Washington
Analysis: As deadly school massacre unfolds in Texas, few signs of common ground in Washington
![Analysis: As deadly school massacre unfolds in Texas, few signs of common ground in Washington Analysis: As deadly school massacre unfolds in Texas, few signs of common ground in Washington](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220525004916-texas-school-shooting-sign-0524-super-tease.jpg)
“I had hoped once I turned President I’d not have to do that once more. One other bloodbath,” the President stated. “Stunning, harmless, second, third, fourth graders. And what number of scores of little kids who witnessed what occurred — see their buddies die as in the event that they’re in a battlefield, for God’s sake. They will stay with it the remainder of their lives.”
“As a nation we now have to ask when in God’s identify we’ll stand as much as the gun foyer,” he stated. “We have now to behave and do not inform me we won’t have an effect on this carnage.”
Earlier within the night, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut delivered the day’s most searing speech from the Senate flooring as he challenged his colleagues to interrupt the legislative stalemate.
“Simply days after a shooter walked right into a grocery retailer to gun down African American patrons, we now have one other Sandy Hook on our palms. What are we doing?” Murphy requested his colleagues.
“Our youngsters live in concern each single time they set foot within the classroom as a result of they assume they’ll be subsequent. What are we doing? Why do you spend all this time working for the US Senate? Why do you undergo all the trouble of getting this job, of placing your self able of authority, in case your reply is that because the slaughter will increase, as our children run for his or her lives, we do nothing?”
The scenes from Uvalde, a small tight-knit group of about 16,000 individuals about 80 miles west of San Antonio, have been gripping and all too acquainted. Shaky cellphone footage captured native residents working towards the college constructing in disbelief as information of the taking pictures unfold.
Then there have been the agonizing afternoon hours when mother and father have been directed to reunite with their kids at an area civic heart, bracing for information of which college students had survived and which weren’t coming residence. Not less than 20 injured victims have been being handled at native hospitals. And there have been extra questions than solutions concerning the suspect, recognized as Salvador Ramos, an Uvalde Excessive College scholar.
A kind of mother and father who was trying to find his 10-year-old daughter within the chaotic hours after the taking pictures was Jessie Rodriguez, who spoke to CNN affiliate KHOU. “After the taking pictures, they do not know the place she’s at. We do not know the listing of who has gotten flown out they usually’re not letting us in on the hospital proper now. So we do not know the place to go,” he stated.
Authorities seek for clues about gunman’s motives
Late Tuesday night, legislation enforcement was nonetheless making an attempt to piece collectively clues of how the taking pictures had unfolded and what drove the gunman to open fireplace on harmless kids and adults at Robb Elementary College. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stated that the suspect arrived alone on the faculty round midday, deserted his automobile and went inside.
Sgt. Erick Estrada, of the Texas Division of Public Security, later described the chaotic collection of occasions that unfolded earlier than the taking pictures to CNN’s Anderson Cooper throughout an interview on “AC 360.”
Earlier than setting out on his rampage, Ramos shot his grandmother at her residence, Estrada stated. She is in crucial situation, he stated. The gunman then encountered officers after crashing his automobile in a ditch close to Robb Elementary, rising with a rifle and a backpack whereas carrying physique armor. It was unclear why the automobile crash occurred or if the college was even his meant goal.
After the crash, he was capable of enter via the south door of the college. Because the taking pictures unfolded, he entered a number of totally different lecture rooms, Estrada stated, but it surely was not clear how lengthy that terror ensued earlier than officers took him down.
Two responding officers have been struck by rounds, in response to Abbott, however weren’t severely injured. A US Customs and Border Safety agent, who was among the many first officers to reach on the scene in a city that isn’t removed from the US-Mexico border, was shot within the head, however the bullet didn’t penetrate, in response to an official. About 20 CBP brokers got here to the scene to help, some finally serving to switch college students safely to their households and providing medical help, authorities stated.
Investigators have been additionally sifting via social media accounts, together with an Instagram account tied to the suspect that three days earlier than the incident had posted a narrative together with photographs of two AR15-style rifles.
A former classmate of the suspect advised CNN’s Curt Devine and Jeff Winter that Ramos “would get severely bullied and made enjoyable of so much” and was generally taunted for the garments he wore and his household’s monetary state of affairs. The previous classmate, who didn’t wish to be recognized, stated Ramos “slowly dropped out” and finally “barely got here to highschool.”
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat, advised CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview Tuesday night that the gunman had acquired the 2 assault weapons when he turned 18, in response to a briefing that he was given by the Texas Rangers.
“On his 18th birthday, he purchased these two assault rifles,” Gutierrez stated. “It is the very first thing he did when he turned 18.”
