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission, said in a report last month that Question 1 would require hospitals to hire as many as 3,101 additional nurses and could cost the state health care system more than $900 million a year.
The controversial issue even divided nurses.....
It was the state's most important ballot initiative, and I voted yes.
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Related:
Voters overwhelmingly support Question 3 on transgender rights
I said no and then asked where is the marijuana shop?
All other questions answered below the fold:
"Democrats take control of House, but Republicans still control Senate" by Annie Linskey Globe Staff November 07, 2018
It wasn't a blue wave, but it is an important splash that was probably the worst possible one for the Democrats.
WASHINGTON — Tuesday’s election represented the first time the nation’s voters have been able to respond to President Trump’s norm-smashing performance in his initial two years in office.
Trump’s victory in 2016 was fueled in part by voters willing to take a chance on the billionaire businessman. Two years in, his unconventional governing style and nationalist agenda were on the ballot, igniting deep passion on both sides.
Rather than focusing on the remarkably strong economy, Trump made immigration a key part of his message, stoking fears over a caravan of migrants heading to the border and releasing an ad featuring an undocumented immigrant who killed two law enforcement officers that TV networks declined to show after outcry that it was racist.
That issue will now fade from the news pages, along with the fraud.
His core supporters were also energized by the Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a spectacle that motivated voters who believed the #MeToo movement had gone too far by ensnaring the nominee in decades-old accusations of sexual misconduct. Kavanaugh’s nomination was approved, and Trump repeatedly mentioned him on the campaign trail.
His file will now be reopened as a death penalty case hinges on his vote (he voted to uphold the conviction).
If there was a unifying message on the Democratic side, it was health care. Many Democratic candidates in close races didn’t emphasize Trump — but said that dislike for him was a given among throngs of volunteers and newly motivated voters, some of whom were casting ballots for the first time. Indeed for many in the Democratic base, the vote was part of a resistance movement launched the day after Trump’s inauguration with women’s marches around the country.
Democrats also won a key governor’s race in Kansas, with Laura Kelly defeating Kris Kobach, the firebrand secretary of state who led Trump’s controversial voter rights commission. The party also won gubernatorial contests in Maine and New Mexico as well as Michigan and Illinois — bolstering their party in the Upper Midwest, but the Democratic Party faced headwinds in Ohio, where Richard Cordray, an ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren and the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was defeated in his gubernatorial bid.
In other words, they chipped away at GOP dominance in state governments.
Earlier this week, the president seemed to show some measure of self-reflection about his tenure when asked what he wished he’d done differently.
“I would say tone, I would like to have a much softer tone,” Trump said in an interview Monday with the Sinclair Broadcast Group. “I feel to a certain extent I have no choice, but maybe I do. And maybe I could have been softer from that standpoint, but I want to get things done.”
Later in the same interview, the president speculated that he could have lost ground if he’d offered a more unifying message. “But if I did that, maybe I’d be swamped,” Trump said. “You know, swamped, meaning with the other side, because I wouldn’t say their tone has been so nice either.”
He hinted that his tone could change after the election. “But that is something I say I’ll be working on,” the president said.
The election saw a record number of women launching campaigns for office with 529 filing to run for the House or Senate from a major political party, according to a tally kept by Rutgers University. Most but not all of them are Democrats.
Tuesday’s elections also had a record number of people of color on the ballot.
Voters across the country turned out in numbers approaching levels usually found in presidential years. There were reports of hours-long lines, malfunctioning voting equipment, and polling places that were unexpectedly closed.
But no Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Korean interference or malfeasance?
(Of course, the Chinese immediately switched sides after the result)
Democrats needed a net gain of 23 House seats to take control of the chamber. Republicans were hobbled by retirements, with 40 members deciding not to seek reelection. That’s compared with 20 Democrats who decided not to run again.
As if they knew what was programmed, 'er, coming.
In the Senate, the Republicans were always favored to keep their majority. They benefited from a favorable map, where 10 of the 35 Senate seats up for election were held by Democratic incumbents in states that Trump won in 2016.
The GOP held on to their seats in a closely fought Senate race in Texas, with newly minted liberal star Beto O’Rourke losing to incumbent Ted Cruz.
By about a point.
Trump was highly involved in the midterms and sought to boost his parties’ chances in these races by crisscrossing the country in the final weeks and holding his trademark rallies. The effect was to nationalize what’s more typically a loosely connected series of local campaigns, but the effort also caused voters in bluer parts of the country to see their votes as a referendum on Trump, rather than a local election. That included Leslie Kobylinski, 59, of McLean, Va., who said Tuesday that she likes Republican Barbara Comstock, the member of Congress who represents her Northern Virginia district, but would not cast a vote for her.
