3 Stories You Should Read 7/29/2019: Santino William Legan, Trump, Biden

July 29, 2019 Confluence

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In the category of: White Supremacist weekend

California festival gunman killed 2 children and 1 adult with assault-style rifle, police say

A 6-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl and a man in his 20s were killed when a gunman opened fire with an assault-type rifle at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in northern California on Sunday night, Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said.

The weapon, an AK-47-style rifle, was purchased legally by the gunman in Nevada on July 9, Smithee told reporters at a news conference Monday.

The suspect — identified as Santino William Legan, 19 — also injured at least 12 others before he was fatally shot by three officers who responded within a minute of the gunfire beginning, Smithee said. Legan apparently entered the annual festival, which attracts about 100,000 people every year, by cutting through a back fence and then began shooting at random, the chief said.

Instagram posts bearing the name of the gunman mentioned a white supremacist book and showed a picture of people walking around the event shortly before the shooting began.

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In the category of: Hubris much??

You’ll never believe what Donald Trump just said about 9/11

(CNN)Donald Trump has always had a bit of Walter Mitty in him. But on Monday morning, in a speech to first responders and others impacted by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, he took his fantastical memory of himself to new and not-at-all-appropriate heights.

“I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder,” Trump said. “But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

Uh, what?

Let’s be clear about what Trump is doing here: He is associating himself — very closely — with the men and women who were the first to respond to planes being crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. People who continue to suffer health issues due to their jobs.

(They were at the White House for Trump’s formal signing of an extension of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, which ensures first responders continue to get money from the government to deal with their issues.)

So, what was Trump actually doing on September 11, 2001?

One thing he was doing was getting on the phone with WWOR’s Alan Marcus to talk about the attacks and their aftermath. It was in that interview that Trump said this about a property — 40 Wall Street — that he owned:

“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

Yeah. He really said that.

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In the category of: Too soon to tell

Don’t Worry About the Democratic Presidential Polls

A significant portion of the support for Biden and Sanders can be attributed to name recognition. More than eighty-five per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents had opinions about the two men, Gallup reported this month, and about seventy per cent saw each favorably. Only forty-nine per cent had an opinion about Julián Castro, fifty-three per cent about Buttigieg, fifty-seven per cent about Cory Booker, and sixty-five per cent about Harris, leaving lots of room for these lesser-known candidates to define themselves. Their challenge is to be noticed, positively. History shows that it can happen. “The Democratic Party tends to try to kill off its front-runners,” said Jeremy Rosner, a managing partner at GQR, a prominent Washington-based polling and strategy firm that works with progressive candidates. “We saw with the first debate how quickly things can change. One good performance, one scandal, one misstep. Right now, boy, my feeling about the Democratic field is: Who the hell knows? Almost all of them are really impressive, and in almost all of them I can see their liabilities and how they get defeated.”

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