Tracker

Architect of Trump election theft attempt is recruiting an army of conspiracy-fueled poll workers: report With the midterm election just months away and Donald Trump still eyeing a third presidential run in 2024, the New York Times is reporting that one of the architects of the former president's attempt to throw out the results of his 2020 loss is currently working on recruiting conspiracy-minded poll workers and watchers that have state election officials fearful of future chaos and disruption. According to the report, attorney Cleta Mitchell who rose to fame as a participant on Trump's infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where the former president demanded the Georgia Republican "find" 11,780 votes, is working with the Election Integrity Network which has financial ties to Trump's still-thriving political operation. As the Times' Alexandra Berzon writes, Mitchell has been busy traveling the country and meeting with far-right activists, instructing them on how to get deeply involved with the election process in their states, putting them in a position to challenge election results and disrupt certification of the votes. According to Berzon, no position at the state level is considered too small by Mitchell, who recently told over 150 conservatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, "We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again.” Pointing out that Mitchell was a participant in multiple lawsuits by Trump to challenge election results at the state level -- none of which succeeded -- Berzon writes that she is undeterred as her conspiracy theories are debunked and that she has the financial backing of several conservative groups. "In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work," the Times report states, adding that an examination of her efforts reveals " a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures." Her supporters "include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation." .alternet.org/2022/05/poll-workers/

Ronnie Hawkins, Key Figure in Canadian Rock and Mentor of The Band, Dies at 87 -Getty Ronnie Hawkins, known by some as “the father of Canadian rock ‘n’ roll,” died on Sunday morning. He was 87. Hawkins’ wife, Wanda, confirmed his death after an undisclosed illness. An Arkansas native, Hawkins was known for having an eye for talent and credited with inspiring much of the Canadian rock ‘n’ roll scene. In the 1950s, he went on a Canadian tour and later moved to Canada, recognizing that he could have a greater impact in a country where rock was in its fledgling form. There, Hawkins formed a group of backup musicians that later became known as The Band, who eventually played with Bob Dylan and became iconic in their own right. The Band invited Hawkins, who went on to mentor more Canadian musicians, on stage for their final show in 1976, with the scene featured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz. When The Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, guitarist Robbie Robertson said: “We should thank Ronnie Hawkins in being so instrumental in us coming together and for teaching us the ‘code of the road,’ so to speak.”

It is going to get worse in the US. Average family income is falling as is literacy. The rich as getting richer, the middle class is getting wiped out, and the poor are getting poorer and more desperate.

About 80-90% of the calls that police respond to are not critical and are usually better served by a mobile crisis team, leaving officers free to respond to more urgent/critical calls. There is a strong linkage between poverty, lack of education/employment and substance abuse- criminal conduct.

You may have noted that there is a very strong feminine presence in the bridge crew that was not present in any of the other series apart from the lamentable Discovery shows.

Shhhhsssss- you'll ruin it for the rest of us.

Sooooo...the Bombers have less Character than before? Agreed. Essentially, the new players are on probation and can be released if the colour of their shoelaces clash with their uniforms.

The war in eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region is not going well for Ukraine now. All of the troops and military equipment that was at Mariupol has been moved north in order to secure the Donbas region. The Russians are using WW2 tactics- throw wave after wave of bodies and equipment at Ukrainian lines expecting that the war of attrition will swing in their favour. Ukrainian military reported than in one day, they killed 500 Russians. Simultaneously, they are forcibly removing Ukrainians to camps in Siberia. Ukrainian supply lines are stretched with food and war materiel in shorter and shorter supply.

The family that loads together, explodes together. They must be sooo proud.

Good series except for the captain sporting a 'do that would take him about two hours before he emerged from his cabin.

Trump is unworthy to be referred to as a human being. He is a pile of excrement in a suit.

Oklahoma GOP gubernatorial candidate: Ban abortion nationwide because life begins 'before' conception Mark Sherwood, a Republican candidate for governor in Oklahoma, asserted that he is against all exceptions for abortion because he believes life begins "before" conception. "No life, even conceived in the most heinous or even less-than-ideal circumstances is a mistake," Sherwood told Real America's Voice host David Brody after revealing that his mother was likely a victim of rape. "As I sit here and talk to you, I can tell you unequivocally, even the people who are pro-choice are not mistakes. Everybody has a purpose." "So I believe life begins in God before it begins at conception," he said, noting that his "plan is to push the legislators on both chambers as per their Republican GOP stance in Oklahoma to present this bill to the houses with the people behind it." Sherwood insisted that he "will sign that bill because it's the right thing to do and we'll make it the law immediately to abolish abortion, no exceptions." The candidate admitted that women would continue to seek abortions even if the practice was outlawed. He compared illegal abortions to the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. "Is it going to stop abortion all the way by people's choices? No," he said. "But do we need to create laws that match the punishment, that match the crime? Yes. And if we do that, God's hand and blessing will be back on this land. And it's going to take hard calls. It's going to take some guts." https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/oklahoma-republican-life-before-conception/