“I just feel strongly the less power Trump has, the quicker the country is going to regain some sort of decency and values,” Kobylinski said in an interview outside the church where she cast her vote.
Kobylinski said that Trump’s divisive language has ignited an ugly sentiment on the far right, that she hopes to combat by voting for a Democrat.
Last year, the administration’s hard line on immigration prompted massive demonstrations in airports and cities when he hastily enacted a ban on immigrants from several majority Muslim countries. He stoked divisions by his understated reaction to racial violence in Charlottesville, Va., last year. And he invited global scorn by enacting a policy of separating migrant families arriving at the country’s southern border.
Notice how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never received much discussion during the campaign?
In the final hours before voting, however, the president made some attempt to pivot back to an argument about the strong economy that he’s overseen.....
He wrote an op-ed for Fox News.
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Related:
"The line between the Trump White House and Fox has always been a little blurry, but in that moment at the Show Me Center at Southeast Missouri State University on Monday night at least, the fusion of president and network seemed complete. Trump has long relied on the network as his outlet of choice. The pipeline also works the other way. The president recruited his current national security adviser, John Bolton, from Fox and he is considering naming another former Fox personality, Heather Nauert, as his new ambassador to the United Nations as early as this week. His son Donald Trump Jr. is dating Kimberly Guilfoyle, who left her position as a Fox host last summer to “dedicate myself full time” to supporting the president’s political activities. Hanging around backstage Monday night was Bill Shine, a former Fox co-president now serving as deputy White House chief of staff in charge of communications....."
Hey, the other side has MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, etc, etc.
Also see:
Republicans lock down Senate control
Trump hailed it as an ‘‘all-out victory’’ in an apparent face-saving measure, but who really benefited?
A historic year for women, no matter who wins and loses
And the CIA.
Other winners no matter who won:
"Facebook, Google are election ad winners despite meddling outcry" by Todd Shields, Bloomberg News November 07, 2018
Even before ballots are counted from Tuesday’s elections, some clear winners have emerged, as Google and Facebook Inc. reap windfalls from political advertising after a season of controversy over online political speech.
Political ad spending is on course to set a record, exceeding expenditures in the 2016 presidential election year, with a total of perhaps $9 billion. Political ad buyers weren’t deterred by months of furor over election meddling by Russians using Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and YouTube.
“This was a test year for political digital,” said Kip Cassino, who works with research firm Borrell Associates after retiring as its executive vice president. “What they wanted to see was how many ads could they put on digital without people getting really upset.”
Digital ad spending rose more than 25-fold from the last nonpresidential national elections in 2014, reaching 20 percent of expected political spending this year at almost $1.8 billion, according to estimates compiled by Borrell. Kantar Media/CMAG, which omits some online activity, estimated 2018 online spending at $900 million, up from $250 million four years ago.
The figures show how digital sites, with their ability to target thin slices of the electorate, have assumed a prime place alongside traditional media such as broadcast TV, which is still prized for reaching large numbers of older voters likely to go the polls and accounts for the largest amount of political ad spending.
Like me.
Kantar estimated providers such as Tegna Inc. and Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. would see political ad revenue rise to $2.7 billion, up 30 percent compared with 2014. When local races are included, broadcast stations saw a decline in political advertising compared with 2014, to $3.5 billion, but remain the top recipient, according to Borrell’s estimates.
Local cable TV advertising sold by the likes of Comcast Corp. or Charter Communications Inc. was expected to jump 75 percent compared with four years ago, Kantar said.
“Everybody killed it this year,” said Steven Passwaiter, a vice president with Kantar, which monitors political ads.....
Yeah, third-quarter political ad revenue was up 17 percent, a windfall that proves that “political advertising remains quite alive and exceptionally healthy.”
Hey, at lea$t someone is.
Time to transfer you.
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Yes, “tomorrow the 2020 campaign begins.”
I'm already working on a post.
"Can American democracy come back?" by Joseph E. Stiglitz November 07, 2018
He's the former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank.
The United States has long held itself up as a bastion of democracy. It has promoted democracy around the world. It fought, at great cost, for democracy against fascism in Europe during World War II. Now the fight has come home.
