When I get tired of politics, nothing cheers me up more than an animal story that ends well. A baby wild elephant had fallen into a narrow open drain near the southern Sri Lankan port city of Hambantota. Animal welfare officers worked with port workers to lift the baby out. It appears that the baby had broken its leg in the fall and is being treated for it before being returned to the mother, whom you can see watching the operation.
Roy Moore still hasn’t conceded that he has lost the Alabama senate race, even though the margin of defeat was 1.5%, well above the 0.5% threshold that triggers automatic recounts and that the Alabama secretary of state John Merrill, a Moore supporter, said that he thought it highly unlikely that a recount would change anything. Then Merrill incorrectly said that Moore could ask for a recount if he was willing to pay for it but legal experts say that Alabama law has that provision only for elections to state offices, not federal ones.
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The newspaper USA Today, as bland and mainstream a newspaper as you can get, let loose with an editorial on Monday that was shocking because it told the truth about Donald Trump in unvarnished terms. The editorial was prompted by Trump issuing a tweet against senator Kirstin Gillibrand who had called on him to resign because of the many credible sexual abuse allegations against him.
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It is always dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from one data point, so the stunning victory in Alabama by Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore in one of the reddest of red states should not be taken as a sign that the era of Republican extremism, so well represented by Moore, is over. The result continues my streak of making wrong predictions, since I had thought that Moore would win and that the only doubt was whether he would win narrowly or easily. My repeated wrongness has made me think of referring to myself as ‘the anti-pundit’. But there are some implications that are easy to predict.
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In what has to be considered a huge upset, Democrat Doug Jones has just been projected to be the winner in the Alabama senate race, defeating sex abuser and molester of teens Roy Moore by a margin of 49.5 to 48.7% with 91% of precincts reporting, in one of the Republican party’s strongest of strongholds.
I am off to bed feeling great and will discuss what this might mean tomorrow.
It is telling that lawyers who are defending three men accused of a hate crime against Somali immigrants are demanding that the jury include people who are more likely to be supporters of Donald Trump.
Three men accused of plotting to bomb a mosque and apartment complex housing Somali refugees asked a federal judge Friday to include prospective jurors from rural western Kansas because they are twice as likely to have voted for President Donald Trump.
A defense motion argues that plans to only summon citizens in the more urban counties closest to the federal courthouse in Wichita is a discriminatory practice that excludes rural and conservative jurors. The trial begins March 19.
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Yesterday Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for senator in Alabama who had been off the campaign trail and hiding for the past week, emerged to hold a final rally before the vote today. Olivia Nuzzi was there and says that it was fittingly weird, and in attendance were well-known Republican loonies: Steve Bannon, Representative Louie Gohmert, and Sheriff David Clarke.
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It turns out that if you microwave eggs, they will explode. Here is a video showing it.