El Paso Shooting Suspect Posted Online 'Manifesto' Decrying 'Ethnic Replacement' in the U.S. (VIDEO)

Bellingcat has an investigative report, "The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror." (Via Memeorandum.)

And click through at Gateway Pundit to read the shooter's racist screed, which cites the New Zealand Christchurch massacre as inspiration: "El Paso Walmart Shooter Patrick Crusius Admits in Manifesto That he Chose a Gun-Free Zone for Obvious Reasons."

And at Russia Today (with the obvious caveats):

El Paso Shooting Suspect Could Face Death Penalty (VIDEO)

I hope the dude fries. Let's so leftists launch an anti-death penalty campaign to free this guy from death row. I mean, it helps to be politically consistent, right? (*Eye-roll.*)

At the El Paso Times, "Capital murder charge filed, death penalty sought against man arrested in El Paso Walmart mass shooting."

Democrat Beto O'Rourke Politicizes Mass Slaughter at #CieloVista #Walmart in #ElPaso (VIDEO)

I'm shocked, horrified, sick, and angry with all the mass shootings, whatever the background of the shooter. And obviously, politically-motivated hate crimes must be denounced and prevented. But let's work as a team. Not tear each other apart. Beto's not helping. And he's especially not helping the #Democrat Party, which will not win a battle to secure even more regressive and confiscatory guns laws.

#Beto is really hitting the “blame Trump” talking points hard. Politicizing #ElPaso won’t turn out well for #Democrats, especially when the left’s inevitable gun confiscation propaganda goes into overdrive. #FakeNewsCNN #Dems #CieloVista #massShooting 🤷‍♂️

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 4, 2019

This is what I’m talking about. 🙄 #Beto https://t.co/vz1rjdWN7V #ElPasoShooting #CieloVista #MassShooting https://t.co/u1PLugKNXv

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 4, 2019

A tragedy like this is not an opportunity to reboot your failing presidential campaign.

This is disgusting and wrong.https://t.co/gHfPHx1Oet

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) August 4, 2019

Emily Miller is Ted Cruz's Campaign Spokeswoman

I've been following Emily Miller for a long time. She used to be on Fox News as a D.C. pundit. Then she was on a local network newscast. She had her book come out, Emily Gets Her Gun, which was widely publicized, as was Emily obtaining her concealed carry permit in D.C., which is a bureaucratic nightmare.

In any case, I saw her tweeting all the time about Texas and I wasn't paying that much attention. But then she was getting picked up by the media while on the campaign trail with Ted Cruz and I googled it. She's Cruz's spokeswoman.

A good lady. She's really taken to the Lone Star State:

How we roll... #CruzToVictory #CruzCrew #Midterms2018 #KeepTexasRed https://t.co/FDAWFb1Ghu pic.twitter.com/cfFRhTZ7dA

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) November 4, 2018

Stephen Harrigan, The Gates of the Alamo

*BUMPED.*

I just finished Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar (which I picked up on a whim).

Now I'm starting Stephen Harrigan's, The Gates of the Alamo.

And thanks for shopping my Amazon links.

Happy Birthday, U.S.A.!

Seen on Twitter:

So this is how #Texas reporters spend time on Independence Day when stuck in the car in rain. 💞💞💞 https://t.co/5hl3Z8Em4M

— Kathleen McKinley (@KatMcKinley) July 4, 2018

When you’re trapped at a gas station surrounded by flash flooding on #IndependenceDay, there’s only one thing to do! 😄😄🇺🇸🇺🇸 Happy birthday, USA!! #ProudAmerican #GodBlessTheUSA #LeeGreenwood #AClassic #Murica pic.twitter.com/n3q8QkOKK5

— Ivory Hecker FOX 26 (@IvoryHecker) July 4, 2018

I’m proud. Actually heard @TheLeeGreenwood sing the song a week or so ago. Good stuff. pic.twitter.com/di7e3QlRLr

— FreedomIsNoJoke (@freedomisnojoke) July 5, 2018

Texas School Shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis Murdered Girl Who Turned Down His Advances

It's horrible.

