…for lowness at this point in a president’s term, breaking a previous record set by Truman:
Former Presidents Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Gerald Ford had lower average approval ratings at some stage early in their presidencies, but Biden has caught up, and today’s average was the first for which he was below all presidents since Truman, a potentially troubling trend as Democrats ready for the midterm elections.
Right from the start, Trump was the victim of a fraudulent campaign to destroy him and brand him a traitor, an effort in which various government agencies cooperated. So his low approval rating was no mystery. What was causing Clinton’s and Ford’s, as well as Truman’s? The article doesn’t say, and it would take a lot of research to find out. Whatever the cause – and in Truman’s and Ford’s cases, it may have simply been that neither was elected to his first term – Biden has been far, far, far worse.
From that same Daily Mail article I wrote about in the post below this one – the article contains a lot of extra information, including the following about Ramos’ parents’ police records:
Ramos is the son of Reyes and Salvador Ramos, 42 – both of whom have a criminal history, DailyMail.com can confirm.
Salvador Sr. has a criminal history going back to 2000, when a Texas Court report shows he was sentenced to 180 days in jail for an unspecified misdemeanor, and was ordered to pay $875 at Uvalde County Court.
He then committed another misdemeanor just one month later and was ordered to pay another $375.
Two years later, on July 29, 2002 he was again arrested – this time for an assault that causes bodily injury against a family member, according to public records.
He was again sent to prison for 180 days.
In 2005, he faced another misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to a maximum of 30 days in prison, and by April 2011, Ramos again faced charges – this time for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possession of marijuana, and faced a maximum of two years in prison.
It is unclear what Salvador Sr’s relationship was with his son, though he lived nearby.
Salvador’s mother, meanwhile, was arrested in June 2003 for property theft of less than $500. It is unclear how long she served for that offense.
She was also arrested on misdemeanor charges in 2005 – though it is unclear what precipitated that arrest.
We also know that the grandfather was a felon.
Not what you’d call a stable law-abiding group. And although it’s “unclear what Salvador Sr’s relationship was with his son,” in fact he did live nearby and there may have been a relationship. It’s easy to guess it was not a good one.
There was also a boyfriend of the mother who was somewhat involved in the family dynamics, but not especially father-like. At least it doesn’t appear that he had a record.
Here’s the story as it now stands. I caution everyone to ask questions, though, before jumping to conclusions.
For example:
Video emerging online from Tuesday’s schoolchildren massacre in Uvalde, Texas shows local police more concerned with stopping parents than stopping the killer…
Here are my questions in response to that sentence:
–Were these all the police that were at the school at the time, or were there other police in the building trying to get in and who were communicating with those outside? Were these police we see in the video stationed outside in case the killer ran out and tried to escape, or in case he had an accomplice?
–Were the killings of children and students still going on, or were they over by this time? Were there cameras in the classroom or halls? Were police inside the building aware of what was going on at that point?
–What would have happened if the parents were let in and they ended up being killed as well? Was that not very much a concern of the police – sort of like the way firefighters restrain parents from running back into a badly burning building?
More:
Javier Cazares, whose nine-year-old daughter was murdered, says cops were ‘just standing there’ and waiting for protective shields to arrive at the scene before they went in.
‘They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,’ he told The New York Times, adding that many were ‘just standing there.’
‘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,’ he said.
Same questions – and also “they said they rushed in and all that” indicates that there may have been police inside already.
On the Border Patrol team, and why police didn’t charge in sooner: Once the shooter got into the classroom and locked the door, police couldn’t get in because of concrete block construction and a steel door. The Bortac team got a key from the principal, unlocked the door and stormed in, three of them. The first carried a shield, which took fire, the second was wounded by shrapnel, and the third killed the shooter.
If that is accurate, then the police outside may have known the Border Patrol team was already on the way or perhaps even at that moment engaged in getting into the classroom, and that the Border Patrol team officers not only had a shield or shields, but may have been more highly trained in dealing with this sort of situation. Unless we know an exact timeline, we really don’t know what was going on with the police in this video or inside the building at the time it was taken.
