Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Let alone that mass killing kids with Fentnyl sounds like a RW dirty sort of fantasy. Or that no one has ever been arrested for tampered with treats. Except one father who poisoned his own son for insurance.

What Snopes says:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/halloween-non-poisonings/

Poisoned Halloween Candy

Police have never documented actual cases of people randomly distributing poisoned goodies to children on Halloween.
Snopes Staff

Barbara Mikkelson
Published November 2, 2000

Claim:
Police have documented cases of people randomly distributing poisoned goodies to children on Halloween.
Rating:
False
False

About this rating

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Origin

Tales of black-hearted madmen doling out poisoned Halloween candy to unsuspecting little tykes have been around for decades — they were part of my Halloween experience more than forty years ago. And every year sees the same flurry of activity in response to such rumors: radio, TV and newspapers issue dark warnings about tampered candy and suggest taking the little ones to parties instead of collecting goodies door-to-door. Even Ann Landers published a column in 1995 warning us against the mad poisoner, saying, "In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy." (Recent years? Poison?)

It's a sadness that a holiday so thoroughly and greedily enjoyed by kids is being sanitized out of existence in the name of safety. Sadder still is there appears to be little reason for it.

Though we've yet to find evidence of a genuine Halloween poisoning, we have uncovered a few isolated incidents initially reported as random poisonings that, upon further investigation, turned out to be something else.

Let's set the criteria for what constitutes a Halloween poisoning and then examine the famous and not-so-famous cases often pointed to as examples of this horror:

To qualify as a Halloween poisoning, poisoned candy has to be handed out on a random basis to children as part of the trick-or-treating ritual inherent to Halloween. The act cannot be targeted to any one specific child.

By far the most famous case of Halloween candy poisoning was the murder of eight-year-old Timothy Marc O'Bryan at the hands of his father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, in Houston, Texas. The child died at 10 p.m. on 31 October 1974, as a result of eating cyanide-laced Pixie Stix acquired while trick-or-treating.
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To make his act appear more like the work of a random madman, O'Bryan also gave poisoned Pixie Stix to his daughter and three other children. By a kind stroke of fate, none of the other children ate the candy.

The prosecution proved the father had purchased cyanide and had (along with a neighbor) accompanied the group of children on their door-to-door mission. None of the places visited that night were giving out Pixie Stix. Young Mark's life was insured for a large sum of money, and collecting on this policy has always been pointed to as the motive behind this murder.

Though the case was circumstantial (no one saw the father poison the candy or slip the Pixie Stix into the boy's bag), Ronald O'Bryan was convicted of the murder in May 1975. He received the death sentence and was executed by lethal injection on 31 March 1984 (not on the poetically-just 31 October as is often recounted in off-the-cuff retellings of the case).

The O'Bryan murder was an attempt to use a well-known urban legend to cover up the premeditated murder of one particular child. (Note that for this explanation of the boy's murder to have been believed, the legend had to have been in wide circulation by 1974.) Though cold-blooded and horrible to contemplate, this crime still does not qualify as a genuine Halloween poisoning because there was nothing random about Timothy O'Bryan's death. (The specter of the mad poisoner from the 1982 Tylenol murders was similarly employed by various murderers attempting to cover their tracks.)

Another attempt to obscure the circumstances surrounding a little boy's death by invoking this legend took place in Detroit in 1970. On 2 November 1970, 5-year-old Kevin Toston lapsed into a coma and died four days later of a heroin overdose. Analysis of some of his Halloween candy showed it had been sprinkled with heroin.
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This case was widely reported as a real-life example of Halloween sadism. Not nearly so widely circulated were the results of the police investigation, which concluded the boy had accidentally got into his uncle's heroin stash and poisoned himself, and that the family had sprinkled heroin on the kid's candy after the fact to protect the uncle.

Antedating both these stories is the odd case of Helen Pfeil, a Greenlawn, N.Y. housewife who was arrested in 1964 for handing out arsenic-laced ant poison buttons as part of a self-evident Halloween joke. Annoyed that many of the trick-or-treaters were too old to be asking for free candy, she made up packages of inedible "treats" to give to the teenagers. The packages contained dog biscuits, steel wool pads and the ant buttons (which were clearly marked "Poison" and labeled with a skull and crossbones). She also took the precaution of telling the teenagers that the packages were a joke when she handed them out, and there is no record of anyone's being harmed by her actions. Even so, the potential for harm was there so she was charged. She pled guilty to endangering children and eventually received a suspended sentence.