At LAT, "Texas school shooter killed girl who turned down his advances and embarrassed him in class, her mother says":

NEW: The Santa Fe High School gunman killed a classmate, Shana Fisher, who had turned down his advances, her mother tells us. Shana finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, and "a week later he opens fire on everyone he didn't like." https://t.co/clHL0gO6zP

— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) May 20, 2018

As he heard the gunshots approaching down the hall Friday morning, Santa Fe High School student Abel San Miguel, 15, hid with a few classmates in the art class storage closet.

He wasn't sure if he was going to survive. Through the door, he could see the barrel of a shotgun. Then the shooter began shooting through the door, killing at least one student inside, and grazing Abel's back.

When the shooter left the room briefly, Abel and others left the closet and tried to barricade the door. But the shooter pushed it open, spotted a student he knew, and with anger said, "Surprise!" before shooting the student in the chest.

"I'm still trying to process everything," Abel said in an interview.

As more details emerged about the shooting that left 10 people dead and 13 injured at the Houston-area school, the student who authorities said confessed to the attack was being held in isolation Saturday as officials identified the victims.

The family of the 17-year-old suspect, junior Dimitrios Pagourtzis, is "as shocked and confused as anyone else by these events that occurred," according to a statement released to the media.

"We are gratified by the public comments made by other Santa Fe High School students that show Dimitri as we know him: a smart, quiet, sweet boy," the family statement said. "While we remain mostly in the dark about the specifics of yesterday's tragedy, what we have learned from media reports seems incompatible with the boy we love."

One of Pagourtzis' classmates who died in the attack, Shana Fisher, "had 4 months of problems from this boy," her mother, Sadie Rodriguez, wrote in a private message to the Los Angeles Times on Facebook. "He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no."

Pagourtzis continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, Rodriguez said. "A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn't like," she wrote. "Shana being the first one." Rodriguez didn't say how she knew her daughter was the first victim.

The gunman repeatedly taunted students during the attack, according to another harrowing account posted to Facebook by one survivor's mother.

After scrambling to escape the shooter's blasts in the art room, Isabelle Van Ness, covered in dust from rounds hitting her classroom walls, could hear the shooter in a next-door classroom yelling, "Woo hoo!" while shooting, according to her mother, Deedra Van Ness.

"The gunman then comes back into their room and they hear him saying … are you dead? Then more shots are fired," Deedra Van Ness wrote. "By this time, cell phones all over the classroom are ringing and he's taunting the kids in the closet asking them … do you think it's for you? do you want to come answer it? Then he proceeds to fire more bullets into the closet and tries to get in."

Police arrived within 10 minutes later as Isabelle hid among the bodies of her classmates, and she could hear the shooter reloading after an "exchange" with police, her mother wrote.

Soon after, the shooter surrendered. "She and her friends had been in the same room with the gunman the ENTIRE TIME," her mother wrote. "As the media announces the names of the confirmed dead, Isabelle falls apart. ... She had prayed that her friends lying around the school were just injured and the confirmation of their deaths was crushing."

The dead included two teachers, Glenda Perkins and Cynthia Tisdale, along with Shana Fisher and seven of her classmates: Kimberly Vaughan, Angelique Ramirez, Christian Riley Garcia, Jared Black, Christopher Jake Stone, Aaron Kyle McLeod and Sabika Sheikh, an exchange student from Pakistan.

Two bombs that Pagourtzis allegedly brought to the school Friday were "intended to be IEDs," improvised explosive devices, but turned out to be "nonfunctional," Galveston County Judge Mark Henry said Saturday.

Pagourtzis, a football player who had allegedly posted images of guns and a T-shirt with the words "Born to kill" on social media in the weeks before the shooting, is being held without bond while facing charges of capital murder and aggravated assault on a public servant.

His schoolmates were allowed to return to parts of the school Saturday to retrieve their abandoned belongings...

