I remember the days when the office of the presidency was respected, and it didn’t matter who was occupying that office – whether he/she was a Democrat of Republican – Americans generally awarded some level of respect to that person.
Those days are long gone.
Since Republicans realized that disrespecting the president was the patriotic thing to do, and since the Republican politicians realized that their patriotic followers were all for disrespecting the president, they have fell over themselves trying to out disrespect each other. The Republican politician capable of hauling the most filth to the president get the most love from the patriots in the Republican party.
Speaking on Morning Joe this morning, Chris Christie, currently running for the same office he is disrespecting, chalked up some love from the people in his party when he called Obama the “weakling in the White House.”
According to Christie, the President of the United States is a “weakling” because he has not spent the lives of Americans and the military in another war, this time, a war with Russia. Christie claimed that if he were president, the first thing he would do is implement a no-fly zone in Syria, and start a war with Russia if Putin disobeyed.
“And my first phone call would be to Vladimir,” Christie said. “And I’d say, ‘Listen, we’re enforcing this no-fly zone. And I mean we’re enforcing it against anyone, including you. So don’t try me. Don’t try me. Because I’ll do it.”
In an interview with CBS, President Obama concluded that his former Secretary of State and current leader in the Democratic run for president, Hillary Clinton, made a mistake when she decided to host her own private server for her private and government emails.
“I think she’d be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly,” Obama said.Republicans have used Hillary’s email decision as a political weapon to attack her.
Obama downplayed the threat to national security, and when it was pointed out that his administration has prosecuted people for having classified material on their private computers, the president said he didn’t get the impression there was an intent to “hide something or to squirrel away information.” He also said he was not initially aware of her use of the private email server.
There are still questions being raised about the security of that system. Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden told Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan recently that Clinton’s use of a private server was a “problem.”
Senate investigators recently discovered that Clinton’s private server was subjected to unspecified hacking attempts in 2013 from China, South Korea and Germany. The FBI is still examining her system, and that review could reveal evidence, if any, of unauthorized intrusions into her server or any attempts to siphon off her data.
I can almost guarantee that you did not hear about the 1,000th mass shooting in America since the massacre in Sandy Hook Connecticut. And I can almost guarantee that because at the time of this mass shooting, the country’s attention was fixated on another mass shooting at a college in Oregon.
Just before sundown on Thursday 1 October, an old man charged across the main street of the little town of Inglis, Florida. He was expecting trouble. Someone had recklessly fired a pistol in public, and Buzz Terhune intended to have words about it.
he horror that unfolded in the next few minutes has become so mundane, so everyday, that it no longer makes national news. Terhune was marching headlong into the 1,000th mass shooting in the United States since the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre almost three years ago.
Just a few hours earlier, a gunman in Oregon had killed nine people and injured nine others at a community college. It shocked the American conscience. But what happened to Terhune and three other people, and has happened to thousands of others across the country, went unnoticed. Shootings that injure or kill four or more people – mass shootings – have become commonplace in American culture.
An examination of the details, though, reveals mass shooting number 1,000 to be, like all the others, a human cataclysm. Broken hearts and bullets, an affair in which the roles of victim and perpetrator flip in an instant.
It started a few days earlier, when sheriff’s deputies responded to a missing person report. Walter Tyson, 57, couldn’t find his wife, Patricia. But when deputies arrived at the house, they found notes Patricia had left saying she wanted a new life. And so she had left.
Days passed.
Inglis sits on Florida’s west coast, in a swamp draped with Spanish moss. The town has been dying since the day, decades ago, when commercial net fishing was outlawed. Its population has dwindled to 1,300, and most residents are getting old.
Most of 1 October, 68-year-old Buzz Terhune ran errands in the tiny downtown. He stopped by city hall to leave a get-well card and balloons for the mayor, Drinda Merritt, who had been ill. The two had a friendly, sparring relationship: Terhune showed up at every city meeting, always sat in the same chair, and always spoke his mind.
“I’m not done with you yet!” he wrote in the card, and drew a little smiley face.
City hall’s main hallway was stacked with old wooden doors. The mayor had replaced them with doors of reinforced glass, and added a thick glass barrier at the front desk, after a man who lived across from city hall started stalking one of the women who worked there. Otis Ray Bean was his name.
“We knew we could have trouble when he moved to town,” the mayor said.
People in town didn’t like Bean. He wore a black leather vest and drank too much. His home looked like a southern gothic haunted house, with rotting clapboard sides and a rusted roof and strange stick-and-feather talismans hanging outside. It sat directly across from city hall and the town bank, looming over the comings and goings of Inglis.
