President Donald Trump has pledged the federal government will provide “whatever is needed” to help El Paso, Texas, recover from a mass shooting Saturday that killed 22 people.
“The Trump campaign has not paid the invoice as of yet,” El Paso spokeswoman Laura Cruz-Acosta confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity late Monday morning.
Well. You know. That’s Trump money – money to promote Trump’s interest in getting elected again. He said the federal government will provide, not that he will. He’s there to make money from being president, not to give it away, or let his Elect Me Again campaign give it away.
How much do they owe? $569,204 plus change. Half a million; lunch money.
In all, at least 10 local governments — from Mesa, Arizona, to Erie, Pennsylvania — are still waiting for Trump to pay public safety-related invoices they’ve sent his presidential campaign committee in connection with his political rallies, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation in June. In all, the bills total $841,219.
Listen, he didn’t get rich by paying people the second they sent the invoice.
It’s worth noting that strangulation is an almost uniquely gendered crime. A large majority of victims are women (often intimate partners of their attackers) and the vast, vast majority of perpetrators are men.
It’s one of those areas where the size and strength advantage is relevant.
[P]olice said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.
Nothing at all?
High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault.
Oh, that.
The entire paragraph reads:
High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault. The accounts by two former classmates emerged after police said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.
I would have led with the nothing in the background part, myself.
CNN has more:
Another former high school classmate, who asked not to be identified out of concerns for his privacy, also recalled being summoned to a school administrator’s office and being told he was “number one” on the list of students Betts wanted to kill.
He said the list was separated into two columns: a “kill list” for boys and a “rape list” for girls.
Chivalry is not dead.
A fourth person, who also asked not to be named for privacy reasons, said, “All I know is there was a list of violent actions and a list of names including mine.”
She said some of the names were female students who, like her, turned him down for dates. She said Betts often simulated shooting other students and threatened to kill himself and others on several occasions.
“He loved to look at you and pretend to shoot with guns, guns with his hands,” she said.
Another former classmate, who was not on the list, said he met Betts through a “friend of a friend.” He said whenever they hung out, Betts would talk about violence and use harsh language about women, like calling them “sluts.”
President Donald Trump tried to blame a lot of things Monday for a series of horrific shootings over the weekend. What he didn’t do was take any of the blame onto himself or pledge to change his rhetoric.
Well. This is Trump. Has he ever in his life taken any blame for anything?
I don’t know for a fact that he hasn’t, because I wasn’t there, but I think if he ever had we would have been told. From everything we’ve been all too able to see, he never does and he is incapable of ever doing so. He’s incapable of it in the same sense I’m incapable of speaking Mandarin. I’ve never learned Mandarin, so even if you put a gun to my head and told me to speak it or get the bullet, I wouldn’t be able to. Same with Trump. He’s never learned donaldtrumpcanbewrong, so he can’t speak it even if you try to force him.
Reading from a teleprompter at the White House, the President sounded nothing like the Trump who goes off-script when he tweets or is whipping up crowds of political supporters at campaign rallies.
Indeed. He sounded like someone reading Mandarin phonetically spelled on a teleprompter, with a wad of cotton in his mouth and a severe head twitch.
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said Monday. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”
It’s Mandarin to him. He doesn’t understand a word of it.
Amy McGrath is his Democratic opponent. That’s her name on the tombstone in the lower right corner. She tweeted this morning:
Hours after the El Paso shooting, Mitch McConnell proudly tweeted this photo. I find it so troubling that our politics have become so nasty and personal that the Senate Majority Leader thinks it’s appropriate to use imagery of the death of a political opponent (me) as messaging.
As far as I can tell it was the campaign account that tweeted it rather than McConnell himself, but that’s a minor distinction, especially since the tweet is still sitting there.
But please, tell us more about the role of video games.
One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice loses nutrients due to rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised potentially serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize press coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.
Will there be anyone left by January 2021?
Last week, an intelligence analyst at the State Department said he left his post after administration officials blocked his testimony to Congress about the wide-ranging national security implications of climate change. A National Park Service employee also stepped forward, alleging she lost her job after refusing to scrub mentions of human-caused climate change from a peer-reviewed paper that was set to publish.
It’s so crazy. What do they think is going to happen? Climate change will be rough for poor people but it will leave rich people alone? That their children and grandchildren will be just fine because they’ll have enough money to deal with it?
Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.
Well, the less we know, the freer we are to make colossal mistakes.
Ziska and another leading researcher at USDA, Naomi Fukagawa, who is the director of USDA’s Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, had collaborated for more than two years with scientists at the University of Washington, University of Tokyo, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Southern Queensland, in Australia, and Bryan College of Health Sciences, in Lincoln, Neb., on what they considered a groundbreaking achievement. The paper looked at how an atmosphere increasingly rich in carbon dioxide could affect rice, which some 600 million people rely on for the majority of their calories, particularly in developing Asian countries.
600 million people is a lot. Their nutrition would seem to be important.
The study found that rice not only loses protein and minerals, which confirmed earlier research, but they also for the first time found that key vitamins can drop.