What initially appeared to be a (non-Halloween) random poisoning attempt aimed at children occurred in Emerson, N.J. On 8 October 1988, The New York Times said traces of strychnine were found in a box of Sunkist Fun Fruits Dinosaurs purchased on September 23 in a New Jersey grocery. The suspicious powder the State Police lab had initially labeled strychnine was retested by the Food and Drug Administration and pronounced corn starch.

The New York Times printed the updated version of the story on 14 October 1988, but not before Thomas J. Lipton Inc. (the manufacturer of Fun Fruits) destroyed 9400 cases of the product. The company maintained that the negative publicity surrounding this story had an adverse effect on their image. Though it's impossible to accurately measure such things, I believe their claim has merit. It's human nature to recall the destruction of the candy but forget it was a false alarm, and it is only reasonable to assume their image was somewhat damaged. (Those initial "Oh my god!" news stories do a fair deal of damage because bits of them stay in the average person's memory whereas retractions or follow-ups do not. Since they lend apparent credence to a myth that's already believed, these "facts" don't get discarded when new information comes along.)
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After Halloween 1994, a three-year-old New Britain, Connecticut, child was diagnosed as suffering from cocaine poisoning. Though he'd been sick earlier in the day and also had a habit of putting anything he found in his mouth, the finger was immediately pointed at tampered Halloween candy (with all the usual attendant media hysteria). More than a week later the local police announced that no traces of cocaine or any other drugs had been found on the leftover piece of candy that was supposed to have poisoned the boy.

In 1982 the police of Redford Township (Detroit) had to issue a similar statement after a youth there became ill and his doctor misread initial lab results and then went public with charges of cyanide poisoning and doctored Halloween candy. Tests done on the lad to determine what was wrong were inconclusive, and later FDA tests of the candy turned up no contamination whatsoever.

Another suspected Halloween poisoning occurred in Washington, DC in 1991. 31-year-old Kevin Michael Cherry of Montgomery County coincidentally died of heart failure after eating some of his child's Halloween loot. As told in the 2 November 1991 Washington Times, anxious parents dumped pounds of their kids' candy before the true cause of death was determined by autopsy.

A further Halloween scare case was that of Ariel Katz, a 7-year-old Santa Monica girl who died of congenital heart failure on 31 October 1990 while trick-or-treating. The police feared a mass random poisoning and acted immediately on what they suspected, as reported in the 2 November 1990 Los Angeles Times:

Santa Monica police had conducted an intense door-to-door search on the street where the youngster collapsed. They feared that other children might have picked up tainted Halloween candy, and they blocked off the 700 block of 12th Street for several hours while they confiscated candy and interviewed residents and revelers.

Seven-year-old Ferdinan Siquig of San Jose, CA. collapsed on 31 October 1996 after eating candy and cookies he was given while trick-or-treating. Initial urine analysis at the hospital revealed traces of cocaine. Subsequent tests done by outside labs came back negative, and it was further concluded that the initial test results were wrong, but this conclusion was reached at least a day after the media had picked up on the story and scared the bejeezus out of everyone yet again with tales of a poisoner on the loose.
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In 2001, four-year-old Tiffaney Troung of Vancouver died a day after ingesting candy she picked up trick-or-treating on Halloween. Police reacted by issuing an alert to area parents to dump whatever goodies their kids had collected. The cause of death was ultimately pegged as non-contagious sepsis-causing streptococcus bacteria (which can cause everything from strep throat to flesh-eating disease). The Halloween candy Tiffaney ate played no part in her death.

An odd act of randomness occurred in the town of Hercules, California (near San Francisco) in 2000. Some trick-or-treaters came home with little packets of marijuana done up to look like miniature Snickers bars. Parents of the kids who received this beneficence quickly contacted the police, who just as quickly traced the giveaway to a particular house. There, a mystified homeowner was confronted about the find. Police investigated and were satisfied the homeowner had no knowledge of the special contents of certain bars that were handed out that night.