America’s credentials as a democracy were always slightly blemished. The United States was founded as a representative democracy, but only a small fraction of its citizens — mostly white male property owners — were eligible to vote. After the abolition of slavery, the white people of America’s South struggled for nearly a century to keep African-Americans from voting, using poll taxes and literacy tests, for example, to make casting a ballot inaccessible to the poor. Their voting rights were guaranteed nearly a half-century after the enfranchisement of women in 1920.
Democracies rightly constrain majority domination, which is why they enshrine certain basic rights that cannot be denied, but in the United States, this has been turned on its head. The minority is dominating the majority, with little regard for their political and economic rights. A majority of Americans want gun control, an increase in the minimum wage, guaranteed access to health insurance, and better regulation of the banks that brought on the 2008 crisis. Yet all of these goals seem unattainable.
And now we find ourselves dominated by billionaire oligarchs (and most of them Zionist Jews).
How could the World Bank guy mi$$ that?
Part of the reason for that is rooted in the Constitution. Two of the three presidents elected in this century assumed office despite having lost the popular vote. Were it not for the Electoral College, Al Gore would have become president in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the Republican Party’s reliance on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and similar efforts at electoral manipulation have also contributed to ensuring that the will of the majority is thwarted. The party’s approach is perhaps understandable: After all, shifting demographics have put the Republicans at an electoral disadvantage. A majority of Americans will soon be nonwhite, and a 21st-century world and economy cannot be reconciled with a male-dominated society. And the urban areas where the majority of Americans live, whether in the North or the South, have learned the value of diversity.
Speaking of the South.....
In a democratic society, therefore, the only way a minority — whether it’s large corporations trying to exploit workers and consumers, banks trying to exploit borrowers, or those mired in the past trying to recreate a bygone world — can retain their economic and political dominance is by undermining democracy itself.
That strategy includes many tactics. Aside from supporting selective immigration, Republican officials have sought to prevent Democratic voters from registering. Many Republican-controlled states have instituted burdensome identification requirements at polling stations. And some local governments have purged such voters from electoral rolls, reduced the number of polling stations, or shortened their hours of operation.
It’s striking how difficult America makes it to vote, to exercise the basic right of citizenship. The United States is one of the few democracies to hold elections on a workday, rather than a Sunday, obviously making it more difficult for working people to vote.
America’s ideals of freedom, democracy, and justice for all may never have been fully realized, but now they are under open attack. Democracy has become rule of, by, and for the few; and justice for all is available to all who are white and can afford it.
Democracy is under attack, and we all have an obligation to do what we can — wherever we are — to save it.....
I'm doing my part.
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I'm told we need to return to bipartisanship, that the synagogue offers hope in a time of divisiveness, and criticism of Jewish protesters is distinctly un-American (and politically incorrect, too).
"‘Just really anxious:’ An America on edge votes" by Matt Flegenheimer New York Times November 07, 2018
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The question was not rhetorical.
“What the hell has happened to our country?” Steven Glassman, a local city commissioner, shouted at perspiring Democrats last week — kick-starting a parking-lot rally that would include police intervention during a shoving match over National Rifle Association signage; a conspiracy theorist with a bullhorn taunting a former US attorney general; and a sway-along version of “We Are the World” that felt ironic in hindsight.
“What the hell has happened?”
Well.
On Election Day 2018, the one so many had been waiting for, the one so many could bear to see arrive, lest hope be supplanted by more despair, and a campaign season’s journey across a cleaved America made plain that the state of our union is:
“Anxious.”
Over dozens of interviews across the country in recent days, Americans reported a kind of emotional pinballing about the verdict to come, the faith and the dread taking turns.
Yet there is something reassuring about a day with manifest stakes, about a Tuesday that will matter for many Tuesdays to follow. The urgency, and perhaps nothing else, is a matter of bipartisan consensus.
In snapshots from state to state, the scale of the moment can get lost at times, burrowed among the typical campaign fare.
Sometimes, the optimism has muscled through, sustaining political old-timers and newcomers who in the last two years have marched and countermarched, volunteered and pleaded with friends, filled town-hall forums for incumbents and fresh faces — many female and nonwhite — to hear their voices carry.
The left sees a civic awakening that would not have arrived without Trump’s victory, even if most of them would gladly exchange it for a Hillary Clinton presidency.
“I don’t care if I lose clients,” said Lynne Jones, an interior designer raised in burning-red Paducah, Texas, wedging a stack of Beto O’Rourke signs into her car over the summer, part of what she described as the most serious political engagement of her 62 years. “Politics is a dirty business, I’m discovering.”