This article is from a British paper that is usually pretty accurate on this type of event [emphasis mine]:
It was unclear at what time the footage [of the encounter between parents and police] was shot. It also emerged Wednesday that Customs and Border Patrol agents who rushed to the scene had to grab a key from school staff to open the door of the classroom where the bloodbath took place.
That is because they were unable to break the door down themselves…
Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when Salvador Ramos, 18, opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him, though a department spokesman said later that they could not give a solid estimate of how long the gunman was in the school or when he was killed.
‘The bottom line is law enforcement was there,’ McCraw said.
‘They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.’
It seems possible that the doors were reinforced for protective purposes, against intruders or perhaps fire. But this made it very hard to enter, even for police with weapons. Also, did they not want to fire at the door because children inside who were alive might have been hit? I’m not knowledgeable about whether gunfire can breach a steel door or not.
More [emphasis mine]:
Steve McCraw, director of the Texas department of public safety (DPS), said on Wednesday that a ‘brave’ school resource officer ‘approached him’ and ‘engaged him’ – but added that ‘gunfire was not exchanged.’ He did not explain why.
The New York Times reported that their sources said at least one armed law enforcement officer from the Uvalde school district was at the school, and that officer exchanged gunfire with the gunman, but the gunman was able to get past…
All of the 19 children who died were inside the one [fourth-grade] classroom.
[DPS spokesman] Olivarez said some of the officers were shot by the gunman, so others began breaking windows around the school trying to evacuate children and teachers.
It sounds to me as though, when the parents were arguing with the police officers outside the building, there was an active shooter situation and also other police were trying to get into the building in various ways and to allow the children to escape.
More [emphasis mine]:
Multiple teams of Border Patrol agents raced to the school, according to Jason Owens, a top regional official with the Border Patrol…
McCraw praised the officers and denied there had been a failure – emphasizing that the arriving officers ‘engaged him’ and were able to ‘keep him pinned down in that location.’
I don’t think we have anywhere near enough information to judge what actually happened and what the police did right or wrong. Inflammatory videos tell only a tiny part of the story, and I don’t rely on them for an understanding of what actually happened except in regard to the tiny part they are telling. In this case, we know that desperate parents were angry at what they perceived as police inaction, and the police restrained some of them. The rest will emerge as time goes on – but for many people, the takeaway will be “the police are awful and they didn’t care.” That is by no means clear right now.
It looks like the FBI top brass kept Hillary Clinton’s campaign identity a secret when it pushed her disinformation to Chicago-based FBI agents investigating ties between Trump and Russia’s Alfa-Bank. That’s according to FBI agents who testified during the Michael Sussmann trial, which is in its final days in a Washington, D.C. courtroom. The FBI told agents that the Department of Justice had brought the information used in the probe. That was a lie. Michael Sussmann, a former DOJ prosecutor now working for the Perkins Coie law firm, brought the information.
So it seems as though the top people at the FBI were deceiving the lower-down agents who would actually be doing the work of investigating. The purpose of the deception was almost certainly to get them to not be suspicious that it was a campaign dirty trick by Hillary and company – which in fact it was.
That is quite extraordinary but unsurprising. What is surprising is that anyone is now testifying to that effect.
More:
The Chicago FBI agents figured out quickly that the data was overblown and the possibility of Trump’s organization communicating with the bank server was nearly impossible because of firewalls.
It turns out that the “connection” was a hotel and hospitality marketing firm sending out spam emails. Trump runs hotels, as you may have noticed.
Because the information was so hinky, “didn’t pass analytical merit,” and didn’t show “a covert communications system,” agents prevailed on their boss to ask the 7th Floor at the FBI headquarters if they could be read in on who provided the flash drives, white papers, and other documents purporting the link. The brass who claimed the information came from the DOJ and said as much in the official referral to investigators. The Sept. 24, 2016 referral never mentions Michael Sussmann.
Agent Ryan Gaynor served as the liaison between Chicago agents and the home office in the beltway. He testified that, had he known that the provenance of the information was Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, it could have “impacted the way I viewed the close hold.”
