democrat & chronicle - gardenscape - 3/1/18

The AP called the race Thursday morning for Republican Edward Durr, an advocate for gun rights and cutting taxes, who held a lead of about 2,300 votes over Mr. Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat who for the past 10 years has served as New Jersey Senate president. Still, the consolation prize for New Jersey Republicans was the pickup of eight seats in the General Assembly, the lower house of the Legislature, cutting the Democrats’ majority there in half.Īnd in what’s undoubtedly the most improbable upset of this or any other election cycle, a conservative truck driver who spent a scant $2,300 on his campaign defeated longtime state Sen. Murphy may have survived the electoral earthquake. Murphy with double-digit leads-erroneously, as it turned out. It was a missed opportunity, probably stemming from belief in polls that until the last week or so of the campaign showed Mr. Ciattarelli’s campaign greater support, he likely would be governor-elect today. If only the national Republican establishment had given Mr. Murphy’s badly mismanaged handling of the COVID-19 pandemic-involving nursing home deaths and mask and vaccination mandates-didn’t help. And just as in Virginia, New Jerseyans weren’t buying it.Īnd Mr.

He implausibly insisted that he was being taken out of context, just as Mr. Murphy fled to the last refuge of political scoundrels. Musk recently hired longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO to try to win back advertisers.Īn Associated Press inquiry about Saturday’s access problems triggered a crude automated reply that Twitter sends to most media queries without addressing the question.“If taxes are your issue, then New Jersey’s probably not your state,” he said dismissively of complaints about high taxes there.īut when the quote was used against him in attack ads, Mr. It has fallen sharply since the billionaire Tesla CEO took over the company and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to cut costs and stave off bankruptcy.Īdvertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly because of changes that have allowed more sometimes-hateful and prickly content that offends a wider part of the service’s audience. The higher threshold allowed on verified accounts is part of an $8-per-month subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue. Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.

Democrat & chronicle - gardenscape - 3/1/18