The journal editors anticipated that the paper would attract international press interest, so they asked the researchers to have their institutions help prepare a press packet. USDA officials initially wrote their own press release to tout the findings, but ended up spiking the release at the last minute because they said senior officials within ARS had concerns about the paper, according to emails obtained by POLITICO from one of the study’s other co-authors.
A communications official went as far as to call the University of Washington and suggest the university reconsider its plans to promote the paper.
Ziske asked for a meeting with the senior officials. No response.
“That’s when it occurred to me,” he said. “This isn’t about the science. It’s about something else, but it’s not about the science.”
Trump says this could be GREAT. It’s up to us. We can do this! We can make it GREAT! Make American mass-murder great again! MAMGA!
We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain. Likewise for those so seriously wounded. We can never forget them, and those many who came before them. Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying……..this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!
Come on, kids! Make it GREAT!! It’s in your hands!
Trump gave a “statement” this morning. I tried to watch it but it’s too unbearable, watching him try to pretend to care, try to pretend to be shocked and sad, try to pretend to be an adult.
Trump issued a statement on the attacks in El Paso and Dayton in which he blamed violent video games and mental health-care, among other things, for mass shootings.
Condemning the “barbaric slaughters,” Trump called on the nation to reject racism. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said.
But he then pivoted to any number of other subjects — including violent video games, access to mental-heath care and the federal death penalty.
Criticism was prompt.
Trump’s statement on the shootings was quickly criticized for downplaying the role of white supremacy and lenient gun laws.
Although the president called on America to “condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” he avoided any mention of his own role in fueling such rhetoric. One political scientist put it this way:
Brian Klaas✔@brianklaas
Sure, it’s good to finally use the words. But let’s be clear: no figure in modern American history has done more to encourage and embolden these hateful ideologies than Donald Trump. It defined his campaign. It has defined his presidency. A reluctant sentence changes none of that https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1158380246749650944 …
Jim Sciutto✔@jimsciutto
“In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy”, says Trump. He also calls the violence “domestic terrorism”. These are both firsts since the shootings.
His focus on violent video games and mental-health care also enraged commentators who emphasized that Trump avoided outlining any specific action he would take to reform gun laws.
Democratic presidential candidate Tim Ryan, who represents Ohio’s 13th District in the House, slammed Trump for confusing Dayton with Toledo in his statement this morning.
As Trump was concluding his remarks, Trump accidentally offered his condolences to the victims in Toledo, which is roughly 150 miles from the shooting site in Dayton.
“It just shows the level of disengagement,” Ryan told CNN, arguing that Trump’s mistake reflected his “diminished mental capacity” to deal with America’s pressing problems. “It’s a slap in the face to the people here in Dayton.”
In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.
On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…
500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun
Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.
?????
Dude, we know lots more than 34 people die in the US every day. We know. But when one person with a big gun kills a lot of people in seconds, yes, we pay attention. We pay attention and we have emotions about it. We ought to have emotions about it.
I wrote a Free Inquiry column some time back quarreling with his claim that “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” Same problem: he left out emotion. You can’t leave emotion out of policy, because policy is all about what we care about. If we don’t care, evidence is just a pile of meaningless facts.
In the waning days of Barack Obama’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a set of grants to organizations working to counter violent extremism, including among white supremacists. One of the grantees was Life After Hate, which The Hill has called “one of the only programs in the U.S. devoted to helping people leave neo-Nazi and other white supremacy groups.” Another grant went to researchers at the University of North Carolina who were helping young people develop media campaigns aimed at preventing their peers from embracing white supremacy and other violent ideologies. But soon after Trump took office, his administration canceled both of these grants. In its first budget, it requested no funding for any grants in this field.
Because? We want more violent white supremacy?
“Under this administration,” says Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, “there’s been a precipitous decline in the dedicated staff and program funding devoted to combatting ideologically motivated violence.”
This decline can’t be chalked up to general budget cuts. Although Trump has slashed funding for many domestic departments, he increased Department of Homeland Security spending by more than 7 percent in his first budget and another 4 percent in his second. The cuts stem instead from two biases. First, in keeping with their law-and-order mentality, Trump officials would rather empower the police to arrest suspected terrorists than work with local communities to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place, as the Office of Community Partnerships did. Second, they believe the primary terrorist threat to Americans is jihadism, not white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnerships committed the sin of working on both.
The first one makes no sense at all. It’s better to let people shoot up Walmarts and then punish them than it is prevent them from wanting to shoot up Walmarts in the first place? Even if you love punishing people for its own sake, there are still the victims of the shootings to consider, not to mention everyone who will miss them.
In 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than “any other domestic extremist movement.” But Trump advisers have shrugged off these inconvenient facts. In an interview in 2017, White House Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared that there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot [in the United States] that was unconnected from isis or al-Qaeda.” When critics cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.”
Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke slam Trump in wake of El Paso massacre, face backlash for politicizing tragedy
I stare, I blink, I stare some more.
For politicizing? What, because in fact it was just a random natural event, like a volcano burping? It was a Tragedy but not at all a political act?