The marijuana packets dressed up to look like Snickers bars had landed in the Hercules dead letter office because whoever had tried to mail a package containing them either didn't use enough postage or had listed an incorrect address. A postal employee (the mystified homeowner) charged with transporting the bars plus various canned goods that had accumulated in the dead letter office to a local charity kept the candy for his own use. He brought the "candy" home to give out on Halloween, thinking the Snickers bars were, well, Snickers bars. The "trick" ended up being on him.

Putting the crazed Halloween poisoner story to rest can be quite the task, as was outlined in a 9 November 1989 article in the Los Angeles Times. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Joel Best, a professor of sociology at California State University, Fresno, who has been trying to debunk this urban legend for more than thirty years:
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"We checked major newspapers from throughout the country from 1958 through 1988," he said, "assuming that any story this horrible would certainly be well reported."

Well, they found a total of 78 cases and two deaths. [The two deaths Best was referring to were the O'Bryan murder and the accidental poisoning of Kevin Toston.] Further checking proved that almost all of the 78 cases were pranks. The deaths were tragically real, but they, too, were misrepresented in the beginning.

The pranks, he said, were all of kids — after years of hearing similar stories — inserting needles or razor blades into fruit, not realizing (or maybe realizing) how much they frightened their whole town.

"My favorite," Best says, "was the kid who brought a half-eaten candy bar to his parents and said, 'I think there's ant poison on this.' They had it checked and, sure enough, there was ant poison on it — significantly, on the end he had not bitten." Of course, the youngster had applied the poison himself.

Best has tried mightily over the years to destroy this particular myth, but obviously to no avail. "It's the old problem of trying to prove a negative," he says.

Sad to say, foreign objects hidden in Halloween loot are part of the trick-or-treat experience, but these incidents are few and far between, and our fear of them is greatly out of proportion with the likelihood of their occurring. Acting on this out-of-control fear, some hospitals and police departments have taken to x-raying bags of Halloween plunder, as noted in the 31 October 1993 Washington Post:

Of several contacted, only Maryland Hospital Center reported discovering what seemed to be a real threat — a needle detected by X-ray in a candy bar in 1988. But there was never an arrest or resolution in the case.

In the ten years the National Confectioners Association has run its Halloween Hot Line, the group has yet to verify an instance of tampering, said spokesman Bill Sheehan. "These myths become truisms."

Sightings: This legend appears in a 1986 Jack Chick tract about the satanic influences of Halloween.76

It would have been funnier if Speaker Pelosi was on rubber crutches. You have to understand the RW concept of "humor". I know I don't.

Republicans Continue to Spread Baseless Claims About Pelosi Attack

Some of the conspiracy theories have already seeped into the Republican mainstream.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/technology/pelosi-attack-misinformation-conspiracy-republicans.html

<snip>

The attack on Mr. Pelosi in the couple’s home in San Francisco early on Friday morning has raised fears about the rise of political violence against elected officials — increasingly, it seems, inspired by a toxic brew of extremism, hate and paranoia that is easily found online.

The assailant, identified by the police as David DePape, 42, posted a series of notes in the days before the attack suggesting that he had fallen under the sway of right-wing conspiracy theories and antisemitism online. Some of the flurry of posts by others questioning the circumstances of the attack appeared intended to deflect attention from Mr. DePape’s views.

No top Republican lawmakers joined in peddling unfounded claims about the attack, but few denounced them, either. Mrs. Clinton, the former first lady and senator who lost to Mr. Trump in 2016, pointedly blamed the party for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories.”

“It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result,” she wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”

It was her post that prompted Mr. Musk, Twitter’s owner since last Thursday night, to insinuate that an alternate version of the assault was possible. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” he replied directly to Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Musk linked to an opinion piece from the Santa Monica Observer, a website known to publish falsehoods, which offered an alternative account of what led to the attack on Mr. Pelosi. Relying on an anonymous source and providing no evidence, the article claimed that the attacker was a male prostitute.

The story also indicated that the attacker was found by the police wearing only his underwear, a detail that was originally published by a Fox affiliate before getting widely circulated in right-wing communities online. The affiliate later removed the detail and appended a correction, saying the article “misstated what clothing the suspect was wearing.”

