I happened to watch 48 hours on CBS last night and the report was new regarding this case. What I learned was that BOTH were on SSRI ANTIDEPRESSANTS.
Maybe I missed it or am forgetting, but the Globe certainly minimized that angle if they covered it at all.
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Top down:
"In Michelle Carter’s hometown, opinions vary on justice of her sentence" by Travis Andersen Globe Staff August 04, 2017
PLAINVILLE — In this town of 8,700, until now perhaps best known for its slot machine parlor and harness racing track, Michelle Carter’s sentence this week for involuntary manslaughter brought shock about the dramatic details from the trial and not a little dismay about the young defendant who lives here.
Carter has kept a low profile in town since the details of the case became public.
“She’s lucky that’s all that she got, as far as I’m concerned,” said Rich Hurd, 62, as he walked his dog on South Street, a main thoroughfare. “I think it’s a little light. What she did was cruel — mentally cruel.”
Why don't you burn her at the stake tonight, 'eh?
Carter would later become a pariah when the public learned that, as a 17-year-old in a long-distance relationship with Roy, she sent him a series of texts urging him to commit suicide.
The two called themselves a couple but had met in person only a few times.
Their relationship was based mainly on social media chats that became increasingly macabre in the days leading up to Roy’s suicide, and on the day of Roy’s death in July 2014, Carter ordered him back into a truck that was filling fast with carbon monoxide in a Fairhaven parking lot. Then she listened on her phone as he choked to death on the fumes.
Related:
"The criminal case hinged on whether Carter’s words over a series of text messages made her criminally responsible for Roy’s death in July 2014. From 30 miles away, Carter, then 17, ordered Roy back into a truck that was quick filling with carbon monoxide...."
This is a tragic case on both sides; however, how do you order someone by text from miles away? There is more going on than the simplistic way the Globe frames the issue. She didn't physically force him back in. This looks more like a test case to criminalize speech than anything else. Someone can claim your words made them kill themselves, when we all know there are many more things involved than just that.
Btw, who ordered all the mass-murdering wars based on lies and what pre$$ organs blared them from their front pages? Isn't there some responsibility there?
Carter, who like Roy struggled with mental health issues, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in June and sentenced Thursday to 2½ years in prison, with half the term suspended. She was allowed to remain free during her appeal.
Oh, she had health issues, too, huh? That's new. According to the lead-in of this article, she was a popular girl that everyone liked with a bright future ahead.
There was no answer Friday at her family’s home on Tanglewood Road.
Elsewhere in the town, opinions varied on whether she received an appropriate sentence.
Hurd said text communications can hold a lot of sway over vulnerable young people, so Carter’s culpability is high in Roy’s death.
Imagine having television stations and newspapers to get your point across.
“She was encouraging him to go through with it,” Hurd said. “It’s the morality aspect. She did it with intent.”
But Jessica Fisher, 53, another dog walker on South Street, had a different view.
She said Carter doesn’t belong in jail, even though “it’s kind of crazy what she did.”
Still, Fisher said, “she didn’t kill him,” adding that adolescents often don’t grasp the impact of their words.
“With young kids, with texting and all that, they’re not empathetic,” she said. “They don’t know how to communicate and socialize with people. That stuff should have been considered.”
We are all losing that skill as the smartphones atomize us all and make us oblivious to the world around us (myself excepted, and I see it all around me. At the stop light, walking down the street, sitting with friends).
Several people closer to Carter’s age, though, said that they were appalled by the texts and felt she deserved a stiffer sentence.
At Plainville Commons, two women, both 20, shopping at T.J. Maxx said Carter should spend at least five years behind bars. “Reading those text messages was horrific,” said Emma Nelson of Attleboro. “I can’t imagine saying that to someone I loved.”
I don't think love was involved.
Her friend Kelly Murray, also of Attleboro, said she had a visceral reaction to Carter’s messages.
“I could feel it in my stomach,” Murray said. “You can’t really get your head around how someone would say that.”
At the same time, Nelson said, she feels bad for Carter’s younger sister, who has to carry the weight of being a sibling of someone publicly reviled. “That must be so hard,” Nelson said.
???????????
Former Plainville selectman Charles Smith also felt a five-year sentence would have been appropriate.
“A person died because of what she did,” Smith said outside a local post office. “She could have said, ‘Get out of the truck.’ ”
I refer you to the comments above regarding mass-murdering wars based on lies, those who ordered them, and those who promoted them on their damn front pages. All we got was some half-hearted apology that blamed their sources for the stenography.
Down the street at An Unlikely Story, a popular bookstore and cafe, 17-year-old Addie Santos said the case filled her with rage.
“It just made me really angry,” Santos said. “When you’re 17 and you have that mind-set, you know what you’re doing.”
You bringing the matches?