Disappointment and impasse in Congress
Senate Democrats instantly took steps to attempt to place a background verify invoice handed by the US Home, often known as the Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021, onto the legislative calendar. However there was no indication that the laws would get the ten Republican votes wanted for passage.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut stated the invoice ought to get a vote on the ground even whether it is prone to fail.
“I believe we have to maintain each member of Congress accountable and vote in order that the general public is aware of the place each considered one of us stand,” he stated.
Biden’s speech — which didn’t define any clear plan for motion on gun laws — mirrored the political actuality that he’s dealing with. With inaction the almost definitely end result, he selected as a substitute to concentrate on the anguish of the Texas households.
Biden performed a job in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004 after lawmakers didn’t renew it. His administration has taken some govt actions, together with current insurance policies to crack down on “ghost weapons,” however they fall far wanting the sweeping actions that each he and plenty of congressional Democrats want to see.
They’re hamstrung, partly, by the filibuster guidelines within the US Senate that require 60 votes to advance main laws. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, stated he would do “something I can” to maneuver what he referred to as “widespread sense” gun laws ahead, however he indicated Tuesday that he’s nonetheless not keen to get rid of the filibuster to get gun laws via the Senate.
Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, supplied a grim evaluation of how the subsequent few weeks would unfold in a well-recognized sample.
“A pair weeks — we’ll return on the Home flooring. We’ll have a second of silence, and we’ll speak about ideas and prayers,” he advised CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”
“The Democrat-controlled Home has handed gun management laws, however it is going to get nowhere within the Senate and nowhere with my colleagues throughout the aisle. And also you and I will likely be speaking about this once more, someday within the subsequent week, two weeks, months or years to come back.”
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Washington
Creating a memorial to the horrors of World War I
![Creating a memorial to the horrors of World War I Creating a memorial to the horrors of World War I](https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2024/08/31/77fcc007-c455-40d9-bbc1-0162e5e6a821/thumbnail/1200x630g2/72c4c83255ec34b4612d034acce8c5a4/wwi-memorial-a-soldiers-journey-detail-a-1280.jpg?v=25685eaa472b1a5dbb5bd46ae506d232)
Over the past 40 years, memorials to America’s 20th century wars have sprung up across Washington, D.C., with one conspicuous omission: There was no national memorial to veterans of World War I in our nation’s capital.
“If you ask anybody on the streets where the World War I memorial is in D.C., most of them will point you to the D.C. Veterans Memorial,” said Joe Weishaar. “For a long time people assumed that it was the national memorial. But the little rotunda that’s there is only to district residents.”
In 2015, Weishaar was a 25-year-old intern at a Chicago architecture firm when he heard about an open design competition for D.C.’s first national World War I memorial. “I set up a shelf in my closet, I set my computer on the shelf, and that was my office,” he said. “I was doing this, like, in nights and weekends after work.”
He sent off his design and then forgot about it, until … “I got a very strange phone call and they’re like, ‘You’re one of five finalists. We need you in Washington, like, tomorrow,’” he said.
Weishaar had never even been to Washington. “No, I had never been. Didn’t own a suit!”
Weishaar’s design beat out more than 360 applicants from over 20 countries.
When the memorial opened to the public in 2021, only one thing was missing: an intricate, 60-foot-long bronze relief, the memorial’s centerpiece, created by classical sculptor Sabin Howard, a firebrand and self-appointed bulwark against the scourge of modern art. “Artists like de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, I’m in opposition to them,” said Howard. “It’s a scam, what’s happened in the last 100 years. I’m here to rectify that scam.”
For his tableau depicting World War I, he said, “I threw out the last hundred years of history in the art world, and I went back to what preceded that period of time.”
Shepherding Howard through the byzantine approvals process was his client, the Congressionally-created World War I Centennial Commission.
“You go to these meetings, and none of the people in the room are artists; they’re all lawyers and, you know, Washington bureaucrats,” Howard said. “The commission asked me, ‘We need to see more – a dying soldier, perhaps, and more suffering.’ I started posing the models. You had madness, you had amputations, death. So, I went pretty deep.”
When he brought that iteration into the commission office, he said chairs were literally thrown in the room.
“I was treated as, ‘You’re working for us.’ And I took that for a long time. But then we got to a moment in the relationship, I stood up and I said, ‘I will not compromise this design. And if you don’t like it, you sculpt it, and I’ll send you some webinars.’”
The World War I Centennial Commission said they are “proud of the magnificent Memorial that Joe Weishaar and Sabin Howard have created,” and that it “provides a model of how a complex and collaborative process can work.”