A spokeswoman for Fox Television Stations said the story was corrected within about two hours.

That change prompted a new round of baseless theories, with some right-wing Americans claiming a cover-up.

“New day, new narrative,” Tricia Flanagan, a former Republican primary candidate for New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District, tweeted to her 70,000 followers.

On Monday, federal prosecutors charged Mr. DePape with attempted kidnapping and assault of a relative of a public official. He was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington at the time, and carrying “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves and zip ties,” according to the office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, which filed the charges.

Mr. DePape’s equipment — and his demand to know “Where’s Nancy?” — suggested a premeditated assault, which would undercut the counterfactual versions being spread online.

Even so, the conspiracy theories found receptive audiences, receiving tens of thousands of engagements on numerous platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and other platforms that have built smaller, though politically active, audiences.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative radio and YouTube host, expressed hope on Monday that some “amazing patriot” would post bail for Mr. DePape and become a “midterm hero.” “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions,” he said, adding that liberals were trying to politicize the attack.

Mr. Carusone noted that Fox’s coverage shifted over the weekend, much as it did after the 2020 election, when the network initially reported the outcome accurately only to later give credence to the false claims by Mr. Trump and others that the vote was somehow fraudulent.

Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

The coverage of the attack on Mr. Pelosi began with fairly straightforward coverage of the crime, before portraying it as a consequence of Democratic “soft-on-crime” policies and, finally, as a mystery with darker undercurrents that could not yet be known.

“Look for what’s missing and what doesn’t add up,” David Webb, a Fox News contributor, said during “The Big Sunday Show.”

Mr. Carusone said the shift reflected a deference by the network, like the Republican Party, to the most extreme voices in the right-wing information ecosystem that both cater to.

“This was everywhere in the right-wing fever swamps immediately,” he said.

At the core of the flurry of disinformation, he argued, was a refusal to show any sympathy for an older victim simply because of his ties to a figure regularly vilified on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Conservatives have for years turned opponents like Ms. Pelosi and others into cartoonish supervillains. Mr. Trump himself regularly called her “Crazy Nancy.”

“They’re very unlikely to give them any solace or support even in the most clear-cut circumstances,” Mr. Carusone said, “because in some way it cuts against the broader narrative that they’re supervillains and therefore deserve it.”

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” @stevenleemyers

It's the resort of those with no sense of humour, they can't say something genuinely funny so they attack someone different, someone weaker. They point out what's wrong with the victim to make themself look and feel so much better.

Their warped logic allows them to feel that he's somehow responsible for what happened to him. The repulsive disinformation that followed on the heels of the attack, and was referenced by leading Republicans, also justifies it in their minds.

They're not nice people, they're really quite revolting.

Impressive historical background there!

When the Pelosis share evidentiary video, this will all be put to rest.

Let's put it to rest now, shall we?




Suspect in Pelosi Attack Was Consumed by Conspiracy Theories, Boss Says

David DePape, the man accused of breaking into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulting her husband, increasingly spent time online in recent months, according to his employer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/us/pelosi-attack-depape-arraignment.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-variants-shadow-lda-unique-time-cutoff-30&alpha=0.05&block=trending_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=975198480&impression_id=2faa7ff5-5a2b-11ed-b614-6dc90ca4e2a8&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=pool%2F91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1&region=footer&req_id=379031511&shadow_vec_sim=0.5056022390232814&surface=eos-most-popular-story&variant=0_bandit-eng30s-shadow-lda-unique


By Tim Arango and Holly Secon
Nov. 1, 2022, 3:26 p.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO — About six years ago, David DePape was down on his luck, living under a tree in a park and hanging around outside a lumber store in Berkeley, Calif., looking for work.

“You know how people sit outside and wait for someone to come and offer them work?” recalled Frank Ciccarelli, a carpenter who builds houses and makes furniture. “He was sitting there. So I picked him up. So he started working for me. And he really worked out well.”

For the next several years Mr. Ciccarelli became close to Mr. DePape — right up until a week ago, when he paid Mr. DePape his most recent wages.

Mr. DePape, 42, now faces arraignment on Tuesday in a San Francisco courtroom on several state felony charges after investigators say he broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week in the well-to-do Pacific Heights neighborhood and bludgeoned her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer.

