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Donald Trump was asked about immigration at tonight’s debate and answered with some ramble about Eisenhower or something.
Anyway, here’s what happened on Google:
USA! USA!
Continued –
Mother Jones
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Noted without comment, Mike Huckabee’s answer to a question about the Fed at tonight’s GOP kid’s table debate:
Link:
Mother Jones
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Details are continuing to emerge about a gun rampage that took place in the streets of Colorado Springs on Saturday morning, in which 33-year-old Noah Harpham shot three people to death before police killed him in a shootout. On Monday, a troubling detail came to light in a Denver Post report suggesting that police may have had a chance to intervene before the slaughter began—but that a police dispatcher may have reacted without urgency to a 911 call about Harpham because of Colorado’s open carry law:
Witnesses watched in horror as Harpham picked his victims off. One of them, the bicyclist, pleaded for his life before being killed.
“I heard the (young man) say, ‘Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!’ ” Naomi Bettis, a neighbor who witnessed the killing, said Monday.
Bettis said she recognized the gunman as her neighbor—whom she didn’t know by name—and that before the initial slaying she saw him roaming outside with a rifle. She called 911 to report the man, but a dispatcher explained that Colorado has an open carry law that allows public handling of firearms.
“He did have a distraught look on his face,” Bettis said. “It looked like he had a rough couple days or so.”
It’s unclear how much time lapsed between Bettis’ 911 call and when the rampage began, but according to The Gazette the initial police response didn’t come until after the carnage was in progress:
The first reports of a shooting came about 8:45 a.m. as Colorado Springs police were called to the 200 block of Prospect Street after multiple calls about gunshots, El Paso County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Jacqueline Kirby and Colorado Springs police spokeswoman Lt. Catherine Buckley said. Authorities said the shooter was killed after opening fire on police officers.
By then, Harpham had killed the bicyclist, 35-year-old Andrew Alan Myers, and two women at a nearby location, 42-year-old Jennifer Michelle Vasquez, and 34-year-old Christina Rose Baccus-Gallela. (Similarly, the Denver Post reported: “Officers were first called on reports of a ‘possible shooting’ at 230 North Prospect Street—a townhouse-like building—where they found the bicyclist dead and a fire burning, the dispatch archives show.”)
Proponents of open carry laws argue that the ability for citizens to take firearms with them in public isn’t just a right but makes communities safer. We don’t yet know, but the law allowing guns to be carried on display in Colorado may have just done the opposite.
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Did Colorado’s Open Carry Law Delay Police Response to a Mass Shooter?
Mother Jones
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Dr. Ben Carson, the Republican presidential front-runner, tried out a new response on Thursday to critics who say he lacks the experience to be president:
It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic. @my_ccu pic.twitter.com/6Nqod4sicS
— Dr. Ben Carson (@RealBenCarson)
If nothing else, it’s good to see Carson has a plan to cope with rising sea levels.
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You may have missed Bernie Sanders’ town hall at Virginia’s George Mason University on Wednesday as the GOP presidential contenders duked it out in Boulder, Colorado. But he made some news. Sanders called for the full decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level, a move that would allow states to regulate the drug the same way they handle alcohol or tobacco. “Right now marijuana is listed by the federal government as a schedule-one drug, meaning that it is considered to be as dangerous as heroin,” Sanders said. “That is absurd.”
Sanders, while touting the possible civic benefits of decriminalization (such as providing a funding stream, through taxation, for treatment of more dangerous substances such as opioids) took pains to frame legalization as a matter of racial justice:
Let us be clear, as is the case in many other areas, that there is a racial component to this situation. Although about the same proportion of blacks and whites use marijuana, a black person is almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person. Too many Americans have seen their lives destroyed because they have criminal records because of marijuana use. That is wrong. That has got to change…A criminal record could include not only time in jail, but a criminal record makes it harder for a person to get a job, harder for a person to get public benefits, harder for a person to even get housing. A criminal record stays with a person for his or her entire life.
The legalization he proposed would also eliminate one of the roadblocks to decriminalization in places such as Washington state or Colorado, by allowing marijuana distributors to use the banking system like any other business.
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While You Were Watching Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders Just Called for Legalizing Weed
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Hillary Clinton appeared on the Late Show on Tuesday night, where she and host Stephen Colbert started out by discussing watching “bad TV” with husband Bill—House of Cards and the Good Wife are among the couple’s favorites—and whether it’s fun to run for president of the United States.
“Some days it really is fun,” Clinton said. “Some days it’s just very hard work. You do so many events, you do kind of lose track of where you are. But most days something happens during the day that really makes you feel like ‘Yes, I know why I’m doing this, I am so committed.'”
But it wasn’t all softball questions. After weighing in on topics like the middle class and Bernie Sanders—responses Colbert jokingly hit back as a “cheap trick” to say things people like—Clinton was then directly asked how she would handle an economic situation like the 2007 financial crisis and whether she’d let big banks fail.
The Democratic presidential candidate answered emphatically, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”
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Hillary Clinton Tells Stephen Colbert: I Would Let Big Banks Fail
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A Washington Post-ABC News poll on gun violence published Monday included a stark finding: “By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws.” Sixty-three percent of respondents blamed a deficient mental health care system as the prime reason for America’s incessant gun massacres, while 23 percent pointed to weak gun regulations.
What’s most troubling about these results and the question that prompted them is that they perpetuate a dangerous stigmatization. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. I wrote about this in my recent Mother Jones cover story on threat assessment, a growing strategy for stopping mass shooters that relies on collaboration between mental health and law enforcement experts:
We know that many mass shooters are young white men with acute mental health issues. The problem is, such broad traits do little to help threat assessment teams identify who will actually attack. Legions of young men love violent movies or first-person shooter games, get angry about school, jobs, or relationships, and suffer from mental health afflictions. The number who seek to commit mass murder is tiny. Decades of research have shown that the link between mental disorders and violent behavior is small and not useful for predicting violent acts. (People with severe mental disorders are in fact far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.)
Then there is the role of guns. As a top forensic psychologist described it to me at a recent summit of more than 700 threat assessment professionals in Southern California, “One of the first things you focus on with this process is access to weapons.” Guns obviously are no more a sole cause of mass shootings than schizophrenia or suicidal depression are. But their role in such crimes is self-evident:
Can they be prevented from striking?
Possession of a firearm, of course, is not a meaningful predictor of targeted violence. But at the conference in Disneyland, virtually everyone I spoke with agreed that guns make these crimes a lot easier to commit—and a lot more lethal. “There are so many firearms out there, you just assume everybody has one,” Scalora says. “It’s safer to assume that than the opposite.” The presence of more than 300 million guns in the United States—and the lack of political will to regulate their sale or use more effectively—is a stark reality with which threat assessment experts must contend, and why many believe their approach may be the best hope for combating what has become a painfully normal American problem.
The Washington Post-ABC News poll furthered a misleading stereotype about a broad population of Americans by presenting a false choice between mental health and gun policy. The chart above shows that only 10 percent of respondents recognized that solving mass shootings is more complicated than checking one box or the other. Any solution deeply involves both, and a whole lot more.
Originally posted here:
What a New Poll About Mass Shootings in America Gets Dangerously Wrong
Mother Jones
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Authorities in Richland County, South Carolina, are investigating a video that surfaced Monday showing a uniformed officer aggressively confronting a high school student. Local station WIS-TV reports that county sheriff’s deputies are investigating the incident, which took place on Monday at Spring Valley High School, according to school officials. The video, which appears to have been recorded on a cellphone by a classmate, shows a white male officer standing over a black female student sitting at her desk; moments later he grabs the student and flips her on her back. After dragging her across the floor, the officer says, “Hands behind your back—give me your hands.” The video has no additional context as to what led to or followed the altercation.