She said that a jail term was warranted, a view echoed by her friend, Ben Matos, 17.
“Just the fact that she encouraged him to commit suicide,” he said. “A juvenile is treated differently, but at 17 you’re pretty much an adult. You should be treated like the rest.”
Maybe they should be allowed to consume alcohol then.
While many people held strong opinions about the case Friday, no one mentioned recent sightings of Carter or her family, who appear to be staying out of view between court dates.
The two 18-year-olds who attended King Philip with her recalled that she was largely shunned by classmates when she returned to school after the news first broke.
“Most of them were scared,” the grad from Norfolk said.
She and her friend from Plainville, while reluctant to weigh in on Carter’s jail sentence, were certain of one thing: She needs continued mental health treatment.
“I feel like she either needs longer [prison time] or she needs help,” the Norfolk teen said.
“Help,” her friend repeated....
The poor girl.
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Related: Michelle Carter Is a Russian Agent
I just want to clarify that I am not trying to make light of the tragedy or the pain of the families. I've been there. What I am trying to point out is the arbitrary narratives the agenda-pushing, mind-manipulating pre$$ applies in framing the issue and playing to your emotions.
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"Venezuela ushers in new loyalist assembly as opposition vows ‘rebellion’" by Mariana Zuñiga Washington Post August 04, 2017
CARACAS — An increasing number of foreign governments have sided with the opposition.
Would we be told of those who support them, and would those states not also be demonized by this $h** CIA pre$$?
The Vatican joined a chorus of worldwide condemnation, calling for the suspension of the new ‘‘Constituent Assembly’’ and demanding the government not use excessive force against demonstrators.
Like those pooper-pumpers have any moral authority about anything. I'm not endorsing violence or anything of the sort; I'm simply pointing out the hypocritical standing of those spewing morality.
The nation’s crumbling economy continued to move closer to the abyss.
The Venezuelan government and pre$$ don't lie to them like up here?
In a nation where malnutrition is soaring amid food and medical shortages, the near worthless currency, the Bolivar, has entered a free fall. Since Sunday’s election, it has shed nearly 83 percent against the dollar on the black market, doubling the cost of bread and tomatoes in less than a week.
This is the kind of thing the CIA does to "make the economy scream," as it was once said in regard to Chile.
What it makes clear is that unless you are some fa$ci$t right-winger, the U.S. won't tolerate you. What hurts Venezuela as opposed to other nations is the vast oil deposits that it sits upon.
You see, when you are planning World War III you look at Venezuela as a gas pump for the war machine, one that is difficult for the enemy to get at (as opposed to that troublesome Middle East/Central Asian region), what with the two oceans between us, Russia, and China (those other areas in their back yards).
In a supermarket in eastern Caracas, shoppers expressed sticker shock and despair.
Early Friday, Maduro’s government released one of two opposition leaders hauled to jail in predawn raids Tuesday. Antonio Ledezma, former mayor to Caracas, was returned to house arrest, according to his wife. But another opposition leader, Leopoldo López, remained in the infamous Ramo Verde prison southwest of the capital.
I'm sorry, say again? They released a guy? Do dictatorships do that?
Even as opponents organized a march, fears grew of a larger crackdown on dissent.
The new legislative body will have powers to rewrite the constitution and revamp Venezuelan law. Speaking to its members earlier this week, Maduro urged them to remove the immunity from prosecution granted to the country’s existing legislators. Most of those legislators are government opponents.
Maduro also called on them to create laws that could condemn antigovernment agitators to ‘‘30 years in jail.’’ Already, a number government opponents have sought refuge in Chile’s Embassy in Caracas, while at least one has sought asylum in Panama.
‘‘What did the opposition do on July 30?’’ Maduro said, referring to the date of the Constituent Assembly vote. ‘‘They went crazy on Twitter.’’
“Only with the tweets they published, it’s enough to send them to prison for 30 years,’’ Maduro told the new assembly. “That’s your job, not mine any more. To do justice in the coming days, will be the job of the Constituent Assembly. And to eliminate the parliamentary immunity that generates impunity.’’
You know, it's their country. What are you supposed to do with subversive traitors working for a foreign power?
In Plaza Bolivar, in front of the legislative palace, businesses were open as usual, and vendors were selling coffee and cigarettes amid signs with slogans such as “Chavez more alive than ever before.’’
Then the humanitarian crisis they wave in our faces must not be that bad, unlike the unreported rubble of Raqqa and Mosul these days.
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Yeah, ‘‘blame the government and its socialist policies. They’ve ruined the country.’’
I wonder how long his term will be.
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"Modern-day presidential vacations are often fraught with political concerns — so a president really can’t win on this front....."
Especially with a hateful, hatcheting pre$$.
State agrees with Trump administration to delay long-awaited water pollution rules
Related: Mercurial Monday
Yeah, they really care about the water here.
