This is, like, fifteen kinds of bullshit.

Okay, I guess I need to lay this out for everyone saying "OMGEEZ BOSTON IS FULL OF IDIOTS":

Yeah, the city of boston could have handled this better. BUT a cop who doesn't watch cartoon network and finds a bunch of unidentified things with wires and batteries under bridges and near a subway stop isn't out of line for being suspicious.

Yeah, someone should have realized that they were silly looking cartoons, but had they been bombs they could have fucked boston's infrastructure, to say nothing of potential lives lost. The political climate in the US has become one where terrorism is a huge issue. If they were bombs, the entire nation would have been down the city of boston's throat about why they let it happen, people would lose their jobs, etc. People were covering their asses.

Also, I don't understand how the president of cartoon network getting fired makes boston's residents stupid?

Maybe so, but what about the 9 other cities that had them up and took them down or just left them be w/o incident? The whole brouhaha (plus Boston trying to charge the two men who put them up like they were terrorists) just shows that the city is going to ludicrous lengths to try and save face for the fact that people around the country are laughing their asses off @them.

He resigned, there's a difference. This shouldn't have gotten out of hand to the point that Turner was forced in the court of retard public opinion to pay $2 million and that Mr. Samples felt he needed to leave his job.

-TM

Ok, I am officially boycotting Boston and assachusetts now. You get no tourism dollars going to taxes from me ever again.

Oh, btw, your state is small enough to drive across on one tank of gas. Suckers.

This is literally: "Were stupid, but we are the government. So now were pointing guns at you and demanding you pay for it."

Turner volunteered to pay the money.

Well then the text is misleading, since you cant volunteer to be forced.

It shouldn't have gotten as out of hand as it did, but I think everyone blaming boston as much as they are is a bit off base.

What do you expect from a state that repeatedly elects people like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy?

See? I was talking about this page, not the source. Quoting anything other than this page is irrelevant to my last statement, since I did not say you were wrong in any way, and was talking about the text I already quoted.

All right, the thing is this. I don't necessarily blame a random untrained metro employee for mistaking the signs for a bomb. I suspect said person was maybe not that bright, but okay, fine, whatever. So them calling it in would make sense at that point. And I absolutely would expect the cops to investigate. Because yes, if it were a bomb and they didn't, well, that'd be all kinds of bad.

HOWEVER...a fucking bomb squad cop should have been able to see the first one and go "Nope, that's not a bomb." What with the special training and all. Maaaybe they'd have to spend a little while investigating it, but really I think it should have been immediately obvious. At which point they should have breathed a sigh of relief, informed the concerned citizen that nothing was amiss, and gone on to whatever the next item of business was. Instead they wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and many manhours finding and dismantling over ten of the things to no fucking purpose whatsoever. Also disrupted the city, etc etc.

All of which is squarely the bungling of the city and its employees. So for Turner to crawl on hands and knees to lick Boston's boots in apology, and for them to pay out 2 million in "damages", and for the head of Cartoon Network to lose his job, all because of something that is not their responsibility...well, that's just ridiculous.

I'm also not entirely unsympathetic to people who feel that the ad campaign was misguided to begin with, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that Turner should have predicted Boston's bizarre and catastrophic overreaction. Again, ad campaigns of this nature occur all the time, and this one passed without incident in 9 other major cities.

No need to get snippy; I was just clarifying since there appeared to be some question as to if they had been forced to pay or had done so on their own.

I know it happened a couple years ago, but we should really consider stripping the Red Sox of their World Series Championship over this.