What's News

So I had no opportunity to check in yesterday. It was a whirlwind 36-hour stay in NYC with the family of my significant other. Somehow we managed to squeeze in the Met, the Museum of Natural History, blowing up the floats for the Macy's Parade, Little Italy, etc. My news intake has been limited to the New York Times and whatever scraps are coming out of my full email inbox, so I don't have a great grasp of what's happening, but I did notice a few items.

* There was apparently "increased security" on the New York City subway today, but I used it and didn't see anything approaching that. 'Course, maybe I wasn't supposed to. And I heard absolutely nothing about the threat, although at lunch I saw a CNN headline screaming "holiday terror!" and thought "Thanksgiving with my parents, now THAT'S a holiday terror!" I'll be here all week, folks.

* There was some real terrorism today.

Terrorists armed with automatic weapons, bombs and grenades attacked at several sites in Mumbai on Wednesday and were holding Western hostages at two luxury hotels, authorities said. Police and Indian media reported at least 80 people were killed and hundreds wounded.

The gunmen targeted five-star hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals, a police station, a train station and other sites in India's financial capital in attacks that began late Wednesday and continued into Thursday, police and witnesses said.

Near dawn Thursday, parts of the city remained under siege, with police and gunmen exchanging occasional gunfire at the hotels and an unknown number of people still held hostage, said A.N. Roy, a top police official.

Sounds frightening. Are those Western hotels?

* Turning to California, major congratulations to Calitics Match candidate Alyson Huber, who has won the AD-10 race after a late surge of provisional ballots. That's fantastic, and while it appeared after Election Night that the State Senate had done the better job by winning their only contested race, Hannah-Beth Jackson has fallen behind and now the Assembly has a net pickup of 3 seats. We still need to be critical about what went wrong in California, but that's a fairly decent pickup, and there are enough seats that'll be in play in 2010 to reach 2/3.

* Meanwhile, Fabian Nunez is going to work with Steve Schmidt. That is completely fitting.

* Looks like the auto industry may get their bailout after all. Just throw it on the $7 trillion dollar pile.