Howard may lack tact, but he doesn’t lack confidence. His sculpture charts a soldier’s wartime journey, from his ambivalent departure, to his wordless homecoming, to the animal savagery of combat in-between. Pointing to one soldier, he said, “If you look at this figure, I don’t think in the history of art that there’s ever been a figure with this much explosive energy.”
Howard’s “movie in bronze,” consisting of 38 figures weighing 25 tons, ends with a soldier, home from war, lowering a helmet to a young girl.
For World War I historian Jennifer Keene, the sculpture’s final tableau illustrates the heavy toll the war exacted on its veterans: “They were not prepared for what they were going to find – the quagmire, the terror of artillery shells, rats and lice and trench feet. No, they are completely unprepared.”
Keene said, “I think that idea at the end, that it’s just a gesture, right? ‘Here’s the helmet.’ There’s no words there, because maybe there aren’t words that can really describe what that soldier has been through.”
The sculpture, which will be unveiled at a ceremony later this month, took nine years of Sabin Howard’s life. “Yeah, but that’s not a lot, when you think about it,” he said.
Asked what he hopes visitors to the memorial a century from now would experience, Howard replied, “I want the visitor 100 years from now to have the same feeling that I had when I went to go see the David when I was 25. We are made in God’s image. That sculpture is made in God’s image. So is mine. It’s a simple thing, but very deep.”
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Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
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Washington
Washington vs. Weber State Game Thread
![Washington vs. Weber State Game Thread Washington vs. Weber State Game Thread](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/p9jeJnZ_MpoLYwW0fWV-ik94qTA=/0x0:8640x4524/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25595680/1915746483.jpg)
In roughly 30 minutes, a new era of Husky football kicks off on the Big Ten Network. As noted in the open thread posted earlier, this is your spot to comment on the game and follow along during all of the action with your fellow Husky fans.
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Washington
Tim Walz has 'gilded his record for political gain,' Washington Post columnist says
![Tim Walz has 'gilded his record for political gain,' Washington Post columnist says Tim Walz has 'gilded his record for political gain,' Washington Post columnist says](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/08/walztim.jpg)
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker criticized Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for exaggerating elements of his career for “political gain” in an op-ed published on Friday.
“I’m not saying that Walz lies, precisely,” Parker wrote in an op-ed headlined, “Tim Walz isn’t exactly what he seems.” “But he tends to gild his résumé for political gain.”
Walz has been forced to defend a number of controversies that have emerged following Vice President Harris’ announcement that he would be her running mate. In particular, Walz has had to explain his record in the National Guard and his 2006 congressional campaign’s statements on his 1995 drunk driving incident.
‘MASTERFUL SHAPESHIFTER’ WALZ GETS POINTED MESSAGE FROM MINNESOTA VOTERS AT STATE FAIR BOOTH
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker criticized Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for exaggerating elements of his career for “political gain” in an op-ed published on Friday. (Scott Eisen)
Parker called out Walz’s statements about his 1995 arrest for drunk driving.
“Walz, then a 31-year-old high school teacher, was clocked at 96 mph in a 55-mph zone in Nebraska,” Parker wrote. “He was pulled over by a state trooper, who, upon smelling alcohol, asked Walz to take a field sobriety test, which he failed. Walz then submitted to a hospital for a blood test, which revealed his blood alcohol level to be 0.128, well above the state’s legal limit.”
While that info is verifiable by police records, Walz’s 2006 congressional campaign staff told the press that the candidate was not drinking and actually failed to understand the police officer’s directions because of hearing loss, blaming an injury relating to his time in the National Guard.
Parker also responded to Walz’s interview alongside Harris with CNN.
WALZ ON ABORTION, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS ‘ON PAR WITH CHINA AND NORTH KOREA,’ SAYS PARENTAL RIGHTS ADVOCATE
![Tim Walz speakimg](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/08/1200/675/403ad5f5-tim-walz.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Veterans who served alongside Walz in the same battalion when he was in the National Guard have spoken out against his honesty about his service record. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
“Morning show softballs may give comfort to the ill-prepared, but they deny viewers the content they need to be better-informed voters,” Parker wrote. “Nothing about the pair’s first (taped) interview Thursday night, with CNN’s Dana Bash, satisfied that imperative. Although Harris handled the interview relatively well, Walz seemed to be a mixed-up mess.”
“He answered none of the four questions he was asked, including whether he had misspoken when he said he had carried a gun ‘in war’ when he never was deployed to a combat zone,” Parker wrote. “A simple ‘yes’ might have sufficed, but instead he sputtered evasive nonsense and, to be rhetorically accurate, gobbledygook.”
Veterans who served alongside Walz in the same battalion when he was in the National Guard have spoken out against his honesty about his service record.
The Harris-Walz campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
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