No mention of his political affiliation, but he has a long criminal record. I'm guessing his motivations are not political, because he is reportedly a Navy veteran and one of his targets was the SecDef and the Chief of Naval Operations. If anything, it's the last one who was likely the real target and the rest a political smokescreen to confuse things. Also, it seems like he intended to actually send poison but screwed up the manufacturing process.
The guy sent threatening letters to the governor of Utah in 2017. Let's lock him up a little longer this time, folks.
Funny how the media are yelling about Trump inciting the Squirrel Hill murderer, which is absolutely false, while ignoring the Democrats actually committing violence.
There has been a bit of a kerfluffle recently over Linus, the creator and maintainer of the Linux kernel, adding a code of conduct to the kernel source tree and taking some time off to "work on personal issues" about how he expresses his criticism in code reviews. He's back now, and the only thing that seems different is a lack of swear words and capital letters for emphasis.
I don't know who sold Linus on the idea that he needed professional help to express criticism without swearing and capital letters, but he paid them too much for something he didn't need. The SQLite community found a much more effective response.
Here's the thing. People are so willing to take offense and make a stink about it on Twitter these days that it's risky to do anything like that, even when (like RDJ) you are deliberately lampshading the thing. It's just not smart to make yourself a potential target.
So while I can see situations where offense may not be intended, it's hard to avoid giving offense anyway.
A robust free speech culture would allow the market to determine whether any given portrayal is good or bad, racist or funny. Or perhaps all of the above. But we don't have a robust free speech culture at the moment. We have a culture where a (somewhat) conservative woman gets fired for advancing a hypothetical she lived through that runs against political correctness. And we're going to make the Left live up to their own rules until it hurts enough that they stop.
Nope. The "rate" of STDs is a function of how it is measured. Lack of routine testing means people go in to a doctor and get tested when they think they might have an STD. If testing was routine (ie, everyone did it once a year routinely) then the denominator in that rate would be the entire population, rather than the people who think they might have been exposed.
Thus, lack of routine STD testing is in fact responsible for the high rate of positive STD tests.
I take no position on whether the executive director at the National Coalition of STD Directors was deliberately playing word games, but he certainly seems to have a strong incentive to push for routine STD testing.
In a coordinated assault on free speech, Gab is being shut down by basically everyone. Gab is basically a less mature twitter without the censorship by political viewpoint; the anti-semite murderer in Pittsburgh had an account there, and this has caused Paypal, stripe, Godaddy, and joyent to shut down their services. All because a bad person had an account on their service. The bad person did not use their service to commit murder; he used their service to say things people don't like (with, in this case, good reason not to like). Because of that, millions of people will now be deplatformed and have their own free speech rights curtailed in a frenzy of collective punishment.
I'm one of them; I have an account on Gab, because Twitter has already proven it can't be trusted. That doesn't associate me with a murderous anti-semite any more than it associates people who use gmail with each other. It's a service. The service is a platform to speech. Bad people get to speak too; no one has to listen to them, but they get to speak, even if the only things they say are bad ideas and hate.
At least, that's how it is supposed to work in a society that believes in free speech. I'm not so sure about ours.
My rule of thumb is that if you start holding press conferences where you deny that you are running, you're running. In this case it's a horribly weak denial.
But she may find the primary contest a bit more difficult than the one she rigged against Bernie.
Erroneous social security information would be a hallmark of fake IDs possessed by illegal immigrants. How many races would an extra 10,000 Dem votes swing?
There are many other examples at the link, including Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Reports suggest the shooting was motivated by antisemitism, but the shooter was not named Mohammed. So far, I haven't seen much more about his history or motive. Unlike most such shootings, the shooter did not commit suicide, but fought with police after they arrived and wounded several. Kudos to the police for going in hot and fast in this case, at risk to their lives.
Of course, people are already trying to blame Trump. Ugh. He's never been anti-semitic and some of his family members are Jewish.
UPDATE: More details here. The name of the alleged bomber is Cesar Sayoc Jr, and he apparently lived in a van covered with pro-Trump stickers. This gives us three possibilities.
He knew he would be caught, and wanted to get caught, and the van is part of the plan
He really is a Trump supporter and/or lunatic; living in a van covered in political stickers does not suggest mental stability
They got the wrong guy (accidentally or on purpose)
Points in favor of the third option are that they found him really fast for a guy with no fixed address living in a van, reportedly already had him under surveillance, and odds of a guy named Cesar supporting Trump are low (but not absurdly low; I think about 30%?). Points against are that they supposedly have both fingerprints and DNA evidence.
I hope they got the right guy.