Ya think?
Who was in charge of the investigation? Why, Peter Strozk under Bill Priestap. Those are rather familiar names.
I wonder whether FBI higher-ups can be prosecuted for lying to the FBI – internal lying, that is, to the people working under them.
People who kill random children are not just homicidally inclined, it’s a particular type of sadistic vengeance, and the target of the sadism is all of us as well as the parents and community directly involved. It’s a war against innocence and love and what people hold most dear – it’s the killer saying he cares nothing about their lives or about humanity itself, which he rejects.
This was the sort of impulse that motivated Eric Harris of Columbine fame, although he killed fellow teenagers and not children. For all that most people know about Columbine (or think they know about Columbine), many people know little about the reality of what happened and who the perpetrators were, and much of what they think they know is often incorrect.
I’ve written at length about that in this 2017 post in particular, but if you’re interested in more you should go to this site. I warn you, however, that it’s exceptionally disturbing.
I’ll mention only three very short quotes of so many that perpetrator Eric Harris wrote in his journals, but I think the quotes encapsulate the sort of impulses I’m referring to. The first is, “…before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit.” The “worthless place” is earth and life itself.
The second quote is this:
Eric writes that someone is bound to ask, “What were they thinking?” He answered, “I want to burn the world, I want to kill everyone except about 5 people…”
This is the third: “You know what I hate? …..MANKIND!!!!…kill everything…kill everything…”
Another thing to remember is that Eric Harris was adept at hiding these impulses and judgments from the world, including his parents. The same is true to a lesser extent of his partner in destruction, Dylan Klebold, who was more depressed (see this) and at least somewhat less psychopathic, but nevertheless full of rage at others.
I don’t know whether Salvador Ramos had this sort of hatred and impulse to destroy to the same extent, but my guess is – from things I’ve read about him – that he harbored something of the sort or at least a significant degree of it. I infer that he had a sadistic motive not just from his actions, which speak very loudly, but also from this report from a survivor who said that as Ramos entered the classroom he said to the students, “you’re going to die.” Seems to me that was a moment of savoring his own power and their terror, and trying to augment both the power and the terror.
(1) Commenter “cb” has a good question: where did Ramos get the money for the guns? They wouldn’t be cheap.
(2) “cb” also wonders whether this story from 2018 might have involved Ramos. Strangely enough, it’s written by someone whose last name is also Ramos, but that’s a pretty common name, especially in areas with a high percentage of people of Hispanic origin. Here’s what happened back in April of 2018, when Ramos would have been 13 (depending on his exact date of birth, which was recently):
In the press release, Uvalde Chief of Police Daniel Rodriguez said that a Morales Junior High School student, 14, and a former Morales student, 13, had specifically targeted numerous students in what they described as a plan to perform a “mass casualty event against the school.”
Authorities said the students were motivated in large part by the Columbine shootings:
“The investigation revealed that the students were infatuated with the Columbine High School shootings and identified themselves to the shooters. The investigation uncovered that the students even referred to themselves using the Columbine shooter’s names.”
This seems like a somewhat different m.o., in that it targeted high school students rather than grade school students, and seems to have been more elaborately plotted. Also, although Ramos’ grandfather said his grandson hadn’t attended high school this past year, the high school he’d dropped out of is listed as Ulvade High School (Morales is the junior high school). The again, the 13-year-old who was arrested in 2018 was a “former Morales student.” If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably not Ramos but might have been.
(3) I’ve also read that Ramos didn’t get help for his emotional problems. Quite obviously, he didn’t get effective help. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t get some help; I haven’t seen that issue addressed anywhere. In addition, if he was a psychopath, it is highly unlikely that any help would have helped.
(4) The photo most published of Ramos (you can find it towards the top of this article) looks like a mug shot to me, with that cold-eyed stare. Maybe it’s not, but if it is it might mean he has some sort of record – perhaps a juvenile one (they’ve said he has no adult record)?