More.

Austin Bombing Suspect Identified as Mark A. Conditt (VIDEO)

He's dead. Blew himself up in a standoff with SWAT, apparently.

At the Austin-American Statesman, "Authorities: Bombing suspect was Pflugerville resident Mark A. Conditt."

Also, "Bombing suspect sought other addresses in Austin area before death, source says." (Via Memeorandum.)

And at CBS This Morning:

Increase in Border Attacks, Smuggling, and Deaths at Texas’ Big Bend Region

Build the freakin' wall already, sheesh.

 At LAT, "Could the Big Bend in Texas be the border's weakest link? Smuggling of drugs and migrants is on the rise":

Two Border Patrol agents bent to study the sandy dirt like animal trackers — what they call "cutting for sign."

They didn't have to look far.

Just yards from the Rio Grande, Agent Lee Smith pointed to footprints and scraps of carpet. Smugglers tie carpet to their shoes in hopes of covering their tracks, he said. Smith followed the rough trail through thick brush, his fellow agent close behind, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a long gun.

They saw no one. But the agents sensed smugglers watching, waiting.

"They come right across. What's here to stop them?" Smith said.

Sometimes smuggler scouts cross on horseback: The muddy banks are pocked with human and horse tracks. The river here, about 60 miles east of El Paso, is just a few yards wide, one of the reasons Border Patrol agents in Texas' Big Bend region have seen troubling increases in smuggling, attacks on agents and migrant deaths in recent years.

"There's hundreds of these crossings just in our area of operation," Smith said. "The drug cartels, they own this part of the land. We have conceded large swaths of the border. There are areas where there are not agents for days."

He called the vast Big Bend "the absolute weakest link on the southern border."

The natural barriers beyond the river that made the landscape a stunning backdrop for "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood" and "Giant" were also supposed to protect it. Or at least that was long the assumption of U.S.officials. There's the river. There are mountains — the snow-covered Chinati, Chisos and Davis ranges.

There's the Chihuahuan high desert, the land full of prickly cat claw and temperatures that soar above 100 degrees on summer days and dip to below freezing on winter nights. And for many years, smugglers avoided Big Bend, that part of Texas where the border makes a gentle swoop south before swinging back north.

But smuggling routes shift according to the dictates of criminal organizations, often in response to border enforcement. In the late 1990s, border traffic moved from Southern California to remote desert stretches of Arizona; by 2013, it moved east again to Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of migration and enforcement ever since.

But now new routes are opening up to the west, in Big Bend.

"As things in the Rio Grande Valley get tougher to cross, they're looking for other places, and this is a spot that over the past few years has become established for smuggling," said Border Patrol Agent Rush Carter, a spokesman for the agency in Big Bend.

Just as migrants once tried to cross the Arizona desert unprepared, Central Americans are arriving in Big Bend without cold weather gear, abandoned to the elements by smugglers. Migrants tell agents that smugglers advertise the area as an easy crossing, the least patrolled stretch of border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection divides the southern border into nine sectors. Big Bend is the largest: 135,000 square miles, 510 miles of river, a quarter of the entire southern border.

The sector stretches north to include 118 counties in Texas and all of Oklahoma. Yet it has the smallest staff of any southern border sector, about 500 agents assigned to a dozen stations and several highway checkpoints including one in Sierra Blanca, notorious for large drug busts. That's fewer agents than have been assigned to a single station in the Tucson sector, Smith said.

President Trump has promised to add 5,000 Border Patrol agents, potentially doubling Big Bend staffing, but with high turnover, agents said that they would still be spread thin.

With such a small staff, agents usually patrol alone, with hand-me-down technology from other areas, including radios so spotty agents have erected makeshift cell towers in the brush to boost reception. Sometimes they just yell.

They don't have observation towers along the border as in the Rio Grande Valley, and their single aerostat blimp hovering overhead, unlike those used in the Valley, is not equipped with infrared technology, Smith said...