Investigators say Mr. DePape was on a mission to take Ms. Pelosi hostage, interrogate her and break her kneecaps if she “lied” to him. The speaker, the nation’s third most powerful political figure, was in Washington at the time of the attack.

The police said the case was politically motivated, and it has heightened fears of political violence ahead of the midterm elections, amid a surge in threats to lawmakers across the country.

Mr. Ciccarelli, 76, described Mr. DePape as a quiet person and a diligent worker — an easygoing guy, at least until the topic of politics came up.

“We were together four or five days a week, four or five hours a day, a lot of times an hour in the car, going back and forth from jobs,” Mr. Ciccarelli said. “I think I know him better than anyone does.”

Over the six years he has known Mr. DePape, Mr. Ciccarelli said, he witnessed a transformation from a shy and hardworking, but troubled, man into someone who was increasingly isolated and captive to his darkest thoughts.

“If you got him talking about politics, it was all over,” Mr. Ciccarelli recalled in an interview this week. “Because he really believed in the whole MAGA, ‘Pizzagate,’ stolen election — you know, all of it, all the way down the line. If you go to Fox News, if you go on the internet and you look at QAnon, you know, he had all these theories.”

Mr. DePape’s sympathies for the most extreme right-wing conspiracy theories are one piece of the growing investigation into his background.

On Monday, Mr. DePape was charged with multiple state and federal felonies, including the attempted murder of Mr. Pelosi, 82, who remains at a local hospital after undergoing surgery. In a statement on Monday, Ms. Pelosi said her husband, “is making steady progress on what will be a long recovery process.”

Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s district attorney, said she would ask at Tuesday’s arraignment that Mr. DePape be held in jail without bail. It was not immediately clear who was representing him.

For a time, Mr. DePape, who grew up in British Columbia in Canada and moved to California about two decades ago to pursue a relationship with a woman he had met in Hawaii, seemed to be living the life of a Bay Area hippie, making hemp jewelry and attending protests against a ban on public nudity in San Francisco. For a time, he house-sat for a woman in the East Bay area who ran an urban farm for low-income residents, and sometimes helped take care of the chickens.

But in the years leading up to the attack on the Pelosi family, Mr. DePape seemed to be spending more and more time in the darkest corners of the internet, according to Mr. Ciccarelli. After working together for a few years, Mr. Ciccarelli helped Mr. DePape get away from the streets, moving him into a friend’s garage studio in Richmond, Calif.

“Once he was housed, he had much more time to spend on his computer,” Mr. Ciccarelli said. “Because when you’re living under a tree, you don’t have a plug. You just have a battery.”

On Saturday, the F.B.I. raided the garage in Richmond and seized two hammers, a sword and a pair of gloves.

As he spent more time on his computer in recent months, Mr. DePape appeared to have produced a voluminous record of his political leanings — ranting about the 2020 election being stolen, appearing to deny the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz and claiming that schoolteachers were grooming children to be transgender. He also targeted the media in one post, arguing that any journalist who said the 2020 election was not stolen to deny former President Donald J. Trump a new term “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.” Mr. DePape’s blog was registered at the Richmond address where he resided.

He reposted videos about right-wing themes, including those celebrating people who had not been vaccinated, mixed in with messages about buying survivalist food supplies and gold. A post on Thursday, the day before the attack on the Pelosi residence, denounced the new superhero movie “Black Adam” for its “wokism,” and claimed it was about finding an excuse to depict “killing with people in all white nations.” In another post from last week, he showed an antisemitic video and suggested Jews had manipulated Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, into destroying Ukraine so they could buy up its land cheaply.

Mr. Ciccarelli, who said he was scheduled to work with Mr. DePape on Monday, said he never heard Mr. DePape make racist comments, but said he had become increasingly isolated the last few years and wanted to work less in the carpentry business.

“He was completely caught up in the fantasy, in the MAGA fantasy,” he said.

Over the last few days, Mr. Ciccarelli has struggled to make sense of the news about his friend. “He did a monstrous thing, but he’s not a monster,” he said. “He’s really decent, gentle — it sounds crazy to say gentle — but he was a very gentle soul. But he was going downhill. He went down the rabbit hole.”

Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.

