The Capitol Gazette, the shooting, and the dead

NY Times  “ 'He didn’t have enough bullets for us,” Mr. Davis said, struggling to grapple with the images of his fallen colleagues. “It was terrifying to know he didn’t have enough bullets to kill everyone in that office, and had to get more.' ” . . .
From the Miami Herald:

A former leader of the Capital Gazette described the intensity with

which Ramos fought the newspaper in court.“He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital,” Tom Marquardt, a former editor and publisher of the Capital Gazette, told the Los Angeles Times. “I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away.’”Social media posts from an account in Ramos’ name indicate that — even after the lawsuit was dismissed — he held a years-long grudge against the newspaper, the Times reports.

MSM . . . "Paul Gillespie, a staff photographer, had just finished editing photos from one assignment and was preparing for the next when he heard shots behind him, and the newsroom’s glass doors shatter. Another shot, and Gillespie dove under a co-worker’s desk “and curled up as small as I could,” he said.

“I dove under that desk as fast as I could, and by the grace of God, he didn’t look over there,” he said. “I was curled up, trying not to breathe, trying not to make a sound, and he shot people all around me.”
"Gillespie said he heard one colleague scream “No!,” then a shot, then another colleague’s voice, and then another shot. Then came the sound of the gunman getting closer to where he was hiding, Gillespie said.
“ 'I kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to die. I can’t believe this.’” Gillespie said.
"Instead, the gunman passed him, continuing to shoot, he said. Eventually, there was a lull in the shots, and Gillespie said he stood and ran for the exit, through the shattered glass, jumping over a colleague who he believed was dead as another shot rang out in his direction. Once outside, he ran to a nearby bank, where he screamed for people to call the cops." . . .

Capital Gazette shooting victim Rebecca Smith:   "Rebecca Smith was a recent hire at the Capital Gazette but had already proved herself a valuable asset.
"Smith, 34, a sales assistant, worked in the news organization’s office in Annapolis. She was one of the five people who were shot and killed Thursday afternoon.
Her boss, Capital Gazette advertising director Marty Padden, said she made sure the sales office ran smoothly.
“ 'She was a very thoughtful person,” Padden said. “She was kind and considerate, and willing to help when needed. She seemed to really enjoy to be working in the media business.” . . .


Rob Hiaasen, journalist killed in Maryland newsroom shooting, had deep South Florida ties

"Hiaasen, 59, had worked as a columnist and editor for the Capital Gazette in Annapolis since 2010. But his connections to South Florida were lifelong. He grew up with his brother, Miami Herald columnist and author Carl Hiaasen, in the Fort Lauderdale area and worked at the Palm Beach Post in the 1990s." . . .



Capital Gazette shooting victim Gerald Fischman: Clever and quirky voice of a community newspaper  . . ."Fischman’s personality was so quiet and withdrawn that it hid the brilliant mind, wry wit and “wicked pen” that his colleagues would treasure.
"For more than 25 years, Fischman was the conscience and voice of the Annapolis news organization, writing scathing, insightful and always exacting editorials about the community.
He was the guardian against libel, the arbiter of taste and a peculiar and endearing figure in a newsroom full of characters.

Capital Gazette shooting victim John McNamara: Sports reporting was his dream "John McNamara was toiling as a news copy editor at the Capital Gazette when he left to pursue his dream: sports reporting.
"He honed his skills at the Prince George’s Journal, a competitor to the Annapolis news organization. Within a few years, the Capital Gazette hired him back. He would work there for nearly 24 years.
"McNamara, 56, was one of five staff members who was shot to death at the Capital Gazette on Thursday." . . .


Capital Gazette shooting victim Wendi Winters: A prolific writer who chronicled her community  . . .  "After a career in fashion and public relations in New York City, the 65-year-old mother of four moved to Maryland 20 years ago and began stringing for the Annapolis news organization. She soon built a reputation as a prolific freelance reporter and well-known community resource.
"The Edgewater woman was one of five Capital Gazette staff members killed in the shootings Thursday.
"Her daughter Winters Geimer said the family was gathering late Thursday." . . .