More.

Devin P. Kelley, Sutherland Shooting Suspect, Broke Infant Stepson's Skull and Assaulted Wife

Following-up from earlier, "Devin P. Kelley, Sutherland Shooting Suspect, Once Escaped From Mental Health Facility."

This was one very bad person. Extremely bad. Evil.

At the New York Times, "In 2012 Assault, Texas Gunman Broke Skull of Infant Stepson":

Before killing dozens of people in a Texas church, Devin Kelley was convicted of breaking his infant stepson’s skull https://t.co/F4Z3pveAI0

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 7, 2017

NEW BRAUNFELS, Tex. — He beat his wife, cracked his toddler stepson’s skull and was kicked out of the military. He drove away friends, drew attention from the police and abused his dog. Before Devin P. Kelley entered a rural Texas church with a military-style rifle, killing at least 26 people on Sunday, he led a deeply troubled life in which few in his path escaped unscathed.

In 2012, while stationed at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Mr. Kelley was charged with assault, according to Air Force records, which said he had repeatedly struck, kicked and choked his first wife beginning just months into their marriage, and hit his stepson’s head with what the Air Force described as “a force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm.”

“He assaulted his stepson severely enough that he fractured his skull,” said Don Christensen, a retired colonel who was the chief prosecutor for the Air Force, adding, “He pled to intentionally doing it.”

Prosecutors withdrew several other charges as part of their plea agreement with Mr. Kelley, including allegations that he repeatedly pointed a loaded gun at his wife.

He was ultimately sentenced in November that year to 12 months’ confinement and reduction to the lowest possible rank. His final duty title was “prisoner.”

His first wife, Tessa Kelley, divorced him while he was confined and was awarded the couple’s only four household items of value: a television, an Xbox, a wedding ring and a revolver.

After his confinement, Mr. Kelley was forced out of the military with a bad conduct discharge. The Air Force said the conviction should have barred Mr. Kelley from owning any guns. Instead, law enforcement officials say, he bought several.

Friends from New Braunfels, Tex., where he went to high school, expressed shock in the aftermath of the shooting, remembering how Mr. Kelley was a friendly, if awkward, teenager who grew up active in his church. His senior yearbook photo shows him smiling, with untamed hair and a Hollister T-shirt. But in recent years, friends said, he grew so dark that many unfriended him on Facebook.

“I had always known there was something off about him. But he wasn’t always a ‘psychopath,’” a longtime friend, Courtney Kleiber, posted on Facebook on Sunday. “We had a lot of good times together. Over the years we all saw him change into something that he wasn’t. To be completely honest, I’m really not surprised this happened, and I don’t think anyone who knew him is very surprised either.”

Instead of straightening out after his bad conduct discharge, Mr. Kelley began a long downward slide that culminated in the shooting Sunday.

After getting out of confinement, Mr. Kelley moved into a barn at his parents’ house, which they had converted into an apartment, according to the local sheriff’s office records.

During the next two years, he was investigated twice for abusing women. The authorities in Comal County, which includes Mr. Kelley’s hometown New Braunfels, released records on Monday that showed he had been the subject of an investigation for sexual assault and rape in 2013.

The investigation ended without the filing of any charges — Mr. Kelley’s only skirmishes in the local courts were traffic violations...

More.

Devin P. Kelley, Sutherland Shooting Suspect, Once Escaped From Mental Health Facility

This is really major, a major nugget of information, especially considering the left's diabolical politicization of the attack within minutes of the first breaking news.

At the Other McCain, "Crazy People Are Dangerous":

Once upon a time in America, crazy people were locked up in lunatic asylums, but then liberals decided we needed “reform.” So they turned loose the lunatics and enacted laws to prevent us from “discriminating” against crazy people. (This was just about the time, coincidentally or not, that Democrat George McGovern picked that kook Thomas Eagleton as his running mate.) Deranged and demented people weren’t the problem, according to liberals. “Society” was the problem. All we had to do is to remove the “stigma” from mental illness, they told us, and these wackos and weirdos could live among us in peace and harmony.