Come on now.
The “tragedy” is political in so many ways. It’s political because the NRA is political, and the NRA is why we can’t have any restrictions on gun ownership. It’s political because El Paso is on the border, and mostly Hispanic. It’s political because the US grabbed Texas from Mexico in 1845. It’s political because Trump has been spewing racism at Mexico since the day he announced his candidacy. It’s probably political because the suspect is alleged to have left a racist manifesto to help us understand his reasons. It’s political because Trump is deliberately and with maximum venom and ill will verbally attacking every brown person he can think of. It’s political because Fox treats Trump as the best thing since lynchings. It.is.political.
Forests. Forests and climate change. It’s not just in Siberia and Alberta and California that they’re in danger of disappearing altogether. Germany too is losing forests.
Germany’s parched forests are nearing ecological collapse, foresters and researchers warn. More than 1 million established trees have died since 2018 as a result of drought, winter storms and bark beetle plagues.
Germany’s forests are undoubtedly suffering as a result of climate change, with millions of seedlings planted in the hope of diversifying and restoring forests dying, warns Ulrich Dohle, chairman of the 10,000-member Bunds Deutscher Forstleute (BDF) forestry trade union.
“It’s a catastrophe. German forests are close to collapsing,” Dohle added in an interview with t-online, a online news portal of Germany’s Ströer media group.
Meanwhile Bolsinaro is destroying Brazil’s on purpose.
The El Paso shooting fits a growing and disturbing trend of far-right violence internationally.
Like the attack in Christchurch, the suspected attacker fits a particular profile – an individual who may have acted alone but who inhabited an international online subculture of extremism, one in which others incite and encourage violent acts.
A document – which authorities have linked to the attacker – was posted online and was characteristic in its claims about population replacement (in New Zealand it was Muslims, in El Paso, Hispanics).
The “population replacement” thing is absurd. Anglo-Saxons did quite a bit of Maori-replacement in New Zealand, and Spanish people replaced Mayans and others in what is now Mexico, and Yankees replaced Hispanics in what is now Texas.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso native, told CNN Mr Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric had stoked divisions: “He’s an open avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country.”
Also on CNN, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, another Democratic presidential hopeful, said: “Donald Trump is responsible for this. He is responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry.”
But acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney rebutted the Democrats’ allegations and attributed the attacks to “sick” individuals, saying on ABC: “There’s no benefit here in trying to make this a political issue, this is a social issue and we need to address it as that.”
But Trump does incite hatred of Hispanic and/or African-American people almost every time he says anything, so we can’t (and shouldn’t) pretend that just has no effect.
There is nothing racist about President #Trump‘s suggesting that those who regularly spew hate at #America might spend their time more productively elsewhere
Trump’s next tweet says
‘God be with you all’: Trump pledges full support for El Paso shooting victims as lawmakers also grieve.
I wonder if the first one is meant to absolve him of any responsibility for the El Paso racist murder-spree. Pastor Scott is wrong, unfortunately, despite being black himself. He’s wrong because the people Trump told to leave are all non-white. Pastor Scott is free to pretend that’s irrelevant if he chooses, but he’s still wrong, wrong on the facts and wrong morally. Trump’s racist record is long and by now boringly familiar, so yes, when he does something that looks racist, it’s safe for us to conclude that it is racist and he intends it to be racist and he does it with malice aforethought.
Today’s shooting in El Paso, Texas, was not only tragic, it was an act of cowardice. I know that I stand with everyone in this Country to condemn today’s hateful act. There are no reasons or excuses that will ever justify killing innocent people….Melania and I send our heartfelt thoughts and prayers to the great people of Texas.
Somebody wrote that for him, and whoever it was is a damn fool. Who cares whether or not “it was an act of cowardice”? What’s that got to do with anything? Why would that matter?
And we know it’s a lie about the heartfelt thoughts and prayers. We know perfectly well they don’t actually care at all.
The FBI, local and state law enforcement are working together in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio. Information is rapidly being accumulated in Dayton. Much has already be learned in El Paso. Law enforcement was very rapid in both instances. Updates will be given throughout the day!
The cops arrived fast. That’s what he singles out for mention. We’re supposed to be thrilled about the sirens and the speeding cars, I suppose. Oooh it’s just like tv!
And the jaunty exclamation point at the end.
He’s been playing golf all day.
But he sent a message before he left.
God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio.
The entire nation is horrified by today’s senseless violence in El Paso. Elaine’s and my prayers go out to the victims of this terrible violence, their families and friends, and the brave first responders who charged into harm’s way.
The House passed HR8, a Bipartisan Background Checks Act, 5 months ago and the Senate has yet to vote on it. It was one of our 1st major priorities after ending the gov shutdown. You’ve been sitting on it since February giving bogus excuses. Care to explain the people why?
I did an angry reply to McConnell myself yesterday. It’s stomach-turning watching Trump and McConnell pretend to be sad about El Paso when they are the very people who glorify guns, scream bloody murder at all efforts to control the sale of guns, and talk racist incitement every chance they get. Nobody wants their damn prayers.