The Capital Gazette web site.

At this hour the names of the wounded could not be found.

Dan Rather Goes To Smack Trump, Ends Up Giving Him Possible Campaign Slogan

Daily Wire  "Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather tried to attack President Donald Trump at the start of the week and ended up giving him a possible campaign slogan to use, calling him "mean as a wolverine.' " . . .

Lean and mean as a Wolverine!

The Maryland shooter

An idiot who killed over a personal grievance, after the paper, accurately, reported on him.  . . . "So for the liberals who immediately jumped on it and said it had to be a white male Trump supporter who hated the media, wrong again."

Capital Gazette Shooter Identified: 39-Year-Old JARROD RAMOS

Authorities have identified the Capital Gazette shooter using facial recognition software.His name is Jarrod Ramos; he is 39 [maybe 38] years old, according to NBC.Law enforcement is now telling media sources the shooter previously sued the Capital Gazette for defamation.NBC News: The shooting suspect’s name is JARROD RAMOS. 38 years old. He was identified by multiple law enforcement officials to NBC News. He had sued the paper in 2012 for defamation. Case was tossed by a judge. @Tom_Winter @MSNBC

 CBS Evening News

‏Verified account @CBSEveningNews

"This individual had some type of vendetta against the Capital newspaper and they were specifically targeted," law enforcement says. https://cbsn.ws/2KebFLw 

He sued the paper a few years ago for defamation and it was later overturned by an appellate court:

Jarrod Ramos of Laurel made the defamation claim in Prince George’s County Circuit Court in 2012 after a 2011 column by then-Capital staff writer Eric Hartley about Ramos’ guilty plea to criminal harassment.
Prince George’s Circuit Court Judge Maureen M. Lamasney dismissed Ramos’ claim in 2013, saying the article was based on public records and Ramos presented no evidence it was inaccurate.
Ramos, who represented himself, appealed the decision to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, which upheld Lamasney’s ruling in an opinion filed Thursday. Source: Capital Gazette

 Posted by Dell Cameron

Scrubbing Laura Ingalls Wilder Is A Dangerous Step Toward Ignorance

The Federalist

Pretending things that make us uncomfortable never happened isn’t going to make America better, or make American children more informed.

"Few people are unfamiliar with the Little House on the Prairie book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her simple retellings of her childhood memories of life in the big woods of Wisconsin, to the prairie of the Dakota territories, to her life as a married frontier wife have captured the imaginations of generations of readers.

"Wilder’s stories of her family’s journey west in a covered wagon, the careful details of the minutiae of their daily lives, and her descriptions of an America most commonly seen in history books should, without question, cement her place in history as a talented and important author. Wilder’s books also have served to introduce children for decades to disability issues, specifically blindness, and are an important look at the positive difference a supportive family can make for people with special needs. The enduring nature of her work is a testimony to her ability to write, and that talent and ability to capture reader’s minds and hearts led the Associate for Library Service to Children to name a literary award after her in 1952. Now her presence has been stripped from the the award, which has been renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

"Wilder’s removal came after repeated rounds of criticism that her books, written about her girlhood in the 1800s, contained racist and offensive characterizations most commonly of Native Americans. These complaints started in the 50s with a reader writing into Harper, the publisher of Wilder’s books, about sentences that she disagreed with. The publisher responded by rewording sections. These gentle rewordings quelled critiques until more recently, when statutes and school names became battle grounds for removing the presence of people with problematic parts of their history. No longer can Confederate leaders of the past have any public monuments. Their part in the Civil War renders them best forgotten, ripped from places where their names and images could remind people of uncomfortable parts of history. And here is where Wilder’s name and image are now being stripped away." . . .

 What is the origin of this movement to delete America's history as a nation? This smacks too much of Stalin's regime airbrushing banished (or murdered) officials out of Soviet photos.  

New Socialist Darling Caught Celebrating With Known Anti-Semite And Racist

Daily Caller

"Oh my, this guy is a definite loony toon. Which says a lot about her, if her being a socialist didn’t already say enough." Weasel Zippers

"Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stunned the political world and rank-in-file Democrats by defeating incumbent Joe Crowley in Tuesday’s New York primary. The Ocasio-Cortez win signaled the growing swing leftward for national Democrats, a party undergoing a power struggle and identity crisis after Trump’s election victory in 2016. The platform Ocasio-Cortez ran on was deeply progressive, calling on the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nationalized health care, universal jobs guarantee and getting America to 100 percent green energy.

"However, footage reveals that Ocasio-Cortez also has associates with regressive views.

"One of Ocasio-Cortez’s most enthusiastic campaigners and a man who stood behind her at her victory party, Thomas Lopez-Pierre, is a known anti-Semite and racist. Lopez-Pierre has regularly used slurs against Jewish and black New Yorkers in public forums and while running for office himself.

"While running for office in 2017, Lopez-Pierre specifically campaigned on “protecting tenants from greedy Jewish landlords.” Lopez-Pierre’s own campaign website shows his rantings agains(sp) “Greedy Jewish Landlords.” His campaign website applauds the arrest of “Greedy Jewish Landlords” and says that “Jewish Landlords” are “punishing” black and Hispanic families." . . .

Turns out this guy is a simple party-crasher and nothing more.

Mexico — What Went Wrong?

Victor Davis Hanson

"Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . ."

"Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

"Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

"Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

"Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded antiTrump bias." . . .

THE PRICE OF FAKE NEWS: The Food Network Eats CNN’s Lunch In Ratings

RedState   "There were a couple of interesting stories out today that unexpectedly dovetailed into a nice commentary on the news media. First up we have a very interesting poll from Axios.

"This is actually stunning. A super-majority of Americans thinks that the news media intentionally runs inaccurate stories. To be clear, I’m not saying they are wrong, I’m just remarking on the total lack of trust people have for the media. This bolsters the findings by a Knight-Gallup poll earlier in the year that found 66% of Americans thought the media could not separate truth from opinion and only 34% had a positive view of the media.

"If the top line isn’t bad enough, just dig into the details:

• 70% say that “traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading.”

"Consider the impact of that for a moment. We’ve long chronicled “name that party” stories where an indicted Democrat politician’s political affiliation will often be omitted from a news story while a Republican will be identified as such in the lede. " . . .

Laura Bush needs a remedial course in history and immigration policy.

americanthinker.

American Spectator

"The Bush family has a famously adversarial relationship with English. It became clear this week that at least one of them is also illiterate where U.S. history and immigration policy are concerned. This was demonstrated when former First Lady Laura Bush took to the pages of the Washington Post to denounce President Trump for enforcing a statute signed into law by her own husband, George W. Bush. Even worse, she compared the HHS facilities where the children of illegal immigrants are briefly housed to the infamous internment camps where Democrat icon FDR imprisoned 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent.

This comparison not only played into the hands of the very Democrats and partisan journalists who remorselessly savaged both her and her husband for eight solid years, it is wildly inaccurate. Mrs. Bush clearly knows very little about the plight of children caught up in the illegal immigration crisis, and even less about the internment camps she so glibly evoked. It’s blindingly obvious that she has been suckered by the propaganda relentlessly pumped out by the “news” media, completely taken in by their lurid images of wailing children and “cruel” DHS officials. Laura Bush has thus become just another useful idiot.

Let’s look at some actual facts: According to the former First Lady’s opinion column, “I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents… the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers.” The facilities to which she refers are actually run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of Health and Human Services. It has been in operation since 2003, at which time Mrs. Bush’s husband had been President for two years. Here are the evil doings that ORR has been up to for the subsequent fifteen years:

ORR has cared for more than 175,000 children, incorporating child welfare values as well as the principles and provisions established by the Flores Agreement in 1997, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and its reauthorization acts, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2005 and 2008.  . . .