“Parents are heartbroken as this is just another example of the intolerance that continues to be of issue in Richland County School District Two, particularly with families and children of color,” a local black parents group wrote in a statement responding to the video.
Also: Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott told WIS-TV that the school resource officer (SRO) was responding to a student who was refusing to leave class. “The student was told she was under arrest for disturbing school and given instructions, which she again refused,” Lott said. “The video then shows the student resisting and being arrested by the SRO.”
The video is the latest in a series of disturbingly violent altercations involving school cops. As Mother Jones first reported in July, there have been at least 29 incidents in the United States since 2010 in which school-based police officers used questionable force against students in K-12 schools, many of which caused serious injuries, and in one case death. Data on use of force by school cops is lacking even as the number of officers on campus has ballooned over the past two decades, with little training or oversight.
Update, 6:15 p.m. EDT: Here is a statement released by the school district, via local TV reporter Megan Rivers:
@RichlandTwo Just Released a New Statement after incident at @SV_Vikings https://t.co/hW9EIevaKM pic.twitter.com/yPkqMT8Y1N
— Megan Rivers (@MegMRivers)
Credit:
Disturbing Video Shows School Cop Body Slam and Drag a Black Female Student
Mother Jones
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The University of Mississippi permanently lowered the state flag from its campus grounds on Monday, in a historic decision to distance itself from the flag’s controversial Confederate emblem.
The flag’s removal follows a 33-15 vote with one abstention by student senate members and faculty last week. Mississippi has been the only state to fully include the Confederate symbol in its flag.
“This is one small step in the structure change we want to see at the University,” the state’s NAACP chapter president Buka Okoye said. “I’m positive for the future because of how quickly the administration acted.”
The decision comes more than four months after a gunman opened fire inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina killing nine people. Once law enforcement officials identified the suspected gunman, photos of him embracing the Confederate flag surfaced, sparking a national debate over the emblem and its racist roots.
Weeks after the shooting, South Carolina finally removed the battle flag from flying above the statehouse grounds—more than 50 years after it was first raised to protest the civil rights movement.
Despite calls from Mississippi lawmakers, including two Republican senators, to do away with the Confederate symbol on the Mississippi state flag in the wake of the Charleston mass shooting, the move to do so likely faces an uphill battle in a state that has flown the symbol for more than a century.
“As Mississippi’s flagship university, we have a deep love and respect for our state,” the university’s interim chancellor Morris Stocks said in a statement on Monday. “Because the flag remains Mississippi’s official banner, this was a hard decision. I understand the flag represents tradition and honor to some. But to others, the flag means that some members of the Ole Miss family are not welcomed or valued.”
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After a week of speculation in Washington, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said for the first time on Tuesday that he would be willing to officially throw his hat in the ring for the position of House speaker, provided that all House Republicans support his candidacy.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House majority leader, withdrew his name from consideration for the post. McCarthy’s exit came after a widely publicized gaffe, in which he admitted that the Benghazi committee was in part a smokescreen intended to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president. Since then, Ryan has been the GOP favorite for the position. However, up until Tuesday he’s insisted that he had no interest in the job.
To win the post, Ryan needs the approval of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative House Republicans that helped force the resignation of John Boehner. Ryan met with the group on Tuesday. According to Politico reporter Jake Sherman, Ryan told the group that he wanted to know by the end of the week whether he would have the full caucus’ support of his candidacy. He also suggested restructuring the position to be more about managing the party’s message and less about fundraising.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) have also announced their candidacy for the speaker post, but Chaffetz said in a tweet on Tuesday that, should Ryan run, he’ll drop out of the race and throw his support behind Ryan.
Boehner had planned to leave his post at the end of this month but has said he’ll stay on in the job until his successor is named. Adding to the pressure to quickly name a new speaker: Congress must raise the debt ceiling by November 3 or risk a federal government default on the nation’s debt.
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After GOP Implosion, Paul Ryan Says He’s Willing to Be Speaker of the House
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