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Local police blocked tactical units from engaging Robb Elementary School shooter for an hour: report When a specially equipped U.S. Border Patrol tactical team arrived on the scene of Tuesday’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, local police who were already on the scene wouldn’t allow them to engage with the shooter, The New York Times reports. “The agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at some point between 12 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., according to the officials — far earlier than previously known,” The Times’ report stated. “But they did not breach the adjoining classrooms of the school where the gunman had locked himself in until a little before 1 p.m. Members of the federal tactical team killed the gunman.” But officials speaking to The Times say the Uvalde Police Department prevented the agents from going in sooner. The new details further call into the question the thinking behind how law enforcement responded to the shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers. The Border Patrol and ICE agents say they did not understand why they were force to wait. All of the 21 victims died in the area where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had barricaded himself in.

Texas Officials Are Trying To Blame A Teacher For Uvalde Shooting The Texas Department of Public Safety is apparently blaming a teacher for propping a door open before the Uvalde shooting. The timeline according to the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, “11:27, we know from video evidence, 11:27 the exterior door suspected of when we knew the shooter entered. Ramos was propped open by a teacher. 11:28 the suspect’s vehicle crashes into the ditch, as previously described. The teacher runs to room 132 to receive a phone. The teacher walked back to the exit door, and the door remains propped open. — as reported by the director, there are two males at a funeral home that when they heard the crash, they went to the crash scene.” Officials claimed that they were holding the briefing to give the facts and not assess blame, but the first thing that they did was to blame a teacher for propping a door open. Texas officials appear to be going out of their way to blame anyone and everything, but the gun laws that made it easy for the shooter to buy an assault weapon and kill 19 children and two adults. It is unbelievable that Texas officials are trying to assign any level of blame to a teacher for this horrible crime. If assault weapons were not so easy to obtain in Texas, the situation would not have been as deadly. Texas is blaming a teacher when easy access to assault weapons is the problem. Something is rotten in Texas.

Fox News Pundit Still Claims Uvalde Cops ‘Saved a Lot of Lives’ and ‘Did a Lot of Right Things’ Tom Homan also blasted reporters for having the temerity to grill Texas law enforcement about the school massacre, calling their questions a “little insensitive…