Tim Arango is a Los Angeles correspondent. Before moving to California, he spent seven years as Baghdad bureau chief and also reported on Turkey. He joined The Times in 2007 as a media reporter. @tarangoNYT

When are you going to admit to the obvious???

https://www.nytimes.com/article/pelosi-paul-nancy-attack-facts.html

Much remains unknown about Mr. DePape. But the authorities have been examining what appeared to be Mr. DePape’s copious online presence, which included angry rants and extremist views.

The domain of a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and law enforcement determined that Mr. DePape had lived there for about two years, according to the federal complaint. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured many antisemitic sentiments as well as concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.


One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.

Explaining why he didn’t flee the scene after he realized Mr. Pelosi had surreptitiously dialed 911, Mr. DePape compared himself to the founding fathers battling the British, saying “he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender,” according to the federal complaint.
The attack itself has become the subject of unfounded conspiracy theories.

In the aftermath of the attack, Republicans and other conservative voices spread lies, misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories about the assault, ominously suggesting that the media was withholding sordid facts about the case.

Elon Musk, the billionaire who completed his takeover of Twitter last week, posted a link to a discredited newspaper known for publishing falsehoods and claimed that “there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” The publication, offering no evidence, suggested the assailant was a male prostitute. Mr. Musk’s tweet was later deleted.

Some conservative media outlets framed the assault as a consequence of “soft on crime” policies of Democrats, a frequent attack line by Republicans around the country in the lead up to the midterm elections.

In comments that — deliberately or not — served to debunk some of the conspiracy theories, prosecutors said on Monday that Mr. Pelosi had never seen his attacker before.

Reporting was contributed by Kellen Browning, Glenn Thrush, Tim Arango, Luke Broadwater, Steven Lee Myers, Stuart A. Thompson, Luke Vander Ploeg, Emily Cochrane and Adam Goldman.

It’s just bullshit, man. She knows the man was beaten and hospitalized, she just has to be unique and contrary. Stupid childish trolling bullshit.

From my readings, this piece in The Guardian seems entirely plausible.

Bolsonaro breaks election silence but refuses to recognise Lula’s victory

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has broken his almost two-day silence over his defeat in Sunday’s presidential election – but refused to congratulate or recognize the victory of his rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro lost what was widely seen as Brazil’s most important election in decades by a margin of 2.1m votes – 50.9% to 49.1% – and dozens of world leaders swiftly recognized Lula’s victory.

Lorry drivers supportive of Jair Bolsonaro block a highway to protest against his election loss to Luiz Inácio
Brazil judge orders police to clear roadblocks by pro-Bolsonaro truckers

But Bolsonaro said nothing, with local media reports suggesting the erratic right-wing populist was holed up in his presidential residence consumed by anger, despondency and disbelief.

In a brief appearance on Tuesday afternoon Bolsonaro at last broke his silence, amid growing public indignation at his undemocratic stance.

“Our dreams are more alive than ever,” the 67-year-old told journalists who had been summoned to the Alvorada palace in the capital Brasília.

However, Bolsonaro, who is the first serving president to lose a re-election bid in Brazilian history, made no mention of the election’s winner and did not say whether he accepted the result.

He thanked the 58 million voters who had backed his failed campaign but did not explicitly say he would respect Lula’s win or allude to the 60 million people who voted for his opponent.

“As president and as a citizen I will continue to follow all the commandments of our constitution,” Bolsonaro said ambiguously.

Bolsonaro also alluded to baseless claims that Sunday’s election had not been fair. He said the post-election protests being staged by hardcore supporters – including using trucks and tires to block key highways – were the fruit of “indignation and a feeling of injustice about how the electoral process played out”.

“Peaceful protests will always be welcome,” Bolsonaro said, adding, however, that destruction and impeding people’s right to come and go was not acceptable.

After Bolsonaro had delivered his message, his chief of staff Ciro Nogueira indicated that his administration would not contest the election result.

“President Jair Bolsonaro … has authorized me that when provoked according to the law we will begin the transition process,” he said.

The political analyst Thomas Traumann said Nogueira’s remarks represented a formal recognition that Bolsonaro had lost the election and that there would be a change of power at the end of the year.

