In It to Win It
In It to Win It's JournalI would not disturb the Court of Appeals' informed judgment about applicants' entitlement to a stay
https://twitter.com/steve_vladeck/status/1531741162888888323🚨BREAKING: SCOTUS pauses 3rd Circuit's order to count undated mail-in ballots in PA judicial race
Order granting the emergency application for stay from Justice Alitohttps://twitter.com/DemocracyDocket/status/1531737523411615749
Every state in the union has now enacted a congressional map!
https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/1531672960012099584You never think it's going to happen to you
I shared a few days ago on one of the threads in this forum that I went to school in Broward County, Florida and in 2008, while I was in high school, there was a shooting that occurred. A student, a girl, brought a handgun to school and shot another student. The girl who was shot died at the hospital. The girl who was shot, I had just met her a few weeks earlier through a mutual friend. When I met her, she gave the greatest energy and the greatest vibes. She was someone that you'd gravitate to. She was just so full of positive energy. The shooting had gathered a lot of media attention with news crews sitting outside the school and news helicopters hovering above the school. It was a lot to deal with.
When the shooting occurred, myself and some friends (and about 1/3 of the school) was at lunch in the cafeteria. The principal announced over the intercom that the school was in lock down. You can hear the seriousness in her voice as she said in a loud and panicked tone "THE SCHOOL IS IN LOCK DOWN! LOCK DOWN NOW! LOCK! DOWN!" We had no idea why we were in lock down. We had no idea a shooting occurred. The only thing that I knew was that my lunchtime got extended and that means less class time. Eventually, the lock down ends and we are allowed to leave the cafeteria and we can see straight across to a separate classroom building, the yellow tape marking the scene where the incident occurred and the victim's backpack lying on the ground. All of the students were herded and bottle-necked into one pathway to the other side of the school to our classrooms to avoid students going near the scene. Through word of mouth, we all eventually learn what happened and the name of the victim. The next puzzle was that the victim had the same name as two other girls, both of which I knew and were good friends with. Our heads were spinning trying to figure which girl was it. Eventually, everyone figures out which girl it was and everyone is devastated.
I remember the word about the shooting had spread fast. I remember parents waiting outside of the school gates, trying to call into the school, and parents calling their kids' cellphones. I remember reading the baseless comments online and speculation from people who knew nothing about what happened pretending they knew what happened and why it happened.
To this day, I still think about it from time to time. I still think about the grief. I still think about the overwhelming press coverage, and the sound of the helicopters hovering over the school. I still think about how the cruel things that people did and speculated about online. I still think about the loss.
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More recently, I lost a cousin to gun violence. I have a rather large extended family. As a family, we've had our fair share of funerals and grieving but this time was different. We had never lost a family member to gun violence. Last year in June, my mother was getting ready for a month-long trip to Georgia to be with the family. She had made the decision to leave a day earlier than originally planned because my cousin (my mother's nephew) had planned a 4th of July trip with his mother and all of his aunts (which includes my mom), his children and a few other cousins. My mom and one of my aunts were going to drive up on June 30th, however on June 27th, my mother gets an unannounced visit from a niece with unfortunate news. I walk into the room and I noticed tears rolling down their faces and I ask "what's wrong? Why are you crying?" and when I get the news that my cousin had gone missing and they heard that he had been shot and killed. I was stunned. It was so hard to believe.
For the time being, this had just been unproven because no one knew where he was. He had not come home from work as he normally would have. They had found out that he had traveled over to the next state on the day he went missing and his adult children went looking for him. When they arrive at the location they believe my cousin went to, someone there tells them that they had seen my cousin and that he'd been shot. However, nobody has any idea where he or his car is.
We went up to Georgia the next day to help look for him. We offered a reward to the public for any information. We did all we could to find him. One week went by, and nothing. Two weeks went by and nothing. About two and a half weeks in, one of cousins get a call from the police saying they found his car with him inside. It took a special kind of evil to mutilate him the way they did. I won't go into the the gruesome details but they didn't only shoot him. It was brutal what they did to him.
My cousin was a tough son-of-a-gun, no pun intended. Of any family member, he was the one nobody expected this to happen to because he had this unbeatable and invincible spirit about him. We were shocked that someone would get the drop on him OF ALL PEOPLE because it was thought to be damn-near unimaginable. My cousin was a gun owner himself, but not a "gun humper" or a "collector," and he always had it nearby just in case. He would take his children to the gun range and teach them how to handle guns properly. When he was younger, he had served in the military. After that, he had gotten into some trouble. He had gone to prison but he had gotten out and really turned his life around. He had gotten a great job, been promoted, and recently bought some land and built a nice house for his family with a garden in the backyard over the past few years.
It was the first time our family had gone through something like that. It was horrific and terrifying. To immediately go from planning a fun family trip to planning an unexpected funeral is heart wrenching. It was a closed-casket ceremony and the most painful part of it was that we did not get to see him one last time before we buried him. Those monsters robbed us of that.