And at the New York Times, "Texas Church Gunman Once Escaped From Mental Health Facility":

Wow. Texas church gunman escaped from a mental health facility & threatened his Air Force superiors https://t.co/yPj6Fr5W25

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) November 7, 2017

The gunman who killed 26 people in a rural Texas church on Sunday escaped from a psychiatric hospital while he was in the Air Force, after making death threats against his superiors and trying to smuggle weapons onto the base where he was stationed, a 2012 police report shows.

The police took the man, Devin P. Kelley, into custody at a bus station in downtown El Paso, where he apparently planned to flee on a bus after escaping from Peak Behavioral Health Services, a hospital a few miles away in Santa Teresa, N.M. He was sent there after being charged in a military court with assaulting his wife and baby stepson, charges he later pleaded guilty to.

The report filed by the El Paso officers says that the person who reported Mr. Kelley missing from the hospital advised them that he “suffered from mental disorders,” and that he “was attempting to carry out death threats” against “his military chain of command.” The man “was a danger to himself and others as he had already been caught sneaking firearms onto Holloman Air Force Base,” it added. The police report was published on Tuesday by KPRC, a Houston television station.

Later that year, Mr. Kelley pleaded guilty in a military court to repeated assaults on his wife and her son, a toddler, including one that left the boy with a fractured skull. He was sentenced to a year in a Navy prison.

At a news conference Tuesday, investigators said they had hit a roadblock as they tried to fathom what motivated Mr. Kelley’s rampage at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs: they have not been able to unlock his cellphone, reviving an issue that received national attention after another mass shooting almost two years ago.

Law enforcement officers recovered the phone carried by Mr. Kelley and sent it to the F.B.I. laboratory in Quantico, Va., for examination.

Twenty-Six Murdered in Texas Church Shooting (VIDEO)

I had to go off Twitter last night, the leftist ghouls were so bad. Some were even cheering the slaughter, saying it was all Texans anyway, and it made him happy. (That guy deleted his tweets later.)

The suspects was dishonorably discharged and court-marshalled, and was this prohibited from possessing. No gun control would have prevented this massacre, since he didn't abide by the law.

More later.

Meanwhile, at Dallas Morning News, "Sutherland Springs church massacre wasn't random, Abbott suggests."

And at CBS News This Morning:

#USC Drops to #6 in AP's Top 25 College Football Poll

Both Penn State and Oklahoma State leapfrogged USC in the rankings. USC was #4 last week. I can see why, but sheesh. The Trojans got heart!

At CBS Sports, "Tomorrow's Top 25 Today: Mississippi State jumps in after upset as LSU falls."

Oklahoma State up 21-0 at Pittsburgh, has outscored its opponents 59-0 in first quarter this season (Watch: https://t.co/vJmgCJY0Og). pic.twitter.com/MVHn3dJ7xR

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) September 16, 2017

Professor Caroline Heldman on President Trump's Handling of Hurricanes (VIDEO)

She appeared yesterday at CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Hurricane Harvey's a Wake-up for Los Angeles

I mentioned to my wife that we don't get that kind of Texas flooding in Southern California (thank goodness), but I fear a catastrophic earthquake. We're due for a big one, if not "The Big One."

Remember the freeway that pancaked in Oakland during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989? And the Bay Bridge snapped in half? Plus, all the other devastation? That's my worst fear.

In Los Angeles, we had the 1994 Northridge 'quake. I lived in Santa Barbara at the time and the temblor literally picked up my apartment and smashed it back down. I was already awake, at about 5:00am. All the streetlights and floodlights at the apartment complex went out. Power was out all together until the early afternoon. There were now mobile phones so you weren't checking everything out on your device.

Anyway, here's the Los Angeles Times, "Houston offers a grim vision of Los Angeles after catastrophic earthquake":

For years, scientists have drawn up terrifying scenarios of widespread destruction and chaos that would come to Southern California when a catastrophic earthquake hits.