UPDATE: Crazy is looking more likely. A Filipino with a history of (non-political) bomb threats and other violent crime, pretending to be a Native American, who has worked as a male stripper. His mom, a Democrat, says he suffers from mental illness.
That said, this is Broward County. You may remember them from the Parkland shooting. Their local police do not inspire confidence in either their competence or their commitment to justice. And I still don't get why anyone, crazy or not, would send "bombs" that won't actually blow up unless they expected to get caught.
On the one hand he has a conviction for bomb threats. But those ... well, read the link. He didn't mail bombs to anyone, he talked tough and made vague bomb threats while disputing a bill against a power company in 2002. That would be on his police record and show up if someone was doing record searches looking for a patsy to blame.
If this guy is the guy who sent the fake bombs, it wouldn't surprise me if he had someone "helping" him like the FBI has been known to "help" people who want to be terrorists. Usually the FBI steps in before bombs get mailed, but it sure would be useful to the Democrats this election if they didn't.
UPDATE:
The ones we have seen pictured were wired to electrical timers. That's not heat, shock, or friction. I remain convinced they were not meant to go off.
It's not something I'd file assault charges over, but it's clearly unwanted touching, and his body language is definitely intimidating rather than conversational.
And an election is more like a job interview than a trial... or a confirmation hearing, even.
Why does it matter which side sent the fake bombs?
Under normal circumstances I might agree with this analysis. But we're looking at a political environment where, during the last election, we had literal riots on the streets instigated by one side, and government officials abusing intelligence and surveillance authority to influence the election. When those riots and abuses failed to win the election, the same side moved immediately to institute a coup by any means they could come up with, and failed again. Their tactics then shifted to more riots, another coup attempt in the form of a special counsel, resistance by government employees to duly elected officials exercising their ordinary legal authority, and then to literal mobs hounding their political opponents in restaurants, in elevators, even in their homes. And now, when all of the above appear to have failed and the GOP's Jobs Not Mobs message appears to be resonating, we have a veritable flood of fake attacks on left-wing political figures and financiers.
The key word there is fake.
Someone who was nuts wouldn't put together fake bombs. They would put together real ones. Maybe they wouldn't work as intended, but they would be real, and they would be intended to harm.
These? They were fake, they were intended to be discovered and publicized, and they were deliberately harmless. That makes them the product of a political actor seeking a political impact, not a lunatic trying to harm people because his brain doesn't work correctly.
That doesn't mean he's necessarily completely rational, but he's rational enough for this to be a political stunt rather than an actual murder attempt.
Sharyll Attkisson provides an update. There's a comprehensive list of people who were fired, resigned, demoted, or reassigned. Some of those names haven't gotten much media attention yet.
On one side of the facts, Dem candidate Andrew Gillum accepted show tickets from people he thought were developers in what sounds like a classic political bribery sting by the FBI. On the other side, the FBI in Washington DC was recently dinged by their Inspector General for accepting gifts of show tickets, sporting event tickets, meal tickets, and so on from reporters in return for leaks.
Two wrongs don't make a right. They are both wrong.
If true, and not BS to sway the elections, even leaking that this happens and that we know that is happens is a serious national security issue. And no, it's not "whistleblowing"; Trump isn't running for election this cycle. And I remember when Obama wouldn't give up his iPhone, and insisted that his presidential daily brief be delivered by a custom-built iPad app.
And don't forget that the NSA and FBI have also been evesdropping on Trump in exactly the same way since before the election. Why should he take their warnings about China more seriously?
Oh, so two of them have been secured? It's just the one that isn't? I rather imagine the President can tell the difference between those three phones, and when he should be using a SCIF instead. So how is this anything other than an unauthorized illegal leak of damaging national security information touching on the sources and methods the FBI is usually so keen to protect?
Look, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good decision by Trump, if it is even true, but leaking it to harm Trump does nothing to improve the situation.
Here's another guess. Rosenstein refused to testify to Congress as planned because he learned he was going to be asked about this, and delayed the testimony so he could leak this and other "preparations" ahead of time.
Yeah, vote Dem if you want more nonsense investigations into Russian collusion that didn't actually happen. Apparently paying Mueller millions for years to turn up jack and shit wasn't enough for Schiff, whose hands are dirty in the FISA abuse that is central to Spygate.
Papadopoulos told FBI informant there was no Russian collusion
If that's an accurate characterization, it's one hell of a leading question. And leaving that information out of the FISA warrant ("We had our informant talk to one of their guys and he denied it completely!") would be a significant violence of procedure at the FISA court. Even worse, since this was the same guy they had previously asked Mifsud to approach and plant the Russian collusion story.
Are there any tapes of this conversation that corroborate this description of it? I hope they are somewhere secure, with logs of who accesses them.