(5) Ramos posted warnings on Facebook 30 minutes before the school attack. That’s too late to be a cry for help, except a veiled and ineffectual one. Maybe representing some mild ambivalence? Or perhaps just bragging about what he was about to do. Also, they were private one-on-one messages and therefore not public.
“I’m going to shoot my grandmother,” Salvador Ramos wrote about 30 minutes before his rampage at Robb Elementary School, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday.
Ramos made good on his vow, writing minutes later that he’d “shot my grandmother.” His last message foretold of his final act of unspeakable violence: “I’m going to shoot an elementary school,” he wrote about 15 minutes before he arrived on campus.
As far as motive goes, this is what I’ve seen:
The messages mirror texts Ramos reportedly sent to a 15-year-old female acquaintance in Germany, who then shared them with CNN, in which he indicated he erupted because he was annoyed his grandmother took issue with his phone bill.
That’s very much in line with psychopaths, in that it’s the sort of thing most teens have to deal with and don’t react to by becoming homicidal. However, psychopaths can become homicidally enraged if crossed even in minor ways.
There’s a great deal more information in that article, much of it very chilling. One piece of information I’d been curious about is answered: apparently his grandmother is alive and in the hospital. Apparently he also was angry at not having graduated from high school with what I assume were his previous classmates.
(6) Ramos did purchase two AR-15s legally (shortly after his 18th birthday), but I’ve not found any definitive word on whether he used those weapons in the killings, although most people seem to assume it. The official word I’ve found, however, seems equivocal:
Two law enforcement sources told CBS News that the suspect had a handgun, an AR-15 assault weapon and high capacity magazines.
When I try to find a transcript of Governor Abbott’s address on this, I keep getting articles about O’Rourke’s appropriation of the moment to start shouting at him. O’Rourke is running against Abbot for governor, and this was his attempt to grandstand for political gain. I don’t know that his efforts really won over many Texans; I certainly hope not.
Here’s the video. I’m with the Uvalde mayor, who calls O’Rourke a “sick sonovabitch.”
…[A] police officer employed by the school district “engaged with the gunman” — but the shooter was able to enter the school through a back door, then a classroom where he opened fire with an AR-15 rifle. It’s unclear whether the school officer and the gunman exchanged gunfire…
[Then the gunman barricaded himself into a class and started shooting children and teachers]…
Law enforcement officers arriving on the scene could hear gunshots inside the classroom, Olivarez said. Officers tried to enter the school, but the shooter fired on them, hitting some of the officers, Olivarez said. At that point, police officers “began breaking windows around the school” in an attempt to evacuate children, teachers and staff, he said.
Officers were eventually able to force their way into the classroom and kill the shooter, who wore a tactical vest, Olivarez said.
When I heard that an Iraqi man living in the US had recently been arrested for plotting to assassinate George W. Bush, my first thought was possible entrapment.
It didn’t used to be that way for me. Although I often did think “entrapment?”, it was way down the list of theories rather than my initial thought. I’d been familiar with the concept from law school, though, and I had been very wary of it ever since because of that exposure.
Well over 20 years into our War on Terror, so-called “terror plots thwarted by the FBI,” with rare exception, are pushed along by, funded by, and materially supported by the FBI—which, more often than not, is simply stepping in at the eleventh hour to stop Potemkin plots of its own making.
Important qualifier here, so there’s no confusion: Very often with these “terror plot” cases, whether they be “ISIS” or “domestic terror,” the person at the core of the plot very much has dangerous ideological beliefs, and their interaction with law enforcement is often preceded by threats or extremist online chatter. The degree of responsibility exists in a spectrum. Sometimes they are mentally unwell dupes who would have otherwise posed no real threat, and the plot is almost entirely of the FBI’s creation. Sometimes they play a more central role, and while the plot may not have happened without FBI assistance, it very well may have. It’s difficult to know at first blush—and without access to the actual affidavit or response from the accused legal counsel—where the latest “foiled FBI” plot falls on the spectrum. But given history and the details we do know, our media, as a rule, ought to be much more skeptical before announcing scary FBI-curated headlines about dastardly plots.