Their efforts to warn the public may get an unlikely boost from the unprecedented disaster unfolding in Houston, where Tropical Storm Harvey dumped trillions of gallons of rain across Texas and brought America’s fourth-largest city to its knees.

While epic flooding is different from a powerful temblor, both natural disasters fundamentally alter daily life for months or years.

In recent years, officials have drawn up detailed scenarios of what would happen if a huge quake struck this region, part of a larger campaign to better prepare.

The last two big earthquakes to hit Los Angeles — the 1971 Sylmar quake and 1994 Northridge quake — caused destruction and loss of life. But the worst damage was concentrated in relatively small areas and did not fundamentally bring daily life across all of Southern California to a halt.

Experts have long warned that a significantly larger quake will eventually strike and that the toll will be far greater...

More.

Texas House Approves SB4 Ban on 'Sanctuary Cities' (VIDEO)

Oh boy this got hot!

At Twitchy, "‘Never talk to me again’: Ban on sanctuary jurisdictions passes Texas House despite tears, pleas for mercy."

Also at the Dallas Morning News, "Texas House finally passes harsher 'sanctuary cities' bill that's more like Senate version."

And watch, at CBS News 11 Dallas/Ft. Worth:

Fewer Illegal Crossings on Southern Border

Amazing how well a little enforcement works in deterring illegal immigration.

I just love this administration, and especially the new attorney general.

At LAT, "Rio Grande Valley is unusually quiet as Southwest border crossings drop to lowest point in at least 17 years."

Earlier, "Jeff Sessions' New Immigration Plan (VIDEO)."

Milwaukee Riots After Police Shoot and Kill Black Armed Suspect (VIDEO)

There's not a lot of news coverage of the rioting, actually.

I had on Fox News for about a half-hour, and not even a short blip of a report.

I suspect folks have gotten so used to blacks burning down cities that it's hardly news anymore. Besides, getting the news out there would destroy the left's "Black Lives Matter" narrative (and help Donald Trump).

Rioters screamed "Black Power!" as a fillin' station went up in flames.

Obama's America.

See the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "Calm restored at scene of unrest as Clarke calls for National Guard," and "Man shot by Milwaukee police subject of witness intimidation case."

More at Twitchy, "Rioters make Milwaukee ‘like a war zone’ after police shooting of armed suspect [photos, video]."

And there's video here, at Ruptly, "USA: Angry protesters burn petrol station after police shoot and kill man in Milkwaukee."

Vote Yes! Keep the Rangers!

I'm not a big fan of public financing of professional sports stadiums. I think the fans get burned in the end.

But see the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‎, "PAC set to kick off campaign for $1 billion Rangers ballpark Sunday."

While the team was battling Houston, @CityOfArlington voters were saying "Yes" to @KeepTheRangers. #KeepTheRangers pic.twitter.com/Yt4UoQBMeS

— Texas Rangers (@Rangers) August 7, 2016

#BlackLivesMatter Coalition Makes Demands, Wants Reparations for Slavery

Check out the title, heh: "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice":

Black humanity and dignity requires black political will and power. In response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the U.S. and globally, a collective of more than 50 organizations representing thousands of Black people from across the country have come together with renewed energy and purpose to articulate a common vision and agenda. We are a collective that centers and is rooted in Black communities, but we recognize we have a shared struggle with all oppressed people; collective liberation will be a product of all of our work.

"Collective liberation."

That's revolutionary rhetoric.

They're communists.



At AP, "Groups affiliated with Black Lives Matter release agenda":

The agenda outlines six demands and offers 40 recommendations on how to address them. To address criminal justice reform, for example, organizers are calling for an end to the type of militarized police presence seen at protests in cities like Ferguson, and the retroactive decriminalization and immediate release of all people convicted of drug offenses, sex work related offense and youth offenses.

The group also is calling for the passage of federal legislation, already proposed in Congress, that would create a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves...