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Nov 10, 2022 9:10:58 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:10:58 GMT -8
Can't get up to vote? You may electile dysfunction.
What the Voters Really Think About Taylor Swift and Happy Hours
In Massachusetts, Democrats and Republicans could find an issue to agree on: letting bars have happy hours.
Commonwealth law bans bars and other establishments from having special discounts on beer, wine and liquor. AP VoteCast shows a majority of voters, about 6 in 10, favor the state legalizing happy hour.
AP VoteCast is an extensive survey of more than 94,000 voters revealing U.S. voters’ views on some of the most significant issues affecting the nation. And some that are less significant, too.
Beyond the happy hour question, AP VoteCast explored Alabama college football rivalries, what Mississippi voters really think about former football star Brett Favre and whether Tennessee voters like Taylor Swift. These questions weren't larks but part of a broader effort to understand how politics and culture intermingle. The survey was expansive enough to cover topics ranging from state ballot issues to theological questions about interpreting the Bible.
About half of Alabama voters say they are Roll Tide fans, compared with just under 2 in 10 who root for Auburn. About 1 in 10 say they back both teams. But a quarter of Alabama voters say they’re fans of neither team.
In Iowa, the survey dug into voters' feelings about being the first in the nation to caucus for their party’s next presidential nominee. The caucuses don’t involve direct votes but a series of speeches and open haggling to decide which candidate to support. That process generated controversy in 2020 because Democrats had a delay in reporting results.
Six in 10 Iowa voters say they want their state to continue to hold caucuses rather than switch to holding primaries with direct votes. But voters for Democrats are about evenly split following their party’s caucus meltdown two years ago.
Pop star Taylor Swift has some bad blood with Republican lawmakers in Tennessee. She called one of that state’s senators, Marsha Blackburn, in a 2020 Netflix documentary “Trump in a wig.”
But many Tennessee voters are willing to shake off the tensions, with about 4 in 10 feeling favorable to Swift. About 3 in 10 felt they are never, ever getting back together with the songstress, most of them Republicans. But another 3 in 10 said they didn’t know enough to say how they felt about Swift, whose latest album, “Midnights,” had 10 songs in the top 10 slots of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
In Mississippi, Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre appears to have fumbled his reputation with voters. An investigation this year showed the three-time NFL MVP had misappropriated $8 million intended for welfare programs, even texting the governor to see if the funds could build a football practice facility at his alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi.
Only about 2 in 10 Mississippi voters viewed him favorably, with most of them also backing Republicans. Roughly 4 in 10 had an unfavorable opinion of Favre, a group that was roughly split between backing Democratic and Republican candidates.
Still, nearly 4 in 10 said they didn’t know enough to say how they felt about Favre.
While he's better known, President Joe Biden was similarly rated by Mississippi voters. By 2-1, they were more negative than positive toward both the Democratic president and the famous quarterback.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:14:23 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:14:23 GMT -8
Yikes!A California megachurch leader and her parents have been arrested on charges including murder and torture in the death of an 11-year-old daughter. Leticia McCormack, a leader at Rock Church in San Diego, founded and led by former NFL player Miles McPherson, was booked in jail Monday on a charge of murder, three counts of torture, and three counts of willful and cruelty to a child in connection to the death of Arabella McCormack, the San Diego County Sheriff's Office reported. Arabella was initially fostered before being adopted by Brian and Leticia McCormack, officials said. Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning. The 49-year-old church elder's father, Stanley Tom, 75, was also charged with murder, three counts of torture, and three counts of willful and cruelty to a child, according to a news release from the department. Arabella's grandmother Adella Tom, 70, was booked on three counts of torture and three counts of willful and cruelty to a child.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:16:09 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:16:09 GMT -8
Senate, Senate, Who's Got the Senate?
Control of the Senate remains a toss-up, with the Democrats having secured 48 seats to the Republicans' 49. Four races - Alaska, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia - have yet to be called.
CBS has projected that Arizona is leaning Democrat, while Nevada could go to either party.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:18:02 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:18:02 GMT -8
Why Louisiana Didn't Ban Slavery on Tuesday
Four US states have voted to remove language from their state constitutions that said slavery is legal as a criminal punishment.
But Louisiana voted to keep the slavery exception after the legislator who had sponsored the ballot initiative turned against it.
Edmond Jordan said he had realised that the measure could have inadvertently expanded slavery.
Advocates of the initiative say it is needed to prevent prisoner abuse.
They hope to remove the same exemption from the US Constitution's 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery but kept a loophole.
Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont all voted on Tuesday to remove exemptions allowing slavery or involuntary servitude from their state constitutions in an effort to ban slavery entirely.
But with all ballots counted from Tuesday's midterm elections, six out of every 10 Louisiana voters opposed the amendment.
The outcome could enable prisoners to challenge forced labour in the criminal justice system, say legal experts.
Some 800,000 prisoners currently work for pennies, or for nothing at all, according to experts. Seven states do not pay prison workers any wage for most job assignments, and prisoners can be punished if they refuse to work.
Mr Jordan, a Democratic state representative for the city of Baton Rouge, says he pulled his initial support for the measure after a closer reading of the proposed law led him to believe that it could have actually expanded protections for slavery.
Currently, the law states that "slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited, except in the latter case as punishment for a crime".
The proposal he authored would have removed the phrase "except in the latter case as punishment for a crime" and added a clause saying that the measure "does not apply to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice".
"Slavery" is currently banned under the law, he says, but the use of the word "latter" in the existing law means that "involuntary servitude" is still technically legal as punishment.
Although there is "almost no difference" between slavery and involuntary servitude, Mr Jordan says, the removal of the word "latter" would have left it saying that slavery and involuntary servitude are both permitted for the "lawful administration of criminal justice".
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Nov 10, 2022 9:21:17 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:21:17 GMT -8
"An Error In Our System"?? WTF?
KFC has apologised after sending a promotional message to customers in Germany, urging them to commemorate Kristallnacht with cheesy chicken.
The Nazi-led series of attacks in the country in 1938 left more than 90 people dead, and destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and places of worship.
It is widely seen as the beginning of the Holocaust.
The message, heavily criticised for its insensitivity, was later blamed on "an error in our system".
The fast food chain sent an app alert on Wednesday, saying: "It's memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!"
Around an hour later another message was sent with an apology, according to the Bild newspaper.
"We are very sorry, we will check our internal processes immediately so that this does not happen again. Please excuse this error," the message is reported to have said.
Germany takes the 9 November anniversary of Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass) seriously, with numerous memorial events and discussions scheduled to reflect the Nazis' murder of more than six million Jewish people.
Daniel Sugarman, Director of Public Affairs at the Board of Deputies of British Jews described the original KFC message as "absolutely hideous".
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Nov 10, 2022 9:24:27 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:24:27 GMT -8
Psst! Wanna Buy a Village? Cheap?
For anyone dreaming of selling up and moving to the country, how about buying an entire village?
Salto de Castro, in north-western Spain, is up for sale and the asking price is €260,000 (£227,000; $259,000).
Located on the border with Portugal in the province of Zamora and a three-hour drive from Madrid, Salto de Castro has many of the buildings you would expect to find in a small Spanish town.
They include 44 homes, a hotel, a church, a school, a municipal swimming pool and even a barracks building that used to house the civil guard.
But what it does not have are inhabitants. Salto de Castro has been abandoned for more than three decades.
The owner bought the village at the beginning of the 2000s, with the intention of converting it into a tourist spot. However, the eurozone crisis prevented the plan from flourishing.
"The owner had the dream of having a hotel here but it was all put on hold," said Ronnie Rodríguez, of Royal Invest, the company representing the owner. "He would still like the project to come true."
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Nov 10, 2022 9:26:21 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:26:21 GMT -8
It's a Good Day to Not Own Crypto. Every Day Is.
The price of Bitcoin has touched a two-year low after the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange pulled out of a deal to rescue its smaller rival.
The price of other digital coins also fell after Binance scrapped its deal to buy FTX, citing due diligence concerns.
It has left some FTX customers unable to make withdrawals from the exchange, which is used to buy and sell various digital tokens.
There are also fears of further crypto market volatility if FTX goes bust.
On Thursday, Bitcoin fell below $16,000 (£14,049) for the first time since 2020 as investor confidence was hit by the news.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:31:47 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:31:47 GMT -8
What Is Russia Up To in Kherson?
Ukrainian military expert Oleh Zhdanov believes the retreat is nothing but a trap to lure Ukrainian forces in and inflict massive losses on them. He claimed that Russian forces disguised as civilians are holed up in Kherson’s residential areas to shoot at Ukrainian servicemen.
“On camera, it will look like alleged civilians resisting the Ukrainian army,” he said in televised remarks on Thursday.
Top Ukrainian officials are equally wary.
“Until the Ukrainian flag hovers over Kherson, it makes no sense to talk about the withdrawal of Russian troops,” presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said in televised remarks on Wednesday.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:34:59 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:34:59 GMT -8
South Dakota Votes to Ignore the QOP and Join The ACA
South Dakotans voted to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, providing tens of thousands of impoverished people with access to health care and dismissing state GOP attempts to sink the effort.
With 56% of the vote, the successful ballot initiative should practically ensure that more than 40,000 people gain access to the program when it takes effect in July. Many would not have had access to health care otherwise.
For residents like Sarah Houska, the decision is life-changing. In the summer of 2021, she had to leave a job that provided health insurance to care for her 5-year-old son, who needed intensive medical care.
Although she has since taken a part-time job at a dental office, Houska, 29, said she lives with the worry that if she develops any health problems, her family could lose stability.
"It felt so great, just so much relief, so much pride in our state for passing this amendment," Houska said Wednesday. "And it wasn't close. I wasn't biting my nails waiting for the vote to come in at all."
The ballot measure amended the state constitution to enshrine expansion for Medicaid health care coverage to all adults who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty level.
Previously, an adult with two kids would have had to make less than $10,590 a year to qualify for the public health care program, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank. Now a family of three earning up to $31,780 would be eligible.
Eliot Fishman, the senior director of health policy for the health care advocacy group Families USA, said that in South Dakota parents with practically any work income were ineligible for Medicaid. Those who were not parents and lived without incomes, typically people with significant health, mental health or substance abuse challenges, also did not qualify.
"In a state like South Dakota, Medicaid coverage is going to be particularly important for people in manual labor and undercompensated roles in their substantial agricultural sector, and then the large uninsured population on Indian reservations," Fishman said.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:36:09 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:36:09 GMT -8
Ever Been to a Party Where Everyone Hates You? Why Would You Go?
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia next week, an Indonesian government official said Thursday, avoiding a possible confrontation with the United States and its allies over his war in Ukraine.
U.S. President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping and other world leaders are to attend the two-day summit in Bali that starts Nov. 15. The summit was to have been the first time Biden and Putin would have been together at a gathering since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:43:59 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:43:59 GMT -8
Lebron Wants a Trade. It's True. He Posted It on Twitter. Or Did He?Hours after Elon Musk's Twitter rolled out his new demanded feature allowing anyone to get "verified" status on the social network by paying $8 per month, the feature is already resulting in the fraudulent impersonation of companies and individuals. And that's exactly what everyone on the planet predicted would happen, so we can presume it was indeed Musk's intention. images.dailykos.com/images/1132196/large/Nintendo1.jpg?1668035516That's not Nintendo of America giving you the finger. That's ... a new Nintendo of America.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:46:07 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:46:07 GMT -8
Trifecta is Governor and Both Houses of the Legislature
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Nov 10, 2022 9:51:19 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:51:19 GMT -8
When the "Experts" Aren't
I was baffled. What were they seeing that I and, more important, the Democratic operatives I spoke to weren’t seeing? Back in mid-August, I wrote a column titled “Why that red wave might end up a ripple.” I noted that Democrats had pulled even on the “generic ballot” — which party voters prefer for Congress — at a time in the cycle when the incumbent president’s party is almost always losing ground. Democrats’ standing receded slightly since then, but the contests remained extremely tight. The races were stable, both in public polling and in the private polling I had seen.
