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12 Dead, 50 Wounded By Colorado Gunman During Batman Premiere (Video)

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Victims As Young As Six Reported

12 people are dead and an estimated 50 more have been wounded by a lone gunman shooting randomly into the premiere of the “Batman: The Dark Knight Rises” movie minutes after midnight in a Colorado multiplex, according to multiple reports. The assassin, who first threw a teargas canister into the theater he reportedly accessed from an outside exit, was subdued and taken into custody by police after a call at 12:39 AM local time. Ten people died at the Century Aurora 16 multiplex theater in Aurora, Colorado, and four died at or on the way to the hospital.

UPDATE: NBC reports the gunman James Holmes, born 12/13/87.

“Witnesses said gunman wore a gas mask and was clad in black,” the Denver Post reported:

A witness, Benjamin Fernandez, 30, said he was watching the movie when he heard a series of explosions. He said that people ran from the theater and there were gunshots as police shouted ‘get down!”

Frenandez said he saw people falling, including one young girl.

Salina Jordan, 19, was in Theater 8 and saw people hit in her theater. She said one girl was struck in cheek, others in stomach including a girl who looked to be around 9 years old.

Jordan said it sounded like firecrackers until someone ran into Theater 8 yelling “they’re shooting out here!”

The police came running in, telling people to run out. Some police were carrying or dragging bodies, she said.

Robert Jones, 28, was in Theater 9 when the shooting started.

Jones said when he first saw smoke billowing from the front of the theater, he thought it was a special effect. Shots rang out almost immediately after.

“I thought it was pretty much the end of the world,” Roberts said.

Roberts stayed flat on the ground until police came into the theater.

Tammi Stevens said her son, 18-year-old Jacob Stevens, was inside Theater 9 when the shooting started. Stevens was waiting for her son at Gateway High School while police interviewed him.

Jacob told his mom that he saw a guy walk into the theater wearing body armor and throw some sort of cannister that then emitted some sort of gas.

“You let your kids go to a late night movie…you never think something like this would happen,” Stevens said.

CNN adds:

Aurora, a Denver suburb, is about 13 miles from Littleton, Colorado — site of the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

In that incident, two teenage students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, armed themselves with guns and bombs and opened fire inside the high school. They killed 13 people and wounding 23 others before killing themselves.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&contentId=bestoftv/2012/07/20/early-batman-shooting-cell-video.cnn

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7sIiqq66rk%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ugG-xzq22Vs%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

Editor’s note: This report has been updated to reflect the change in the number of reported dead from 14 to 12.

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Trump ‘Let Americans Die’ By Secretly Handing COVID Testing Machines to Putin: US Senator

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A leading Democratic U.S. Senator is calling Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s alleged handing over of COVID testing machines to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the height of the pandemic, “damning” and “disqualifying.”

“So, news just broke that Donald Trump, when he was president, at the beginning of the pandemic—when we didn’t have enough supplies to keep people alive here in the United States—sent critical in-demand testing equipment to Vladimir Putin,” explained U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT). “Donald Trump chose to keep Vladimir Putin alive and let Americans die.”

“That revelation alone should disqualify Donald Trump from being President of the United States,” said Sen. Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Donald Trump helped Putin and hurt us at a moment where we didn’t have enough testing equipment to go around in this country, at a moment where our lack of testing equipment was resulting in Americans unnecessarily dying and even worse, he hid the fact that he gave Putin the testing equipment from the American public,” Murphy added.

READ MORE: Trump’s Upcoming Madison Square Garden MAGA Rally Sparks Comparisons to 1939 Nazi Event

Senator Murphy was responding to news this week from Watergate journalist Bob Woodward’s latest book, “War,” that reveals Trump handed the vital testing machines—not boxed tests but “point-of-care” fast-testing devices, to Putin, an alleged war criminal who is conducting an illegal war in Ukraine.