Just before 6pm on 1 October, Terhune and his friend Scotty Smith pulled up to the bank’s cash machine, in Smith’s truck. Terhune sat in the passenger’s seat. The truck sat too high for Smith to reach the machine, so he stepped out. As he keyed in a $100 withdrawal he heard Terhune, behind him in the cab, say something about a fire.
Smith looked at the sky.
“Nah, Buzz,” he said. “That’s just some mist coming in. Not smoke.”
He heard Terhune say, “ … firing a gun”, and saw him jump out of the truck and take off running.
“Where are you going?” Smith shouted.
Terhune called back, “The kids!” and pointed to a playground next to city hall. He apparently suspected Bean was drunkenly firing off his pistol in sight of the children, whose mother was scrambling to gather them.
Smith hadn’t heard the gunshots, and still didn’t quite grasp what was happening. “What has Buzz got us into now?” he thought.
He danced around the cash machine until it spit out his money, then hopped into his truck and pulled away, toward the Bean place.
Terhune, who served three tours in Vietnam, crossed the street to confront Bean.
Bean, though, lay dying in his yard. He wasn’t the shooter.
A man Terhune didn’t recognize stood on the steps of the side porch, with one pistol in his hand and another on his waist. Walter Tyson had bought them years earlier in New York state, where he had a concealed-carry permit.
In the bank parking lot, Smith looked through the windshield of his truck. He saw Bean lying in the yard and, a few feet away, Terhune now lying still in the grass. He heard four more gunshots, from the first floor of the house. Tyson had found his wife.
Smith pulled his truck past the house and on to the side of the road. He dialed 911, and an operator told him to stay clear of the scene. But he backed his truck up to the house and watched his friend Terhune, hoping for movement. Praying for a twitch.
“If he had moved, I was going to pull the truck up and throw him in it and take off,” Smith said later. “Like on TV, you know? But it didn’t happen like that.”
Tyson had shot Terhune twice in the head, and he never moved again.
Inglis has no police department. But according to Lieutenant Scott Tummond of the Levy County sheriff’s office, the town had a single stroke of luck that day.
A couple of blocks away, a tactical joint task force of US marshals, state police and sheriff’s deputies had just arrested a fugitive on unrelated interstate charges. When Smith called 911, the enormous task force responded within moments, arriving at Bean’s yard like a cavalry division.
“I have no doubt things would have carried on, and been worse, if they hadn’t been there,” Tummond said. “I believe Tyson would have fled the scene and it would have spilled into another town.”
Seeing the house surrounded, Tyson climbed to the second floor. He called his daughter, Jennifer Conklin, and told her what he had done. She begged him to surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “Goodbye.”
And he shot himself.
The town had never known violence like it. And yet it seemed familiar, and even inevitable. At a memorial service for Terhune, pastor Bobby Thompson addressed much of the town.
“So profuse has become the violence that we have become accustomed to it,” he said. “We expect it.”
The reaction of many citizens is, now, to reach more quickly for their own guns.
Mayor Merritt is a petite, middle-aged woman. “If I had been there that day, the difference is I would have stopped at my car for my gun,” she said. “Then I would have crossed the street. And I would have dropped the shooter.”
After Scotty Smith called for police, he went home and picked up his own pistol.
“Maybe I’m just paranoid,” he said.
His hands shook as he talked about what he had seen.
“I felt like I needed it. It’s crazy. People will shoot you for anything, these days.”
So as fate would have it, even Republicans are having a hard time accepting Bush’s response to the massacre in Oregon. You remember his “stuff happens” remark when he was asked about the shooting?
“Stuff happens” he said.
Well in this new CBS poll, Americans of all stripes are having a hard time when Jeb’s cavalier response.
Bush’s plummeting fortunes were confirmed in a CBS News poll released Sunday which said his favorable rating among Republican primary voters has dived 11 points since August.
Trump, with 27 percent, remains in the lead in the race for the Republican nomination, with Ben Carson (21 percent) in second place, according to the poll.
Next are Ted Cruz (nine percent), Marco Rubio (eight percent). Bush was in fifth in the crowded field of 15 Republican presidential hopefuls with six percent.
The first Democratic presidential debate will be held on CNN on Tuesday. Today the network released the candidate’s standing order based on poll results since August 1st.
Standing at center stage will be Hillary Clinton with Bernie Sanders to her immediate right. To the right of Sanders will be Jim Webb.
On Clinton’s left will be Martin O’Malley and to his left, Lincoln Chafee.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, spoke to a group of 10,000 people in Tucson Arizona. Saunders, who has been criticized by some as being weak on gun control, spoke in favor of background checks and other measures that can possibly cut down on the frequency of mass shootings in this country.