So what happened? Political journalists were suckered by a wave of Republican junk polls in the closing weeks of the campaign. They were also swayed by some reputable polling organizations that, burned by past failures to capture MAGA voters, overweighted their polls to account for that in ways that simply didn’t make sense. And reporters fell for Republican feints and misdirection, as Republican operatives successfully created an artificial sense of momentum by talking about how they were spending money in reliably blue areas.
An extraordinary profusion of bad partisan polling flooded the media late in the campaign, coming from GOP outfits such as Trafalgar (which had Blake Masters over Mark Kelly in the Arizona Senate race, Don Bolduc over Maggie Hassan in the New Hampshire Senate race, among others) and Rasmussen (which gave Republicans a five point edge in the generic ballot).
He Seconds That Emotion
We were led to believe that Hispanics were defecting from Democrats in shocking numbers. The truth appears to have been more nuanced. According to exit polls, which we always have to take with a grain of salt, the slippage may have been about 5 percent in some parts of the country, but some candidates (like Beto O’Rourke in Texas) held on to Hispanics at the same rate President Biden did in 2020, or even increased that level of support (like Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada).
We were led to believe that Black men were also drifting away from the Democrats. That’s not entirely true. Look at Georgia, where the great fear was that Black men wouldn’t vote for Stacey Abrams: A slightly higher percentage voted for her in this election in that state than voted for Biden in 2020, according to exit polls.
We were told that Biden and the Democrats had made a huge mistake by focusing so much attention on abortion and a fragile democracy at the expense of crime and the economy. That, too, was wrong. Abortion was a tremendously animating issue in this election, and voters rebuffed many prominent election deniers in the night’s biggest, most competitive races.
In fact, you could say that voters rebuffed Trumpism itself — and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. It may be too optimistic to say the fever broke, but Tuesday night, we saw enough people in enough states shake it off, allowing us to imagine a day when Trump no longer dominates the Republican Party.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:54:59 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:54:59 GMT -8
It's Melania's Fault. He Should Have Asked Oprah, Instead.
Donald Trump is apparently not in good spirits after Tuesday night’s midterm upset.
According to CNN’s Jim Acosta, an aide to the former president said he was “livid” and “screaming at everyone” on Wednesday after what Republicans hyped up to be a red tsunami turned out to be more of a ripple. As of Wednesday afternoon, Republicans appeared poised to win control of the House, but the fate of the Senate still hung in the balance.
And though Trump wasn’t on the ballot, more than one-morning headline dubbed him the election’s biggest loser. Democrats outperformed Republican nominees he endorsed, and voters largely rejected candidates who parroted his election-denying rhetoric.
To add fuel to the fire, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ― Trump’s likely rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 ― won reelection convincingly, despite attacks and threats from Trump.
According to Acosta, a Trump aide said Trump’s handpicked contenders were “all bad candidates.”
Trump on Monday said he planned to make a “very big announcement” on Nov. 15, widely expected to be news that he is mounting another bid for the White House. However, amid fallout and finger-pointing over the disappointing election results, some Republicans have suggested Trump should delay it.
The aide told Acosta it’s unlikely Trump would do so because it’s “too humiliating to delay,” but there are too many unknowns at this point.
Trump was fuming, in particular, over the loss of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania to Democrat John Fetterman, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported. He reportedly blamed anyone who advised him to support the celebrity physician, including his wife, Melania Trump.
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Nov 10, 2022 9:56:56 GMT -8
Post by mhbruin on Nov 10, 2022 9:56:56 GMT -8
Don't Hide Things In Food
Security officers at a South Florida airport have reported finding a handgun hidden inside a raw chicken packed in a traveler’s luggage.
The Transportation Security Administration posted photos of the gun and poultry Monday on its official Instagram account. The weapon was recovered at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
The post didn’t identify the traveler who was transporting the weapon or whether any arrests were made. ...................... A U.S. Navy engineer and his wife have been sentenced to prison for trying to sell sensitive military secrets to an unnamed foreign government, including one instance where they hid official documents inside a peanut butter sandwich.
On Wednesday, Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Diana Toebbe, were sentenced to more than 19 years and nearly 22 years in prison, respectively, after they both pled guilty to conspiracy earlier this year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
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