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• 18 students and three adults have been killed.
• The suspect’s grandmother was shot and wounded.  She was airlifted to a regional hospital for treatment and is still alive, but in critical condition.
• Although Republicans pushed for armed police officers at schools to protect students after the Sandy Hook massacre, no police officer was on site.
• Two responding police officers were wounded.  One of the wounded officers was a Border Patrol agent.
• President Joe Biden will address the nation tonight at 8:15 p.m. ET.  He ordered flags flown at half-staff through May 28th.
• Instagram has taken down an account reportedly run by the shooter.
• North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis warned that this shooting should not lead to restrictions on gun rights for “law abiding” citizens.

“I would like to see this, a national push, instead of parents buying kids all these tools and toys and games, invest in the classroom to make it safer,” says Fox guest Maureen O’Connell, a former FBI agent, in the aftermath of the slaughter of 15 people, including 14 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-graders at an Ulvalde, Texas elementary school.  “There are companies out there that, that will do that.  They’ll come out and they’ll do a threat assessment on the whole school.  They’ll say, ‘This is an area of vulnerability that you might want to address, and this is how we would address it.’  And they have, I mean, they have blankets that you can put up on the wall that are colorful and beautiful, but they’re ballistic blankets.  I mean, there, there are ways to obscure the, ah, the classroom windows so that the shooter can’t have target acquisition.  I mean, there are just a million tools out there, but it’s, it, it….  but we’ve been banging this drum for years.  Let’s start investing in our kids!”

There’s a few major problems with O’Connell’s recommendations.  First, ballistic blankets and obscured windows don’t help when the shooter is already inside the school.  Second, conservative parents don’t want to invest in schools; they constantly complain about tax burdens.  And finally, the answer is not to put piecemeal products in place in the hope that schools won’t be targeted; it’s to get guns off the streets and make sure the people who do own guns are responsible for them and sane enough to own them.

Our nation needs to take a serious look at the state of mental health today.

Sometimes meds can be the problem.

America is failing our youngest generations from decades of rejecting good moral values and teachings.

We don’t need more gun control.

We need to return to God.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) May 24, 2022

After another horrific shooting that left more than a dozen people dead, including the shooter, at Robb Elementary in Ulvalde, Texas, there’s a lot of information buzzing about.  Here’s a consolidation of information from various news reports:

• 15 people–14 students and one teacher–were shot to death.
• The children killed were in 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades.
• Located about 85 miles west of San Antonio, Ulvalde is a heavily Hispanic town, with about 80% of the population being of Hispanic heritage, according to the 2000 Census.
• Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated the shooter was an 18-year-old American male who attended high school in the town.  The shooter is also dead, reportedly killed by police.  Abbott identified the shooter as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos.
• The shooter carried a handgun and possibly a rifle into the school.  It’s unknown if two guns were used in the murders.
• A 66-year-old woman and a 10-year-old student are hospitalized in critical condition with gunshot wounds.
• The shooter shot his grandmother before going to the school.  It is unknown if the grandmother is among the people listed as killed or wounded at the school.
• This is the second shooting in 10 days with 10 or more fatalities, with the Buffalo supermarket shooting being the other.
• This is the 49th mass shooting (3 or more victims) in the United States in the month of May.
• This is the 251th mass shooting in the United States in 2022.  Today is only the 144th day of the year.
• This is the 25th mass murder (3 or more killed) in the US in 2022.
• There have been 26 mass shootings in Texas YTD.  This is the fourth mass murder in the state this year.
• This is the second mass shooting taking place at an education location in 2022.

Y’all (both sides of aisle) – please wait for facts. It does not appear it was tied to the border / bailout at all. Just wait. https://t.co/MBpcZrHWtI

— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) May 24, 2022

Texas Gov Greg Abbott confirmed that 14 children and 1 teacher were killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde on Tuesday, plus the gunman, Jake Tapper reports. No words.

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds 61% of 2020 Trump voters agree that “a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views”, while only 22% of Trump voters disagreed with the statement.