“Donald Trump should not be President of the United States,” Sen. Murphy continued. “Nobody should be president of the United states who puts the health of a brutal dictator, an enemy of the United States, ahead of the health and well being of Americans, not during the pandemic, not ever.”

The Kremlin confirmed Trump gave Putin the testing machines, Politico reported, adding that “Woodward writes in his book that when Trump was still president in 2020, he ‘secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use’ during a time period when Covid tests were scarce.”

“This is a moment when COVID is running wild, not just in the United States, in the world,” Woodward told “CBS Sunday Morning” in an interview, the news network reported Wednesday. “He gives Abbott [the manufacturer] point-of-care testing kits to Putin. I mean, these are precious assets to anyone in the world, in the country, and he gives it to him for his personal use.”

Since the start of the COVID pandemic, 1.2 million Americans have died from the disease.

In February of 2021, still the height of the pandemic, The Guardian reported the U.S. “could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump’s policies.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Top GOP Strategist Names Three Key Issues That Will Get Republicans to Vote for Harris

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Trump’s Upcoming Madison Square Garden MAGA Rally Sparks Comparisons to 1939 Nazi Event

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Twenty years ago, Republicans gathered at midtown Manhattan’s iconic Madison Square Garden for their national convention. But in 1939, the precursor to the renowned New York City venue hosted a different, and infamous event. With a name similar to Donald Trump’s “America First” MAGA rallies, it was called the “Pro-American Rally”—yet the party behind it was anything but.

The German American Federation, or German American Bund, was essentially the American Nazi Party. Its leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, reportedly “was to become seen simply as an incompetent swindler and liar who spoke poor English.” He would later be exposed as a foreign agent, and, according to the FBI, “denaturalized in 1943 due to his pro-Nazi allegiances and deported to Germany in 1945.”

Slated for October 27, just nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rally at Madison Square Garden “will kickoff an ‘arena tour’ for the former president who plans to visit battleground states in the final push before the Nov. 5 election,” NBC News reports.

Back in April, Trump “teased” out the event.

READ MORE: Top GOP Strategist Names Three Key Issues That Will Get Republicans to Vote for Harris

“We’re going to be doing a rally at Madison Square Garden, we believe,” the ex-president said. “We think we’re signing Madison Square Garden to do. We’re going to have a big rally honoring the police, and honoring the firemen, and everybody. Honoring a lot of people, including teachers by the way.”

In 2019, NPR reported on the February 20, 1939 Nazi rally.

“The organizers had chosen the date in celebration of George Washington’s birthday and had procured a 30-foot-tall banner of America’s first president for the stage. More than 20,000 men and women streamed inside and took their seats. The view they had was stunning: Washington was hung between American flags — and swastikas.”

” In the 1930s, the Bund was one of several organizations in the United States that were openly supportive of Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism in Europe. They had parades, bookstores and summer camps for youth. Their vision for America was a cocktail of white supremacy, fascist ideology and American patriotism.”

“Attendees wore Nazi armbands, waved American flags and held aloft posters with slogans like “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America,'” NPR reported, describing the mood inside the rally as “jubilant.”

“The speeches were explicitly anti-Semitic, and tirades against ‘job-taking Jewish refugees’ were met with thunderous applause.”

Award-winning journalist and co-founder of Spy magazine, Kurt Andersen, noted: “History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.” Award-winning historian Michael Beschloss posted a photo from that 1939 rally.

“Historian here,” remarked Professor Manisha Sinha, President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, “not the first time that Madison Square Garden has hosted a Nazi rally. Businessmen trying to overthrow a democratically elected government? History doesn’t repeat but it sure rhymes!” she also said.

READ MORE: What We Know About FBI’s ‘Sham’ Kavanaugh Investigation and How Trump WH Blocked the Probe

“Let’s be clear,” warns Democratic New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose district includes Madison Square Garden. “Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.”

He’s calling on the owners of The Garden to cancel the event.