Texas cops’ claims unravel: Police didn’t "engage" Uvalde shooter — but they cuffed scared parents Texas state police on Thursday walked back key claims they repeatedly made about the Uvalde school shooting after coming under scrutiny for failing to stop the gunman until 90 minutes after he arrived outside of the school. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and spokespeople at the state's Department of Public Safety said since the attack that school police officers "engaged" the shooter before he entered the school, praising law enforcement's "quick response." But DPS regional director Victor Escalon acknowledged during a hectic news conference on Thursday that police did not engage the shooter and, in fact, there was no school police officer there at all before the gunman entered the school. "He walked in unobstructed initially," Escalon said. The official said the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, shot his grandmother and crashed her pickup truck before going to the school. "He was not confronted by anybody," Escalon said. In fact, Ramos crashed his car at around 11:28 am but did not enter the school for about 12 minutes. The gunman got out of his truck and shot at two people across the street, Escalon said, before shooting multiple times at the school building. Ramos entered the school through an unlocked side door at around 11:40 am, according to Escalon. The gunman walked into a classroom and fired more than 25 times, the official said. Officers arrived at the school at around 11:44 am and tried to engage the gunman but came under fire and backed off. The suspect was in the classroom for about an hour as police gathered outside while worried parents begged officers to enter the building and stop the gunman. Escalon claimed police during this time were evacuating other parts of the school and at some point tried to negotiate with the suspect. Eventually, a Border Patrol tactical team arrived and breached the classroom, killing the suspect in a shootout, according to Escalon. RELATED: "Go in there!": People begged police to enter Uvalde school as gunman rampaged for up to an hour It's unclear why it took so long for law enforcement to stop the gunman. Data shows that most "active shooter" attacks in the U.S. end within five minutes, according to FBI data, but the Uvalde attack lasted 20 times as long. CNN reported that there were about 100 federal agents and local police officers on the scene. "They [didn't] make entry immediately because of the gunfire they were receiving," Escalon said while dodging questions from reporters. Parents who lost their children in the attack slammed the police response and the cops' narrative following the shooting. "They said they rushed in and all that, we didn't see that," Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jacklyn was killed while he begged police outside to let him go into the school, told the New York Times. "There were plenty of men out there armed to the teeth that could have gone in faster. This could have been over in a couple minutes." The response came under criticism from law enforcement experts. "If you've got somebody you think is actively engaged in harming people or attempting to harm people, your obligation as a police officer is to immediately stop that person and neutralize that threat," Don Alwes, a former instructor for the National Tactical Officers Association, told NBC News. "We don't expect police officers to commit suicide in doing it. But the expectation is that if someone is about to harm someone, especially children, you've got to take immediate action to make that stop." The stalled response may have cost lives. "You can't wait until patients go to a trauma center," Dr. Ronald Stewart, the senior trauma surgeon at University Hospital in San Antonio, who coordinated treatment for multiple victims, told NBC. "You have to act quickly." Instead of entering the school, law enforcement officers were seen doing crowd control as terrified parents gathered outside. Some officers apparently went inside the school to retrieve their own children, according to a DPS official. A video recorded outside the school shows law enforcement officers with long guns preventing parents from entering the school to do the same as they beg the cops do something. "Shoot him or something!" a woman pleads in the video. "They're all just ******* parked outside, dude. They need to go in there," a man is heard saying. "The police were doing nothing," Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children attend second and third grade at Robb Elementary, told The Wall Street Journal. "They were just standing outside the fence. They weren't going in there or running anywhere." The response took so long that Gomez had time to drive 40 miles to the school after hearing about the shooting to plead with police to enter. Gomez and other parents urged law enforcement to go into the school before U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs and told her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation, she said. Another father was tackled and thrown to the ground by police, she said, and another parent was pepper-sprayed. Gomez said she convinced local police officers that she knew to persuade the marshals to free her. Once she was free, Gomez jumped the school fence and evacuated her children to safety. A spokesman for the Marshals Service denied that anyone was handcuffed. "Our deputy marshals maintained order and peace in the midst of the grief-stricken community that was gathering around the school," he told the Journal. Desirae Garza, whose niece Amerie Jo Garza was killed in the shooting, told The Times that her brother Angel was handcuffed by a local police officer as well while trying to run into the school. "Nobody was telling him anything. He was trying to find out. He wanted to know where his daughter was," Garza said. After the shooting, Gomez said she saw police use a Taser on a father who approached a bus evacuating students to get his child. "They didn't do that to the shooter, but they did that to us. That's how it felt," she told the Journal. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, called out state officials for providing the public with "conflicting accounts of how the tragedy in Uvalde unfolded." Castro sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday calling for a federal investigation into the police response. "I'm calling on the @FBI to use their maximum authority," he tweeted, "to investigate and provide a full report on the timeline, the law enforcement response and how 21 Texans were killed."

The roots of this violence are many and run deep in American society. I believe that the greatest contributor to this is the "I'm alright, screw you" attitude there. There is no sense that they are anything like a cohesive society that cares for each other. This is a stratified society which claims to be a melting pot but shuns and marginalizes anyone without money or power. If my concern is only for myself and my status and possessions, then anything or anyone that threatens my position is a threat and must be suppressed with all the tools at my disposal. As one American put it, "It is not enough that I win, it is only enough if I see you reduced by losing".

Sexual predators rarely have more than one incident. I suspect that police in Hamilton and surrounding areas as well as the place Saunders was living are going to look at unsolved incidents to see if he fits any of them. These things are like pulling on a thread on a sweater- you don't know where you are going to wind up.

In the Uvalde incident, they seemed to feel that their value was largely decorative.

Police Slow To Engage Uvalde Gunman Because They 'Could’ve Been Shot,' Official Says "They could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school," a spokesman said. Police officers were slow to enter Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to confront a gunman because “they could’ve been shot,” a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said Thursday. Lt. Chris Olivarez spoke with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to describe the law enforcement response after an 18-year-old gunman entered the school on Tuesday, killing 19 young children and two teachers. Olivarez said officers responded quickly that day amid reports there was a gunman at the school, but waited for a tactical team to fully confront the man, identified as Salvador Ramos, and kill him. Police have offered changing explanations of the timeline after they arrived at the school, and varying accounts say the gunman was left inside a classroom with children and teachers for 40 minutes to an hour before he was killed.

Well, that answers the question. He's innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but if so. give him the max.