The Fourth District Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court ruling tossing the 14th Amendment challenge to Madison Cawthorn’s ability to hold public office.  The ruling, which throws out a lower court ruling claiming the 14th Amendment no longer applies, provides states the opportunity to determine if a candidate for federal office meets state-level qualifications.

As legal opinions go, this is a fun one.  For background, a lower court ruled that North Carolina elections boards did not have the power or authority to determine if Madison Cawthorn could be excluded from the ballot for being a supporter of the insurrection that occurred on January 6th.  That lower court ruled that an amnesty issued by Congress in 1872 for rank-and-file Confederates nullified the “insurrectionist” exclusion for eligibility for elected office.

The Fourth District’s ruling basically eviscerated that lower court opinion.  The opinion states that it’s clear that the 1872 amnesty was meant for people who had previously acted against the United States; it was not a blanket amnesty for anyone who tried to topple the nation’s Constitution after the Civil War.  Cawthorn–or should I more accurately say, the lawyers for the college drop out–seriously argued that that legislation gave carte blanche to anyone who would attempt to overthrow the government in the future, which is obviously insane. 

Roger Stone’s legal entanglements continue to get more dire.  Justice Department prosecutors have asked a judge to order Trump dirty trickster Roger Stone to turn over financial records going back to 2017 as part of a tax evasion investigation, The Daily Beast reports, a move that would give the DOJ access to his multiple sources of income while he worked to prop up Donald Trump.

The request, made as part of a federal complaint prosecutors made against Stone and his wife last April, states that Stone defaulted on more than $2 million in back taxes over the past decade, with Stone claiming insolvency while raking in millions of dollars in donations and fees for his political activity.

The records will also provide insight into who was paying Stone while he was attempting to overturn the November 2020 election.  The prosecutors have avoided requesting court action as the two parties were in negotiations in the last two months, but stonewalling by Stone forced the DOJ to request court intervention.

“An alleged ISIS-linked operative in the U.S. was plotting to kill George W. Bush, going so far as to travel to Dallas in November to take video around the former president’s home and recruiting help from a team of compatriots he hoped to smuggle into the country over the Mexican border, according to an FBI search-warrant application filed March 23 and unsealed this week in the Southern District of Ohio. The FBI said it uncovered the scheme through the work of two confidential informants and surveillance of the alleged plotter’s account on the Meta-owned WhatsApp messaging platform. The suspect, based in Columbus, Ohio, said he wanted to assassinate Bush because he felt the former president was responsible for killing many Iraqis and breaking apart the country after the 2003 U.S. military invasion, according to the warrant.”

“The case shows how federal investigators continue to monitor threats from ISIS even as the group has been severely weakened by American intelligence and military operations in recent years. It also shows how the FBI, despite its claims of being prevented from investigating major crimes because of Meta and other tech providers’ use of encryption, has been able to work around WhatsApp security by using old-school policing with sourcing of informants and tracking the metadata they can get from the messaging company” – Forbes.

WNDU: “The Kosciusko County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office confirms with ABC21 News an investigation is underway involving a pastor at a local church. The confirmation comes after a video was streamed from inside the New Life Christian Church on Sunday. During that broadcast, Pastor John Lowe can be heard telling the congregation, ‘I committed adultery. It was nearly 20 years ago.’ He went on to say that he ‘makes no excuse for his sin’ and that he wasn’t disciplined and would not ‘use the Bible to defend himself.’ ‘I have no defense. I committed the adultery,’ he said. Lowe asked for forgiveness and then told the congregation he was stepping down from ‘ministry responsibilities.’ The congregation applauded. A woman and her husband then spoke before the crowd. The woman said she lived in a ‘prison of lies and shame’ for 27 years. She then said she is a prisoner no longer. ‘If you can’t admit the truth, you have to answer to God,’ she said to Lowe. ‘You are not the victim here. The lies need to stop,’ she said. ‘A partial truth is not true.’ ‘It was wrong,’ Lowe said again as he spoke from the podium. ‘If I could go back and redo it all I would. I can’t. All I can do is ask you to forgive me.’ The congregation then gathered around Lowe and prayed. At one point someone in the crowd brings up the age of the woman at the time she alleges the pastor started the relationship. Lowe responded, ’16-years-old, ok.’ He then added, ‘It was wrong.'”