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I write all of this to say that I never imagined that a shooting would happen at any school I attended, but it did. I never thought that I would lose a family member in such a sudden and horrific way but I did. Evil comes at the times when you least expect. For all the "gun humpers" and wannabe superheros that believe they'd be able to stop someone, if the moment arises, they will never be prepared for it. It happens so suddenly, in the most unpredictable way and most unpredictable place, that you may not even have the time to respond. The mythical gun-toting heroes always seem to never be where they're needed the most or if they happen to be there, they almost certainly die before they can react.
When you're prepared, it always comes from the place where you're not looking.
You never know how these things play out.
You never know where it will come from.
You never think it's going to happen to you.
🚨Supreme Court DENIES Texas Legislators' effort to block deposition subpoenas in redistricting case
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1531643637414625284For background:
https://twitter.com/DemocracyDocket/status/1528785951111118853
Abbott blamed school shooting on lack of mental health resources. But he reportedly cut more than
$200 million from the department that handles them.
Business Insider via Yahoo News
Lori Post, director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at the Northwestern University School of Medicine told NBC News that there's "no evidence the shooter is mentally ill, just angry and hateful."
"While it is understandable that most people cannot fathom slaughtering small children and want to attribute it to mental health, it is very rare for a mass shooter to have a diagnosed mental health condition," she told the outlet.
CNN's Pamela Brown reported that despite Abbott's assertion that the issue is tied to mental health, he's cut more than $117 million from the state's Health and Human Services Commission in 2021 to a little more than $93 million in 2022.
Across the two years, more than $200 million was cut from the departments funds to go towards supporting the National Guard and efforts on the border, per the outlet.
The governor's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, but told CNN that Abbott has spent his time in office working with legislators to support mental health initiatives in the state.
Mental Health America, a non-profit tracking mental health resources across the country, however, ranked Texas 50 out of 51 territories for mental health access in 2021.
-snip-
JHC!!! Video appears to show Texas 911 dispatchers relaying information from children in classroom
GMA via Yahoo News"Child is advising he is in the room, full of victims," the dispatcher can be heard saying in the video. "Full of victims at this moment."
"Is anybody inside of the building at this...?" the dispatcher asked.
Uvalde Mom 'Destroyed' By Loss of Only Daughter, Calls Texas Gov. Abbott 'Embarrassment'
Rolling Stone via Yahoo News“How can an 18 year-old buy an AR but he cannot buy beer? That is absolute insanity,” Rodriguez, 35, tells Rolling Stone.
Speaking in a her first interview since the rampage claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers — including her 10-year-old daughter Maite Rodriguez — the devastated mom says she heard the father of another victim highlight the disparity in the minimum ages for gun buying and drinking in Texas, and she wanted to amplify the message.
“In my opinion, nobody’s brain is fully developed at the age 18. You’re still a child, and what would a child do with an AR? I guess we all know now,” she says.
Rodriguez, who went from planning her daughter’s future to planning her funeral all in the same week, says that even amid her blinding grief, she can see Gov. Greg Abbott’s refusal to even consider stronger gun laws in the aftermath of Tuesday’s tragedy for what it is, inexcusable.
“He is an absolute embarrassment to Texas,” she says of the two-term Republican governor who’s heading into an election against Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, the former U.S. Representative who interrupted an Abbott press conference Wednesday to call the tragedy “totally predictable” due to lax gun regulation.
'Sick and tired' of our country's inability to control gun violence (Opinion)
Tallahassee Democrat via Yahoo NewsI thought for sure, after the Newtown, Connecticut massacre of kindergarteners, first and second graders, their principal and teachers, that finally Congress would act to ban assault-style weapons and approve universal background checks that nine out of every 10 Americans support. It did not.
Mitch McConnell, Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, would not even allow the bill to come to the floor for debate and a vote. And though Democrats have a Senate majority now only because Vice President Harris can break the 50-50 tie vote between Democrats and Republicans, they must bring the bill to the floor for a vote and force Republicans and conservative Democrats to publicly show where they stand.
We cannot control what happens in other states, but voters can control what happens here in Florida. The media and Floridians in this mid-term election season must force Sen. Marco Rubio to answer some hard questions.
Why?! Why has he refused, since the Newtown Connecticut and Parkland Florida school shootings, to demand and pass gun safety laws in the Senate?
Obama reunites with the boy who touched his hair in the Oval Office 13 years after the iconic photo
Business Insider via Yahoo Newshttps://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1530157112688525312
As Jacob took in the presidential visit alongside his father, then-National Security Council staffer Carlton Philadelphia, his mother, Roseane, and his older brother, Isaac, he quietly asked a question.
"I want to know if my hair is just like yours," he said to Obama in a tone so low that the then-president asked him to repeat his question.
After hearing the question, Obama remarked: "Why don't you touch it and see for yourself?"
The president bent over, but Jacob hesitated to move his hand.
"Touch it, dude!" Obama said.
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Member since: Sun May 27, 2018, 06:53 PMNumber of posts: 8,235
