Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“voters had approved Massachusetts Question 1. The initiative’s passage means that car manufacturers will be required to provide vehicle diagnostic data to consumers and independent mechanic shops. Voters in the state approved a similar right-to-repair ballot measure in 2012, but this year’s election closes a loophole that auto manufacturers had been using to skirt the requirements established by that earlier vote.”
“The Daily Beast reported this week that Biden was considering Michael Morell as a potential CIA director, but Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) had objections. Wyden publicly warned that Morell, who served as deputy director of the CIA under Obama, shouldn’t be considered due to his past ties in obscuring CIA torture.”
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“Morell’s role in essentially absolving CIA staff (including current CIA Director Gina Haspel) of responsibility for destroying tapes of CIA torture of suspected terrorists during the Iraq War. He was also responsible for the CIA’s response to the Senate’s torture report, insisting that the CIA’s methods had resulted in actionable intelligence. They had not.”
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“CNN reported that Nick Shapiro, a spokesperson for Morell, insists that Morell was not familiar or involved with the CIA’s torture program, didn’t learn about it until 2006, and has since said that “he believed that waterboarding is indeed torture.””
“Given the narrowness of Biden’s presumed victory, it seems unlikely that Trumpism has been dealt anything resembling a death blow. The GOP will have little reason to shun Trump; on the contrary, given the results in 2016, 2018, and now 2020, one could make the case that the Republican Party performs better with Trump’s name on the ballot than without it. Those in the mainstream media who continue to fail to understand Trump aren’t going to get off easy: They just plain have to get better at this, or they will continue to lose ground to their challengers in the alternative media.”
“Nearly two-thirds of Virginian voters approved Question 1, which establishes a bipartisan redistricting commission to redraw state and federal legislative districts after this year’s census. Previously, the governor and the Virginia General Assembly handled the once-per-decade redistricting
The new commission will include eight legislators and eight citizens, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Each new map—one for the state’s congressional districts, one for the state Senate, and one for the state House of Delegates—requires the approval of at least 12 commissioners, including six of the legislators and six of the citizens.”
“It’s great to have highly effective vaccines, but as the researchers observe, “How well a vaccine program ‘works’ will also depend on how quickly it can be manufactured, how efficiently it can be distributed to locations in greatest need, how persuasive health messaging can be in promoting public acceptance, and how consistently the public can adhere to the many complementary prevention strategies (e.g., masks, hand-washing, distancing) to limit the spread of the virus.”
“The 2020 election was an important milestone in unraveling America’s disastrous war on drugs. Across the country, by overwhelming margins, voters came out for legalizing marijuana, removing criminal penalties for psychedelic use, and treating drug addiction as a public health rather than a criminal concern.
The biggest victory was in Oregon, where voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 110, making it the first state to eliminate the possibility of jail time for possessing small amounts of heroin, cocaine, oxycodone, and every other narcotic. Instead, violators could be hit with at most a $100 fine.”
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“In Washington, D.C., voters opted by a margin of 3 to 1 to make the use, possession, and cultivation of entheogenic plants and fungi, such as psilocybin mushrooms, law enforcers’ lowest priority.
“It does not change law in any way. It simply says, ‘Look…we, the people, think that the police and the district attorneys should stop arresting and prosecuting people for psychedelic plants. So please do that,” says Moore.
Mississippi, Arizona, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Montana all passed initiatives allowing marijuana to be sold for either medical or recreational use.”
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“Voters Oregon approved Measure 109, making it the first state to legalize psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms.”
“Trump is the first president in 17 years to reinstate federal executions”
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“In addition to pushing through federal executions over the past five months, the Justice Department published a new rule to the Federal Register on Friday that would allow the use of other methods for capital punishment. The new regulation reintroduces the use of firing squads and electrocutions for federal executions in addition to lethal injections.”
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“only three people had been executed by the federal government in the past 50 years. Meanwhile, in less than five months, eight people have already been put to death by Trump’s Justice Department, with five more executions scheduled to happen before Trump leaves office.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/11/5/21548677/trump-hispanic-vote-latinx
“Biden’s expansive vision is about more than vastly increasing spending, but let’s start there because the numbers are simply staggering. He’s proposing $11 trillion in brand new spending over the next decade, according to the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl. Big-ticket new items include $1.4 trillion to expand Obamacare; $2 trillion on his version of a Green New Deal; jacking Social Security and Supplemental Security Income by $1 trillion; and goosing spending on preschool, K-12, and higher education by $1.5 trillion. Biden has also signed on to a $3.3 trillion stimulus spending plan pushed by House and Senate Democrats.
All of this new spending would be layered on top of an existing annual federal budget that has swelled to nearly $7 trillion in fiscal year 2020, from a record-high yet relatively cheap $4.4 trillion in 2019. To pay for this new largess, Biden has laid out $3.6 trillion in tax hikes over the coming decade, resulting in what Riedl says is “the largest permanent tax increase since World War II.” Much of the new revenue would come from boosting corporate income taxes back to what they were before Republicans lowered them during Trump’s first year in office. Yet despite all the hikes, Biden would still manage to increase the national debt”
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“Pick any page of his campaign website’s extensive “vision” section and you’ll find endless proposals to tinker with everyday life and employment. He pledges to “aggressively pursue employers who violate labor laws, participate in wage theft, or cheat on their taxes by intentionally misclassifying employees as independent contractors” and also to “establish an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the U.S. Department of Justice.” What sort of bureaucracy do those sorts of things require? The same sorts of questions are raised by his on-again, off-again endorsement of a federal mask mandate.”