Earlier today, Forbes broke a story about the FBI stepping in to “break up” an assassination plot by Iraqi national Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab to take out former President George W. Bush, supposedly as revenge for the Iraq War…
Further inspection of the details, however, reveal that the “plot,” like most “ISIS/al Qaeda” plots the FBI “thwarts,” was likely moved along by and facilitated by FBI agents and well-paid FBI informants. (Forbes doesn’t say how much these informants were paid, but in some previous thwarted plots it has been as high as six figures.) The only actionable thing the suspect did other than supposedly trying to recruit people in WhatsApp was surveil George Bush’s Dallas residence. An FBI informant paid for the flight, picked up Shihab, and ushered him to the residence, according to NBC News. “After traveling to Dallas with the informant to take video of Bush’s residence,” Forbes writes,” the accused took more footage at the George W. Bush Institute.”
Please read the whole thing.
That article only deals with the “war on terror” cases connected with Islamic fanaticism. It doesn’t go near the evidence for entrapment in the Whitmer kidnapping plot in Michigan as well as the January 6th “insurrection”.
By the way, the government is re-trying the Whitmer defendants after the jury was hung in their previous trial. It doesn’t surprise me; the prosecutors will not give up on this unless the men are acquitted outright, and even then perhaps they’ll come up with some other charges against them if they can manage it.
First and foremost, there are the victims, now listed as 19 children and 2 adults. The cold-blooded killing of children is evil personified, and most human beings are especially revolted and outraged by it.
But beyond that, there is the sameness of it. It’s a theme we’ve seen before, with variations. One of those variations is the political use of such things by Democrats to demand a crackdown on gun owners that would virtually never have prevented it. Another is the portrait of a disturbed person as perpetrator (sometimes a very young one, as in this case of an 18-year old).
As is so often the case with these incidents, I find that the most early information is often available in the British press:
Neighbors and classmates say his behavior spiraled into the bizarre and macabre as he entered his later teenage years, with one friend telling Good Morning America: ‘He had scars on his face and someone asked him, ‘Are you ok?’ and he just said with a smile ‘I did it myself, I liked how it looked.’
He began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed…
The would-be mass murderer lived with his grandmother on Hood Street…
According to Ramos’ neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, the shooter and his mother would often have screaming matches, with police being called to the home on multiple occasions.
So was the mother at the grandmother’s house too? The article goes on to say that he had recently moved from the mother’s to the grandmother’s house. There also was a grandfather present in that home:
In since deleted Instagram videos, Ramos had allegedly filmed his mother interacting with police.
Classmate Nadia Reyes claimed: ‘He’d call his mom a b***h and say she wanted to kick him out… He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.’
Flores, meanwhile, told the Washington Post how he had tried to be a father figure to Ramos but that the situation at home only worsened as he got older.
So a neighbor had tried to be a father figure.
Jeremiah Munoz, an alumnus from the local high school who used to play Xbox games with Ramos, also told the New York Times he would often hear him arguing with his mother through the microphone – and his mother would scream back at him, telling him he needed to go to school and he was doing nothing with his life.
Munoz said Ramos would often leave his mother’s house and stay with his grandmother for several days after a big fight – and over the past year he has been spending more and more time with his grandmother.
Ramos’ grandmother, who owned the house on Hood Street, was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday’s killing spree. Flores said Ramos had moved into his grandmother’s home across town some months earlier.
There, his grandfather, Ronaldo Reyes, 72, said he lived in a front room and slept on a mattress on the floor. Reyes told ABC News he had no idea his grandson purchased two AR-15s nor that he kept them in the house.
Perhaps not all of this is accurate, but the British papers have a good track record. The article goes on to add that the grandfather was a convicted felon.
This type of thing is a classic story among disturbed teens. We used to see this sort of family quite often at the clinic where I got my training. Fathers sometimes were absent but not always, but whether present or somewhat absent they often were violent and/or abusive as well.
Not all of these kids grow up to become murderers or criminals – very fortunately. Some are even helped by the mental health system, or grow out of it in some way. But some, like Ramos, go out in a blaze of ignominy which they interpret as glory.