The right speaks with gratitude for a White House dream realized.
“We believe he’s sent from God,” Kathy Kiely, 67, said of Trump from a mall food court in Prescott, Ariz., “to bring us back to where we used to be, and where we can be.”
Is that how he can keep campaigning without losing his voice?
More common, though, are the darker appraisals: of enemies real and imagined, of what awaits us if the national rupture remains.
“History always repeats itself,” said Robert Brock, 42, a Trump-supporting truck driver in South Daytona, Fla., forecasting a kind of modern civil war between conservative and liberal. “People aren’t realizing that.”
If so, then we need to break up these so called United States and let Washington, D.C., become a literal swamp again. We can become the United States of New England or petition to join Canada or something. The Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, Rockies, and West Coast can go their own ways.
It's the only way to avoid the bloodbath, and with any luck it may bring and end to the MIC and Empire -- a boon for the rest of planet.
Historians have reached for parallels lately and generally found them wanting. There is a measure of the ‘60s-style upheaval and hazard, they say, and some midterm echoes from 1994 or 2010, but the divisions feel deeper, harder. The cement is drying.
Actually, the 60's were way worse. It's just lost in the fog of history and generational memories.
At least in an overt sense. The surveillance has expanded much more with tools they couldn't even imagine back then.
“One of the great things about America is it’s in a state of constant reinvention,” said Jon Meacham, the author of books on Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and George H.W. Bush. “Great leaps in the life of the country — great innovations, great changes in the American story — have all been about people being curious and being inventive and striking out for the territories, both literally and figuratively, as Huck Finn did.’’
Oh, man, the myth of AmeriKan exceptionalism.
Do you know what misery striking out for new territories has brought on so many throughout the world?
“Right now,” he concluded, “Huck Finn is just watching Fox and getting madder.”
I'm Huck Finn!
At the parking-lot gathering in Fort Lauderdale — before the NRA sign skirmish, before the bullhorn interruptions — Delores Thompson, 65, from Sunrise, Fla., stood near the back with an “I Voted Early” sticker pressed against her top, beside a young girl in a “FEMINIST” T-shirt playing with her hair.
Young feminist playing with her hair?
Thompson’s candidate was Andrew Gillum, she said, the man who would be Florida’s first black governor, the reason she had come to stand in the heat, and a change was coming to America. She was almost sure of it.
“It’s time,” she said, squinting a bit.....
Almost, because he lost, but it was another razor-thin margin (along with Scott winning the Senate) so Trump and his team need to immediately take a look at that electoral map because as of right now, he isn't winning in 2020. Look where he lost the House.
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Speaking of conspiracy kooks:
"Pipe bombs suspect appears at Election Day court hearing" by Jim Mustian Associated Press November 07, 2018
NEW YORK — The man accused of sending pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Trump was ordered held without bail after his first court appearance in New York on Tuesday.
Cesar Sayoc, who was transferred from federal custody in Florida, hugged his lawyer after a hearing in which Assistant US Attorney Jane Kim called him ‘‘a serious risk of danger to the public and a flight risk.’’
How?
His bombs couldn't have exploded and he was living in a van down by the river.
He was arrested outside a South Florida auto parts store. He was living in a van covered with stickers of Trump and showing images of some of the president’s opponents with red crosshairs over their faces.
Assistant Federal Defender Sarah Baumgartel declined to comment after the hearing, in which Sayoc presented himself as polite and soft-spoken. The hearing lasted less than 10 minutes.
While Sayoc’s attorneys have not commented on his mental health, his mother wrote a letter to ABC News saying he has suffered from mental illness for years.
‘‘While I have not lived with my son for 35 years or even heard from him in over four years, I cannot express how deeply hurt, sad, shocked, and confused I am to hear that my son may have caused so many people to be put in fear for their safety,’’ Madeline Sayoc wrote in the letter, according to ABC News. ‘‘This is not how I raised him or my children.’’
The pre$$ didn't tell us you were estranged for so long.
