Though he's since called them "inelegant", former governor and current presidential nominee Mitt Romney's (R-MA) comments about the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes have generated a lot of buzz about who those people actually are.
Here's a look.
[Data for this chart comes from here, here and here.
["Portrait Of A Happy Elderly Senior Couple Smiling Together" on Shutterstock]
Gov. Greg Abbott's office denied a viral claim that his staffers tried to coerce a Uvalde massacre victim's family into supporting a pro-firearms message, and the person who posted the allegations backed away from their claims.
The Daily Beast contacted the person who controls the account @MyCancerJourne3 to ask about the tweets, and the individual claimed they had been hacked and were trying to remove the posts -- which have been shared more than 32,000 times.
“This is completely false,” said a spokesman for Abbott. “No truth to it whatsoever.”
The tweets claimed the person's nephew had been killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, and alleged the governor's representatives followed them home and offered to pay them to stand alongside Abbott to say stronger gun laws were unnecessary.
The person then claimed the representative threatened criminal charges if they spoke about the encounter and made menacing comments after they profanely rebuffed the offer.
Other Twitter users pointed out that same account had made previous claims about being the victim of personal tragedies, and it appears to be linked to a Washington State man whose Facebook page was deleted soon after The Daily Beast reached out to him, and he told the publication that someone had hacked his social media accounts.
“Somebody somehow got into my account,” the man said. “It's got nothing to do with me or my family in any way.”
The Twitter account has previously solicited financial assistance for colon cancer treatments, as well as claiming to have suffered strokes, being placed in a medically induced coma and receiving approval for assisted suicide -- all of which the Washington man insisted was true.
On Friday's edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," former New York City police commissioner William Bratton tore into Texas law enforcement for their repeated mixed messages and false claims surrounding the officer response to the Uvalde school shooting.
In particular, Bratton said that the information Texas authorities are giving out is simply not adequate to explain what happened.
"My question to you has to do with ... that 12 minutes between the time the car crashes, he crashes the car, and he gets into the school," said anchor Mike Barnicle. "A full 10 minutes outside of the school. Ten minutes after the 911 call was first registered. This is a small town, as you pointed out. There's no traffic. There's no congestion at that hour. How bothersome is it to you that within that 10-minute package of time, 12 minutes in total, that nobody, apparently, responds to a shooter at a school?"
"Well, Mike, that's one of the details that's going to have to be determined, in the sense of that 12 minutes, what calls are coming into 911 system?" said Bratton. "Where were the police officers in that community going to the shooting scene with the grandmother, potentially going to the shooting scene at the funeral home? Then the idea that the funeral home is right across from the school. What notification protocols do they have to lock down the schools when they have a shooting incident adjacent to one?"
RELATED: Texas Democrat Demands FBI Probe of Police Response to Uvalde Shooting
"The devil is in the details," continued Bratton. "Unfortunately, law enforcement is doing a terrible job in this community, in Texas, in Public Safety, of giving details, even if they are preliminary. There's so much that needs to be explained here. Up to this point, they have been giving out nothing, basically. It can't be described as anything but misinformation. It is an embarrassment to American law enforcement and certainly to law enforcement in Texas, as to how badly they are handling this situation."
So far, police have continued to stonewall the issue, with one officer blowing off CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz as he requested more details.
Watch below or at this link.
'Embarrassment to law enforcement': Retired NYPD chief shreds Texas cops for misinformation www.youtube.com
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Friday examined the "major discrepancies" in the police account of the roughly one hour that a teenage gunman spent at the Texas elementary school where he killed at least 19 children and two teachers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety defended the response by Uvalde police, but "Morning Joe" co-host Willie Geist said the changing narrative of what happened and how officers reacted was jaw-dropping, and he asked NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian to explain what was so troubling about the law enforcement account.
"It's really astonishing," Dilanian said. "Let's remember, the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is conducting the briefings, they did not respond to this incident. Their whole job here was to investigate and find out what happened and tell the public. They've really been a font of misinformation, including from the head of the agency, who sat next to the governor of the state and told the world in a very confident voice that there was a school resource officer who encountered the subject as he came into the school. Then yesterday, we learned that that person didn't exist. There was no such school resource officer."
"Then we learn other, new information, that the shooter actually exited his grandmother's truck, which he crashed outside the school, then fired shots at onlookers across the street, and then essentially was lingering outside the school for 12 minutes, firing shots, before he entered through an unlocked door, also new information, unimpeded, unobstructed, nobody confronted him," Dilanian continued. "Then we learned in this new -- and, again, all this information is coming from the same agency that has provided misinformation. We should take it all with a grain of salt. But according to the latest account, some local police officers, Uvalde police officers, immediately rushed in, which is what the doctrine of mass shooting says they should do. They were met with a hail of gunfire from the 18-year-old with an assault rifle, AR-15, a weapon of war. They were armed, presumably, with handguns. A couple were shot and wounded, the police are saying."
"Victor Escalon said they made entry, didn't make entry, retreated," Dilanian added. "Bottom line, they were out-gunned, treated, then we have this mystery. We have this decision by the police to wait 60 minutes for a Border Patrol tactical team. There's a lot we don't know and don't understand about that, so we should be a little careful. There were police inside the school, we were told, evacuating children, in other parts of the school. But the account is, somehow, the gunman had barricaded himself. They use the word 'barricade.' It was two adjoining classrooms."
"Now we're learning ... that dead children were found in four separate classrooms," he said. "That's a thing we don't understand but, as you know, the doctrine for police response to mass shootings really changed after Columbine. The rule now is go in with whatever force you can. This is a policy from the Texas Police Chief Association, a manual says the first two to four officers should form a team and immediately enter the building. That's what they did initially. Then, for whatever reason, they didn't follow up with that. They waited for essentially federal agents, a group of Border Patrol and other police who formed a team, a stack as they put it, went in with a ballistic shield in front, took fire from the shooter -- incredible act of bravery -- and killed the shooter. There were local police officers involved in that, we're told. These videos we're seeing and the accounts of parents screaming for the police to go in while they were standing outside, that has to be explained. There is just no good explanation for why they waited 60 minutes when the doctrine calls for them to go in immediately."
Watch the video below or at this link.
05 27 2022 07 02 06 www.youtube.com
Copyright © 2022 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com.