The supreme court echoed that interpretation in a statement which said that by green-lighting the transition process, Bolsonaro had “recognized the final result of the elections”.

Traumann believed Bolsonaro’s refusal to categorically concede and his signal to protesters reflected a behind-the-scenes effort to secure some kind of informal amnesty that would shield him from prosecution once he steps down and loses presidential immunity.

Observers believe that after leaving power Bolsonaro could find himself exposed to a multitude of possible investigations and charges relating to fake news, anti-democratic behaviour, alleged corruption and his handling of a Covid pandemic which killed nearly 700,000 Brazilians.

“He is clearly afraid of prison … so what he’s trying to do is negotiate with the only card he has left, which is big street protests,” Traumann said.

On Tuesday night Bolsonaro was reportedly locked in talks with at least six members of the supreme court as part of that supposed negotiation. One prominent political journalist, Guilherme Amado, said the president planned to “request that neither he nor his family be persecuted” once he stepped down.

On Tuesday morning the supreme court ruled that the federal highway police should “immediately take all measures” to clear the roads Bolsonaro supporters had illegally blocked.

Owners of lorries being used as barricades would be fined 100,000 reais (£17,000) for every hour they remained part of the blockade, the court said.

In São Paulo on Monday night, roads near the international airport, one of South America’s busiest, were backed up with traffic, leading some passengers to pull their luggage through the tailbacks on foot to try and catch their flights. More than two dozen flights were cancelled because pilots and crew could not reach the airport.

It's always better press, to play the victim.

Like most NPD cases, she could never fathom why people hate her so much.

According to a close friend and Brazilian native and activist, neither candidate was going to be a "winner" for the people.

Such is the corruption currently inherent in that "system" of faux democracy.

Lesser of two evils is still evil. I thought the Yanks would be onto that "concept".

An 84 yr old man had his house broken into and attacked with a hammer.

No one deserves that.

Crime families know exactly what's happening here.

The question you want to ask yourself (but won't) is 'why are these octogenarians not enjoying their retirement years'?

Pelosi (and her puppet Biden) can barely string a few sentences together.

If they were in the private sector, they would have been kicked to the kerb two decades ago.

What are they doing still in positions of power?

They can't even get it together to speak coherently.

They're puppets that the public recognize as somehow trust worthy.

They're basically all the "party" has, at this point in time.

Criminal elements at work behind the scenes want them at the visible "wheel" of the party.

hcr

Ok, this is just too funny and shows you actually have no idea about our government.

The five oldest senators are:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) — 88
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — 88
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) — 87
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) — 87
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) — 81

Ten of the 28 senators up for reelection in 2022 are 65 and older.
Of the 439 representatives, 151 of them are 65 or older.
Of the 382 representatives running for reelection in 2022, 128 are 65 or older.

Age of Congress by Party

The average age of Democrats in Congress is 61 and of Republicans is 58. When separated by chambers, the averages are fairly similar, with Republican senators on average being older than Democrat senators, while Democrat representatives, on average, are older than Republican representatives.

https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-current-congress-is-among-the-oldest-in-history/

Again, you really look stupid when you spew nothingness and try to pass it as fact.

It’s stupid that these corrupt old bags of bones are still doddering around Washington, stealing openly from the American people.

You don't deal with reality well at all. The U.S. demographics are trending older:


Population Reference Bureau’s Population Bulletin, “Aging in the United States,” examines recent trends and disparities among adults ages 65 and older, and how baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 are reshaping America’s older population.

The current growth of the population ages 65 and older, driven by the large the baby boom generation, is unprecedented in U.S. history. As they have passed through each major stage of life, baby boomers (between ages 55 and 73 in 2019) have brought both challenges and opportunities to the economy, infrastructure, and institutions.

These key findings from the report were updated in June 2019 with the latest available data.

Demographic Shifts
The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to nearly double from 52 million in 2018 to 95 million by 2060, and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population will rise from 16 percent to 23 percent.

https://www.prb.org/resources/fact-sheet-aging-in-the-united-states/

Why wouldn't you want them being fairly represented by their peers in government?

The longer a ‘representative’ is in Washington, the more deals they make with lobbyists and other people peddling money for favors. They’re all multimillionaires because they decided to enrich themselves by selling out their constituents.

TERM LIMITS.