STILL UNHINGED: Kathy Griffin Responds To Blistering RNC Ad

RedState  "On Tuesday the RNC released a blistering campaign ad that highlighted the hateful and inciting language the far-left has been using when it comes to President Trump and his administration."

"Included in the video are the now infamous images of comedian Kathy Griffin holding a bloody replica of Trump’s decapitated head.

"As if to prove their point, Kathy Griffin launched an unhinged tirade of her own on Twitter after the ad was released. H/T Mediaite:" Language advisory

. . . 

What Country Ever Existed A Century and a Half Without A Rebellion?

. . . Abolition is not our problem today.  Our problem today is progressivism, that uniquely Western branch of Marxism which worldwide, in the 20th century, ran up a butchers bill of somewhere between sixty and one hundred million lives lost.

Bookworm Room  . . . "The tombstone in the picture to the left marks the grave of Civil War officer Nathaniel Grigsby.

"It has been 153 years since the end of our last rebellion in this country.  That rebellion began a year after Abraham Lincoln was elected and many people south of the Mason Dixon Line announced that they refused to accept the results of the ballot box.  To use a phrase common at the time, Lincoln was “not my President.”

"After the civil war ended in Union victory, our federal government was careful to station federal military units in every state so that there would not be a repeat of what happened in 1861.  And there will not be.  But we are on the edge of blood in the streets of one form or another in this country.   It is as obvious today, one year on from when an insane Bernie Bro tried to kill Republican Congress-critters on a soft ball field, as it must have been around 1859, when John Brown, an abolitionist dissatisfied with pacifism, thought he could lead an armed slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

"At the time, we collectively lost over one million lives in our Civil War to bring about abolition.  Abolition is not our problem today.  Our problem today is progressivism, that uniquely Western branch of Marxism which worldwide, in the 20th century, ran up a butchers bill of somewhere between sixty and one hundred million lives lost." . . .

Beware the cultural revolution of the Chinese Red Guards that the American left seeks today.

The path of American culture

It’s On: The Epic Tapper-Ellison Battle Over Farrakhan

Ed Morrisey  "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Five minutes of talking-head gold, as this confrontation between CNN’s Jake Tapper and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) demonstrates. Tapper has spent the last several months demanding more accountability from members of Congress who have or had relationships with notorious bigot and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Ellison at one point belonged to NoI, but has insisted lately that he’s never had a relationship or taken a meeting with Farrakhan.

"When Ellison starts talking about the bigotry inherent in the so-called “Muslim ban” executive order upheld by the Supreme Court earlier today, Tapper asks Ellison to explain his own brushes with bigotry and anti-Semitism. That’s when the fur flies and the fun begins:" . . .

. . . "Ellison’s been evasive and deceptive on this for a very long time. Check out the archives of our friends at Power Line for chapter and verse on Ellison’s radicalism and his embrace of Farrakhan until it became inconvenient. Tapper was right to call him out and force him to confront the question, especially as he poses as an opponent of bigotry.

"Why stop at Farrakhan? The Free Beacon’s Brent Scher suggests that if Ellison keeps denying he met with the Nation of Islam leader, Tapper can ask Ellison instead about this meeting from 2008:

Why doesn't anybody ever grill him on why he let the Muslim Brotherhood pay for his trip to Saudi Arabia? And why he met with radicals like Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah on the trip?http://freebeacon.com/issues/keith-ellisons-saudi-arabia-trip-included-meetings-radical-cleric-bank-funds-suicide-bombings/ …

Ellison Explodes Over Travel Ban Decision, Lies About It Being ‘Muslim Ban’  "So if it’s a Muslim ban, why does it include Venezuela, and not include most of the Muslim world?"

Keith Ellison Freaks Out After Supreme Court Upholds Travel Ban, Says Gorsuch Obeys His “Paymasters”