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I don't mean to throw stones but maybe they should build a wall (if it's good enough for Israel, it should be good enough for us):
"A Bangladeshi immigrant convicted Tuesday of terrorism charges after setting off a pipe bomb in New York City’s busiest subway station at rush hour told the trial judge he was angry at President Trump and didn’t carry out the attack for the Islamic State group. The verdict against Akayed Ullah was returned in Manhattan federal court after a trial in which the defense maintained that he intended to kill only himself last Dec. 11. Nobody died, and most of the injuries were not serious. After the verdict was announced and the jury left the room, Ullah spoke out, telling the judge: ‘‘I was angry with Donald Trump because he says he will bomb the Middle East and then he will protect his nation.’’ Judge Richard Sullivan told him: ‘‘Right now is not the time for a statement.’’ Ullah repeatedly told Sullivan he did not carry out the attack for the Islamic State group. Sentencing was scheduled for April 5, when Ullah faces a mandatory 30-year prison sentence and could be sent to prison for life. Prosecutors said he wanted to maim or kill commuters as part of a ‘‘lone wolf’’ terrorist attack on behalf of the terrorist organization. They disputed the defense claim, saying Ullah would not have worn a bomb had he wanted to kill only himself. They also cited social media postings by Ullah, as well as comments he made after his arrest to investigators. The verdict capped a weeklong trial that featured surveillance video of Ullah the morning when his pipe bomb sputtered, seriously burning him in a corridor beneath Times Square and the Port Authority bus terminal, where most subway lines converge. At trial, Ullah was confronted with his post-arrest statements and his social media comments, such as when he taunted Trump on Facebook before the attack. The president later demanded tightened immigration rules. Authorities said Ullah’s radicalization began in 2014 when he started viewing materials online, including a video instructing Islamic State supporters to carry out attacks in their homelands."
Yeah, that always leads to violence.
Related:
Conspiracy charges stand against Chicago officers
The undercover police fabricated the case by planting a toy gun on him.
6 arrested in suspected plot to attack French leader Macron
The plan to target the French president appeared to be vague and unfinished, but violent, the official said.
In other words, it was another mind-manipulating psyop.
"London police said Tuesday that they have arrested six men over a video that showed a cardboard model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire — an act condemned by bereaved families and survivors of the apartment-block blaze that killed 72 people. The Metropolitan Police force said five men turned themselves in at a police station late Monday and were arrested on suspicion of a public order offense after allegedly creating a copy of the fire-ravaged west London public housing tower. Survivors of the blaze expressed disgust at the video, and called the burning of the model a ‘‘vile act.’’ Although it was not clear when the video was taken, it emerged on social media at a time of year when Britons celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. Many across the country light fireworks and bonfires to mark Fawkes’s failure to blow up Parliament in 1605....."
I think it is. It's to incite an emotional reaction and direct outrage toward a carload cutout and not the actual event brought about by government and corporate negligence.
Sorry for forgetting the 5th of November.
Didn't they name a street after him?
"Chancellor Angela Merkel’s once-unassailable position in German politics endured yet another blow Sunday as support for her party fell precipitously in a state that has long been a national bellwether, projected results showed. The outcome was just the latest indication Merkel’s grip on power is slipping....."
After reports that she was ready to step down to avoid trial, she fled to Brazil before going missing and presumed dead.
Why being stiffed by Amazon is a good thing
Because it could be another GE, who just put their new headquarters on the market.
Turns out they are moving to a jar:
"Placing a jar of feces on a pedestal next to him, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates made a plea Tuesday for the safe disposal of human waste as he kicked off a ‘‘Reinvented Toilet’’ Expo in China. ‘‘You might guess what’s in this beaker — and you’d be right. Human feces,’’ the former CEO of software giant Microsoft said. ‘‘This small amount of feces could contain as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.’’ He went on to say that pathogens like these cause diseases that kill nearly 500,000 children under the age of 5 every year. More than 20 companies and academic institutions are exhibiting new toilet technologies at the three-day expo in Beijing, from self-contained toilets to a small-scale, self-powered waste treatment plant called the Omni Processor. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Gates co-founded with his wife, has spent more than $200 million since 2011 to stimulate research and development of safe sanitation technology."
You are what you eat:
"Those who crave the tastes of Thanksgiving no longer have to wait for the meal to be cooked. Pringles is selling chips that taste like turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. The limited-edition chips are not available in stores. The three-pack stackable mini cans are at the kelloggstore.com. They cost $14.99. The snack brand produced eight Thanksgiving flavors last year that came in a TV dinner-style tray. Those flavors included mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and cranberry sauce-flavored chips."
Come to think of it, my stomach doesn't feel too good.
Must have been the cake.
US stocks climb in thin volume as Americans vote
Nobody wanted to ‘‘make a big bet in front of the elections.’’
Number of job openings down slightly in September
Workers continue to struggle as companies plan fewer holiday parties this year (driven by concerns over concerns over drunk driving).