“This is a disastrous decision by Madison Square Garden that will endanger the public safety of New Yorkers and has the potential to incite widespread violence. For the good of NYC and its residents, I demand @TheGarden keep our city safe by cancelling the Trump rally.”

The company that owns Madison Square Garden is owned by billionaire Trump donor Charles Dolan, who founded HBO.

Outrage online in response to the news of Trump’s planned Madison Square Garden rally has been palpable.

 

In 2020, PBS aired,” A Night at the Garden,” about the 1939 American Nazi rally.

Watch the video and see the social media posts above or at this link.

READ MORE: Chief Justice ‘Shaken’ by Public Reaction to Him Handing Trump Near-Total Immunity

 

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Top GOP Strategist Names Three Key Issues That Will Get Republicans to Vote for Harris

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Mike Madrid, a top Latino GOP strategist, says there are three key issues the Harris-Walz campaign must focus on to win over Republicans, these “three messages are far more important than the messengers,” and if they do so they will “win the race.”

Madrid, a Lincoln Project co-founder, is a veteran political consultant and one of the country’s authoritative experts on Latino voters. He is also the author of, “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy.”

In an interview with The Independent, Madrid warned, “the Latino vote looks like it’s going to keep getting stronger” for Trump.

“Madrid,” The Independent reports, “attributed the growing strength for Trump among Latinos to years of inept Democratic messaging that assumed immigration — ensuring a compassionate attitude towards migrants from South and Central America — was a priority for voters who had roots in that part of the world.”

READ MORE: What We Know About FBI’s ‘Sham’ Kavanaugh Investigation and How Trump WH Blocked the Probe

“We’ve never been interested in immigration. It’s just this political and media narrative that the Democrats have been driving,” he said.

And he warns the Harris campaign is in “deep, deep trouble” in both Arizona and Nevada. The current FiveThirtyEight polling average puts Harris up by one point in Nevada and Trump up by one point in Arizona. Nationally, Harris is up just 2.6 percentage points over Trump.

“Demographically, the shift of North Carolina has made it far more important than Arizona,” he says, “so that if Harris wins North Carolina and Pennsylvania, there’s virtually no roadmap for Trump.”

Madrid believes Harris must focus on suburban women and college-educated voters.

“It’s gonna be the largest gender gap in the history of the country, and it’s correlated into the diploma divide,” he says. “What’s keeping her competitive is she is increasing the margins with college-educated women, and that includes Hispanic women, white women, African American women — all women with degrees are opening up this gap.”

He also warns Democrats to stop focusing so much on Republican “turncoats,” like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, to promote their message.

Madrid says Republicans don’t need someone telling them it’s OK to vote for Harris.

READ MORE: Chief Justice ‘Shaken’ by Public Reaction to Him Handing Trump Near-Total Immunity

“You do not need a permission structure to defend your body or your country,” he says on social media. “I’m deeply honored & grateful for those Republicans who have the courage to step forward against Trump. Everything helps at this moment. But let’s be clear – we’re way past a ‘permission structure’.”

“We’re not selling toothpaste folks,” he continues. “The threat to our country and our rights is existential and that’s why 17-20% of Republicans were peeling off Trump – before Nikki Haley, before Liz Cheney, before the convention. Republican defections will win this race for Harris but…We should not put politicians, personalities or pundits in front of the issues proven to move Republican voters. That’s called stepping on your message. Lead with what has proven to work. Lead with the three things that jarred GOP voters out of their haze.”

“There are three issues proven to move Republican voters past ‘The Bannon Line’ from 2020,” Madrid writes. They are, the January 6 insurrection, Trump’s “Big Lie” about voter fraud and a “rigged” election, and the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion:

“January 6
The Big Lie
Dobbs

Focus on these three issues and you win the race. Harris can pass the Bannon line and get a record number of Republican votes.”

READ MORE: ‘They Are Partners’: Experts Warn on Trump and Putin After Bombshell Woodward Revelations

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