“We are tired of condolences and we are tired of just prayers. We are tired and we are embarrassed in picking up the paper or turning on the TV and seeing children in elementary schools slaughtered and young people on college campuses shot.
I think the vast majority of the American people want us to move forward in sensible ways that keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them and cut down on these senseless murders that we see every week.”
Funnyman Jim Carrey was somber on Saturday as he attended the funeral of his late girlfriend, Cathriona White in Ireland. Carrey also helped carry the coffin to the burial grounds.
The actor was seen carrying White’s coffin to Our Lady of Fatima Church, in her home village of Cappawhite, Co Tipperary, the Associated Press reported. He helped walk the casket from the funeral service to the burial grounds of Cappawhite Cemetery where White was buried next to her father, Pat, NY Daily News reported. Carrey was bedecked in all black and appeared somber while holding the coffin with numerous other men.
White, a 30-year-old make-up artist, was found dead on Sept. 28 at a residence in Sherman Oaks and died of suspected suicide. According to the L.A. County Coroner’s office, White was found along with several suicide notes and four different kinds of powerful medication, including Ambien, Percocet, Zofran and Propranolol.
In his statements at a rally in Georgia on Saturday, the Republican leader, Donald Trump, implied that if Hillary Clinton was a Republican, she would be in jail.
“I mean, honestly, she shouldn’t be allowed to run. No, she shouldn’t be.”
Clinton is currently being investigated by the FBI for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of State, and questions surrounding it continue to dog her on the campaign trail.
Trump said if Clinton were a Republican, she would have already been in jail for the offense.
“I can tell you this, if that were a Republican that did what she did with the emails, they would have been in jail 12 months ago,” the businessman said. “They would have been in jail. It’s a very unfair system. It is a very, very unfair system. But I’m telling you, if that were a Republican, it’s called jail time.”
Clinton maintains that she never knowingly sent classified information over the server and has not broken the law.
Her husband was getting arrested, so like anyone else with a cellphone, she turned on her camera and began recording the arrest when the two white officers in Jacksonville Florida, suddenly became afraid for their lives and decided to attack her and her cellphone to save their lives.
“I was beaten, and then falsely arrested, my phone was stolen, my car was taken. It was a traumatic experience,” Kelli Wilson said of her unintended encounter with the cops. “It was definitely an experience you never think you would be going through,” said Wilson.
Wilson said that when the officers demanded she put away her phone, she asked “why?” And that is when the police decided to escalate the situation with the citizen.
“He asked for it, he demanded it again, and I gave him the same, ‘Why do you want my phone? What do you need my phone for?’ He told me he would punch me in my face. I eventually got punched and beaten and the sergeant that was on the scene joined in the beating.”
Wilson said the police still have her phone. Her beating for recording an arrest was captured by a nearby surveillance camera. On the police report, the officers claimed they arrested Wilson because she was interfering with an arrest.
There have been a lot of questions and inquiries into Ben Carson’s claim of being held up at gunpoint at a Popeyes in Baltimore. So many inquiries in fact, that the Baltimore police felt the need to explain in a tweet that they couldn’t find any information about the incident.
Based on the information that #BenCarson mentioned, there was not enough info to identify a police report in reference to the incident.
The tweet referencing the #BenCarson report is in reference to multiple media request. Date and location would assist in locating report. — Baltimore Police (@BaltimorePolice) October 8, 2015
So if the police have no information regarding a gun-point robbery, then Carson, the man who claimed he was personally witnessed the robbery, is the best person to get more info from.
In another interview, Carson was asked about his story and whether he would provide more information on his story.
“I don’t know,” Carson said. “To me it wasn’t that big of deal, to be honest with you.”
He then explained that he is a Christian man and wouldn’t lie about what happened.
Personally, I don’t believe him. But that’s just me.
When asked about the upcoming firings and layoffs, the denial was expected. But according to this report, company wide layoffs will happen next week.
Jack Dorsey was named permanent CEO of Twitter on Monday, and a big reason he got the job was that as a co-founder, Dorsey isn’t afraid to make the tough, necessary decisions. He isn’t wasting much time.
Twitter is planning company-wide layoffs next week, according to multiple sources. It’s unclear how much of the staff will be culled, but insiders say it will likely affect most, if not all, departments.
The downsizing comes at the same time Twitter is restructuring its engineering organization to make it leaner and more efficient, these sources say. It’s likely that many of those impacted by the layoffs will be engineers, which make up about half the staff.
The actor took to twitter with his very special message for the Republican presidential candidate. What caused Rogen to send such a message to Carson? I can’t say I know for sure, but there is a litany of dumb Ben Carson statements Rogen that could have pissed Rogen off. Whichever statement it was, Rogen apparently got to the point where he just couldn’t take it anymore!
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