“ABC21 spoke with Indiana University Law Professor Jody Madeira in general about Indiana laws. ‘There is one particular offense that could apply, which is called child seduction. This applies when people in positions of trust or authority of a child, law enforcement, mental health practitioners, or anyone with a professional relationship with the child,’ she says ‘It affects children between 16 and 18 years old, again these people use their professional relationship to engage in sexual conduct with a child and that is the offense of child seduction. The statute of limitations is set by Indiana Code 35-41-4-2. Normally it says that these crimes must be prosecuted before the victim reaches the age of 31, however, there’s an exception to that. The exception is basically that if the state obtains a recording, a confession that provides evidence sufficient to charge the crime.'”

“Mike Erickson, the GOP nominee in Oregon’s new 6th Congressional District, is alleged to have stopped at an ATM for $300 and then dropped his ex-girlfriend off at a clinic. Republicans in Oregon’s newly drawn 6th Congressional District last week chose as their nominee for the House businessman Mike Erickson, an anti-abortion candidate who has been accused of paying for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. The AP called the Republican primary race for Erickson on Friday after enough votes were counted in the state’s all-mail election to determine that he had defeated state Rep. Ron Noble and a handful of other candidates for the nomination” – American Independent.

Those were the days… pic.twitter.com/Wz5dMBbNLi

— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) May 24, 2022

AP: “An impassioned effort by some Arizona Senate Republicans to ban the use of ballot drop boxes failed Monday. Scottsdale Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita’s efforts to change a proposal requiring drop boxes to have video monitoring was blocked by fellow GOP senators who knew House Republicans weren’t on board with the harsher proposal. And the whole exercise ended up being in vain after Republican Sen. Paul Boyer of Glendale joined all Senate Democrats in rejecting the measure outright. Ugenti-Rita said drop boxes are rife with possibilities for ‘ballot harvesting,’ a pejorative term for dropping off completed ballots for other people. The Legislature in 2016 made it a felony to return another person’s mail ballots unless it is for a family member or if the person returning the ballot is a caregiver. She pointed to recent documentary that alleged thousands of ballots were illegally cast in 2020 battleground states . Fact-checkers have shown the arguments made in ‘2000 Mules’ are full of unsupported allegations that thousands of ballots were illegally deposited into drop boxes. ‘If you think ballot boxes contribute to ballot harvesting and can be manipulated, you would ban them, not require that we tape them,’ Ugenti-Rita said. ‘It’s too late at that point.'”

“But GOP Sen. J.D Mesnard noted that banning drop boxes outright would essentially kill the bill, because there’s no support in the House for going as far as Ugenti-Rita was proposing. ‘I don’t want to kill the bill. I want something done in this area that leaves us better. And I strongly disagree that doing nothing is better than having them monitored with cameras.’ The original House measure would have completely banned unmonitored drop boxes, but it did not have the votes to pass so it was watered down to allow counties to set up video monitoring where practical.”

The former Alaska governor seems to be having a great time in the Peach State campaigning for loser former Senator David “Chickenshit” Perdue’s all but doomed primary bid instead of the vacant US House seat for Alaska’s at-large House district that she’s supposedly running for.

Justice Department: “Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., age 56, most recently of Snowshoe, West Virginia, pleaded guilty today to making threats against a federal official, specifically for sending emails threatening harm to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the current Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Connally further admitted threatening Dr. Francis Collins, the former Director of the NIH, Dr. Rachel Levine, currently the Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as a Massachusetts public health official and a religious leader.”