"Leak investigations triple under Trump, Sessions says" by Charlie Savage New York Times August 04, 2017
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new counterintelligence unit to manage the cases.
Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, who appeared Friday on Fox News, raised the possibility that lie detector tests might be given to the small number of people in the West Wing and elsewhere with access to transcripts of Trump’s phone calls. ‘‘It’s easier to figure out who’s leaking than the leakers may realize,’’ she said.
I'm having a really hard time figuring out the players and internal machinations from behind the scenes. The overall battle is clear, though (h/t). Trump does not want another big war and “thus far … no one in the administration can move Trump to start a war because he doesn't want to have his Iraq.”
Really, what choice does he have if the world will end??
Barack Obama’s administration oversaw a crackdown on people who talked to reporters about government secrets without authorization, bringing more leak-related criminal cases than all previous presidents combined.
I'm sorry, what was that?
This is the same pathetic pre$$ that is nostalgic for him and that fawned all over him!
But Trump has suggested an even harder line, which would raise First Amendment issues.
Oh, NOW the pre$$ is worried!!
In 2013, after a backlash in Congress and the news media over aggressive tactics to go after reporters’ information in leak investigations, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. revised those rules to tighten limits on when the government is allowed to subpoena telephone companies for logs of a reporter’s phone calls, which could reveal their confidential sources.
Yeah, somehow that has all been forgotten by the pre$$ as they incessantly cover for and promote the negligent rule of Obama.
Of course, knowing what we now know about government surveillance, data collection, and government hacking tools, they already know who the reporters are talking to. It's a big show-fooley!
The changes made it harder for law enforcement officials to obtain such logs without providing advance notice and giving news organizations a chance to contest the request in court. The department’s rules also impose limits on subpoenaing journalists for notes or testimony to force them to help investigators identify their confidential sources.
Sessions’s deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, later said the review of the guidelines had just begun and it was not clear what, if anything, would be changed.
Sessions was joined in the news conference by Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence.
The two are cochairmen of an insider threat task force first established by the Obama administration in 2011 after Chelsea Manning’s leak of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic and military files to WikiLeaks.
How Nixonian -- and then he topped him with the spying on the campaign and unmasking of Trump transition officials.
Coats threatened to administratively discipline people suspected of leaking, apart from any prosecution.
“Understand this: if you improperly disclose classified information, we will find you, we will investigate you, we will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law, and you will not be happy with the results,” Coats said.
Whatever happened to Reality Winner anyway?
The Trump administration has been bedeviled by leaks large and small that have disclosed infighting inside his administration, including the president’s rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders.
Information shared with reporters brought to light what surveillance showed about contacts by Trump’s associates with Russia and even what Trump said to Russian visitors in the Oval Office.....
--more--"
Related: Special Counsel Mueller asks White House for documents on Flynn
The next President of the United States:
"Pence to speak at conservatives’ meeting organized by Koch brothers" by Kenneth P. Vogel New York Times August 04, 2017
WASHINGTON — In a sign of an expanding alliance between the Trump administration and one of the most well-financed forces in conservative politics, Vice President Mike Pence has agreed to speak to a gathering of the billionaire Koch brothers’ advocacy network this month.
They have nowhere else to turn. Democrats and Deep State are bent on destroying him.
Pence will deliver the keynote address on Aug. 19 in Richmond, Va., to the annual meeting of activists and donors organized by Americans for Prosperity, the group announced on Friday. The nonprofit advocacy group is financed by the industrialist brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, and their allies.
Who are the Koch brothers?
The Koch brothers steer a network of groups that spent between $720 million and $750 million to bolster conservative policy positions and politicians before the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the spending.
Yet the groups withheld support from President Trump’s campaign out of distaste for his populist and protectionist rhetoric, which clashed sharply with the Kochs’s support for free-market policies.
But in recent weeks, the Koch groups — as well as other deep-pocketed conservative outfits — have expressed increasing support for Trump’s plans to overhaul the tax code.
They are hungry for the tax loot.
While there isn’t any specific tax-reform legislation yet, the Koch network was pleased with a broad blueprint released by the Trump administration. It would slash corporate tax rates but, notably, did not include an import tax that the Kochs opposed.
This week, Americans for Prosperity hosted an event in Washington with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the White House legislative affairs director Marc Short, who once worked for the Koch network, to present a united front on tax reform.
First I've seen of it, and..... ?
Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, and the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce are the two lead groups in the brothers’ network. They have begun what they describe as a “multimillion-dollar” campaign to build public support for tax reform.
It was a stark contrast from the Republican push to repeal the Affordable Care Act — an effort that never had full buy-in from conservative groups, and ultimately collapsed amid disagreements within the party. That failure has added urgency to the tax reform push.