“According to Connally’s plea agreement, from December 28, 2020 to July 25, 2021, Connally used an anonymous email account from a provider of secure, encrypted email services based in Switzerland, to send a series of emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the current Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (‘NIAID’) and the Chief Medical Advisor to President of the United States, threatening to harm and/or kill Dr. Fauci and members of his family. One of the emails threatened that Dr. Fauci and his family would be ‘dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.’ As detailed in Connally’s plea agreement, also on April 24, 2021, beginning at 9:34 p.m., Connally sent Dr. Francis Collins, the then-Director of the NIH, a series of four emails threatening Dr. Collins and his family with physical assault and death if Dr. Collins did not stop speaking about the need for ‘mandatory’ COVID-19 vaccinations… Connally also admitted sending emails threatening harm to three other individuals. Specifically, on November 24, 2020, Connally sent a series of six threatening emails to Dr. Rachel Levine, then Secretary of Health for the State of Pennsylvania, at Dr. Levine’s email account at the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The subject lines and body of the emails threatened Dr. Levine with physical violence and death. Investigation revealed that the anonymous encrypted email account was associated with Connally… Connally faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison for threats against a federal official.”

“Juneteenth holiday marks a celebration of freedom and independence. However, we received feedback that a few items caused concern for some of our customers and we sincerely apologize. We are reviewing our assortment and will remove items as appropriate,” Walmart said in a statement to Fox 7 Austin after a backlash they should’ve seen coming from light years away. And yeah, the trademark symbol is really there too. The “Balchem Company”, the OEM for the Walmart-branded ice cream, applied for the rights to Juneteenth with the USPTO in September 2021.

Pennsylvania GOP Senate Candidate Dave McCormick’s campaign sued to have undated mail-in ballots counted as he trails Mehmet Oz by less than a thousand votes in the too close to call primary election, the Washington Examiner reports. “Both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit have held that mail-in ballots should not be disqualified simply because the voters failed to hand write a date on the exterior mailing envelope of their ballots,” McCormick campaign lawyer Chuck Cooper said in a statement. “Because all ballots are time-stamped by the County Boards of Elections on receipt, a voter’s handwritten date is meaningless. All timely ballots of qualified Republican voters should be counted.” Note how he said “Republican voters” because in the 2020 election, when Trump was trying to get all mail-in ballots tossed in Pennsylvania, he would’ve been okay with them not counting the Democrat mail-in votes.

In a case that could foreshadow a disastrous outcome for conservatives efforts to handcuff social media companies’ autonomy, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling the blocked Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s law that would have blocked the platforms’ ability to police the content users post, Yahoo reports.

“We hold that it is substantially likely that social-media companies—even the biggest ones—are ‘private actors’ whose rights the First Amendment protects, that their so-called ‘content-moderation’ decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment, and that the provisions of the new Florida law that restrict large platforms’ ability to engage in content moderation unconstitutionally burden that prerogative,” the opinion reads.

DeSantis pushed the Republican-dominated Florida legislature to pass the law, whining that conservatives were being unfairly blocked from popular social media platforms in a violation of their First Amendment rights.  However, individuals aren’t banned from sites because of their political views; according to the terms of services of various platforms, they were suspended or banned for violent or threatening content or other issues such as misinformation about the coronavirus or the 2020 election.

Five of the ten Republican candidates for governor in the Michigan primary, including the top two entrants, may be booted off the ballot because a sizable portion of the signatures they each got on the petitions to qualify for the election were faked, the Detroit News reports.

Former Detroit police Chief James Craig and businessman Perry Johnson, the front-runner and the wealthiest candidate respectively, are at risk of missing the ballot, according to the finding by the Michigan Bureau of Elections.  The bureau found that a firm hired by many of the GOP candidates, had forged at least 68,000 signatures across all their clients’ petitions.

Financial adviser Michael Markey, Michigan State Police Capt. Michael Brown and entrepreneur Donna Brandenburg would also be kicked off the ballot if the findings stand.  The determinations would upend the GOP primary, which is scheduled for August 2nd.