They needed the repeal to free up the cash, but I suppose now they will bailout the insurance companies and add to the debt.
“With tax reform, we’re coming out of the gate far more united,” said Short, who also for years worked as an aide to Pence. “There is a lot more support for the tax plan in the conservative movement and with business groups, and certainly AFP will be a big part of that.”
Meaning the American people are going to get totally screwed.
While tax reform has been a top item on Republican wish lists for decades, it has been elusive — in part because of the array of interest groups that have won special treatment for their industries in the tax code.
Well, they can keep those, too!
Pence has been reaching out to corporate and industry leaders to try to sell the administration’s agenda, and he has a long relationship with the Koch network and other major donors and groups that fund the conservative movement.
He met with Charles Koch for an hour in June and has spoken to past gatherings of Americans for Prosperity.
In a separate development Friday, Trump said states can count on his administration to dispense federal emergency funds efficiently.
‘‘We do it quickly. We do it effectively,’’ Trump said at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where he and members of his Cabinet received a briefing on the summer’s hurricane season, which began June 1.....
WTF?
Are you planning to soon?
What horrific false flag event awaits us this fall?
--more--"
I'm sure this guy can empathize with Trump:
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and onetime close confidant has agreed to testify in two ongoing corruption cases against him, Israeli police said Friday. Police have been investigating Netanyahu for several months over the cases but have released few details. On Thursday night police revealed that the cases involving Netanyahu deal with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust crimes. Netanyahu’s office has repeatedly denied wrongdoing over the investigations, portraying the accusations as a witch hunt against him and his family by a hostile media....."
That explains the commiserating.
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"Toyota to take 5 percent stake in Mazda and build joint US plant" by Jonathan Soble New York Times August 04, 2017
TOKYO — Toyota said on Friday that it was taking a 5 percent stake in Mazda, another Japanese automaker, and that the companies would jointly build an assembly plant in the United States and would pool resources on new technologies.
The factory’s location has not been decided, but mixing appeals, rebukes, and state-sponsored enticements, Trump has pushed both American and foreign-owned companies to locate factories in the United States rather than in lower-wage countries. Even before Trump was sworn in, the heating and cooling giant Carrier agreed to cut the number of jobs it planned to move to Mexico from an Indiana plant after the state added $7 million in incentives.
Related:
"Carrier Corp. is beginning job cuts at the Indianapolis factory that became a rallying cry for President Trump because of the company’s plans to shift work to Mexico. About 300 employees will leave this week as part of a previously announced plan to relocate production of fan coils, Carrier said in a statement Wednesday. A total of 600 jobs will be eliminated during the next few months, the unit of United Technologies Corp. said."
So much for the Trump effect, the NYT narrative, and the loot incentive.
Last week, the Taiwanese electronics supplier Foxconn joined Trump at the White House to announce its plans to locate a new plant with 3,000 positions in Wisconsin, which lured the company with a staggering $3 billion in state tax credits.
See: Wopat and Wisconsin
The announcement by Toyota and Mazda earned a congratulatory tweet from the president early Friday. “Toyota & Mazda to build a new $1.6B plant here in the USA and create 4K new American jobs. A great investment in American manufacturing!” he wrote. Seven months earlier he had warned Toyota in a tweet that moving operations to Mexico could result in a “big border tax.”
That is not going to be in the bill because Congre$$ serves globali$m.
The alliance between Toyota and Mazda represents a small but significant step in the consolidation of the Japanese car industry, where a half-dozen producers compete for customers and capital.
Consolidation, the death throes of capitali$m.
In an era of soaring development costs and unsettling technological shifts — especially the emergence of battery-powered and self-driving cars — many smaller producers fear they lack the resources required to keep up. Even Toyota, one of the world’s largest producers of vehicles, with an output of 10 million units a year, has been accused by some critics of falling behind in research and development.....
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Today's top story:
"Mass. health insurers uneasy over Trump’s threat to cut subsidies" by Priyanka Dayal McCluskey Globe Staff August 04, 2017
As the drama around national health policy continues in Washington, insurers across the country don’t know whether the subsidies will keep flowing, and for how long. The payments are made monthly and the next one is due in about two weeks.
I've had enough.
An abrupt cutoff of the subsidies could further destabilize insurance markets by forcing insurers to raise their rates, which would make insurance less affordable for families on the lower end of the income scale.
Can't have that happen.
The push is reminiscent of the TARP bailout.
Health care advocates predict that if the Trump administration axes the subsidies, the rate of people without insurance will rise.....
And I predict the Patriots will win the Super Bowl this year.
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Here is Exhibit A regarding single-payer, government-run health care:
VA Secretary ousts third admin at troubled N.H. veterans’ hospital
It was today's above-the-fold feature, and it's all smiles, huh?
What a piece of junk.
