Explosions shook the city of Kyiv on Sunday morning after Russia launched its first attack in the capital in over a month. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay joins CBS News’ Ali Bauman with more on the attack.
This state cannot adequately fund their schools now and just wasted billions on a border stunt that failed. But they will do anything other than talk about how easy it is to get a gun in their state to shoot school kids. Hugs
Patrick said he wants police in as many Texas schools as possible to have bulletproof shields before the fall. He’s asked other state leaders to move around money in the state budget to make it happen.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, center, has asked state officials to move $50 million in the state budget to provide bulletproof shields for school police officers before the start of classes in the fall. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Texas Tribune
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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called on state leaders Friday to move around $50 million in the state budget to buy bulletproof shields for school police officers following a mass shooting last month at an elementary school in Uvalde where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.
“I am asking the Speaker of the House to join the Senate members of the Legislative Budget Board and me next week in a budget execution letter to move $50 million to either the Governor’s Office or Department of Public Safety (DPS) to begin buying these bulletproof shields as soon as possible so every member of school law enforcement has one,” Patrick said in a statement Friday afternoon. “This will begin the funding necessary to eventually provide bulletproof shields to all law enforcement.”
Patrick’s request would require the approval of House Speaker Dade Phelan and other House members of the state’s Legislative Budget Board. But because lawmakers have already appropriated the money for the two-year budget cycle, it would also require letters from the agencies where the money would be taken certifying that the transfer would not negatively impact their functions.
Patrick said he would send a draft letter Monday and asked Phelan to act quickly. Phelan’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
State Republican leaders have already signed off on twosimilar transfers worth about $1 billion this year to send money to Gov. Greg Abbott’s costly border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, which was running out of funds. Patrick, who approved those transfers, said the same should be done to provide bulletproof shields to school police officers.
“We have used transfer authority this year to spend billions on the border. We can surely find this amount of money to better protect our kids,” Patrick said, adding that there are “several sources in the current budget that can be tapped to provide this funding.”
Patrick did not name those sources.
During the last of these budget transfers in April, DPS, one of the agencies that Patrick is suggesting should be given money to pay for the bulletproof shields, was forced to relinquish $160 million of its approved budget to keep Operation Lone Star going. Without that transfer, leaders for the Texas Military Department, which has assigned 10,000 service members to the mission, would have been unable to continue the operation.
Patrick said the state should start by providing bulletproof shields to all school police officers and then expand to all law enforcement officers. The state could experience supply-chain issues in obtaining the shields, but it should push to get “every quality shield we can find.”
“This straightforward solution can begin right away,” Patrick said. “If all responding law enforcement had bulletproof shields last week, lives may have been saved.”
Patrick’s plan continues the trend in the state’s Republican leadership of responding to mass shootings by pushing for more teachers to be allowed to use firearms in schools and funding school police. But the law enforcement response to the shooting has been roundly criticized after state and law enforcement officials gave inaccurate information in the initial aftermath of the shooting that has since been debunked.
Police responding to the shooting took more than an hour to engage the gunman who was inside a classroom shooting at children and teachers. The police chief for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, Pete Arredondo, determined police were dealing with a “barricaded suspect” and that the children were no longer in danger, state officials said. The leader of DPS later said it was the “wrong decision, period.”
Patrick said that if every police officer in the state had a bulletproof shield, “their ability to respond to an active shooter situation would be greatly enhanced.”
Texas lawmakers have responded in a similar manner in the past. After a gunman with a high-powered rifle ambushed and killed five Dallas police officers in July 2016, state lawmakers responded by allocating $25 million in the state budget for police agencies across the state to buy bullet-resistant vests that could withstand rifle ammunition.
Last session, after two DPS troopers were fatally shot through a windshield in their patrol car, lawmakers agreed to foot the bill to bulletproof windshields in DPS patrol cars, Patrick said.
This is a wonderful grand explanation of conservatism. Regressive. Well worth the read. After watching it then argue with me about it if you disagree. Hugs
Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke in favor of “Christian nationalism” during a recent social media broadcast, echoing some of the worst despots and dictators from history. Texas Paul sounds the alarm.
Great cats loving gravy, what drugs do these people take? I am serious this rant is deranged. But these people really believe it, and the sex symbols they want to return to were often gay but hiding it. The truth is what he wants is white Christian straight male power. White Christian straight male authority over women and everyone else. How many times the article says that equality is wrong, that women must be servants to the male with no rights or it destroys humanity and western culture. Notice that he blames falling birthrates on women, he blames stealing kid’s virtue on drag queens / trans people. The only one he never blames for anything bad are the men. The men that run the country, the men who refuse to pay living wages so people can afford kids, the men raping and molesting kids, the men are not the problem according to him who is male. To solve the world’s problems, give all power to straight white Christian males who will take the country back to 1950. That was when white straight Christian males were the boss of everything, women obeyed men serving their needs, other religions were not considered a real thing, blacks / minorities knew their place and stayed there, and the LGBTQ+ were deeply hidden too terrified to attract notice. That is the equality that saves the country and makes god happy. Hugs
Via press release from Nazi-haven social media site Gab:
Our culture is what we hand on to our children, but the West isn’t having children. The birth rates are down, and people are wondering why we aren’t having babies. Our men and women aren’t making big families and our communities are becoming sterile and childless.
This is a crisis that’s been building for generations. Sterility is the real climate change crisis of our time. The poles are melting but it’s not the ice caps, it’s the sex symbols.
We have trashed our sex symbols in only three generations. The icons of male and female have been ruined by equality of the sexes, and the West has become almost indistinguishable from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We’re being terrorized by maniacal transvestites who want a genderless future.
Have you ever heard the phrase “You sound like a girl”? What is it about speech that can give away somebody’s sex? There is something in the detail of our tongue that gives it away.
We understand this on an instinctive level, but as a culture, we’ve forgotten that boys and girls are supposed to sound distinct and speak differently to each other.
Husbands marry and wives are married. This follows the pattern of Christ who redeems and marries His Bride. Christ gives His Body and Blood, and the Church receives Holy Communion.
God calls Israel to the wedding feast, and in His parable, the wise virgins trim their wicks until the Bridegroom appears to take them. The women are not running to the groom any more than mankind can run to God. He had to come to us to redeem us.
Do you see the pattern? There is active and passive in these icons. Christianity is marriage. Equality cannot exist in marriage.
Our culture is a cult of equality. The strange irony is that terms for active and passive lovers exist in homosexual slang, but not that of normal couples. I hate to say it, but the rainbow people have clearer terms for these dynamics than most straight people do.
What is it about magnets that give them their unique properties? They aren’t equal. There is a passive and active property to them, and they work on a polarity of positive and negative. Magnets either attract or repel according to their force. Opposites attract and stick. Magnets that lose their polarity lose their sticking power, just like men and women.
Drag Queen Story Hour is the Rocky Horror Picture Show for your children. It’s a linguistic sex-change program. The drag scientists want to destroy the virtue of children and their sense of sexual reality. How can we repair the damage that these “Frank-N-Furter’s” have done to the little Brad and Janets of the world?
Traditionalists need to talk ourselves out of this deadly transgendered sterility and back into our right minds as masculine and feminine creators. We must teach children to talk unequally and uniquely. If we restore the culture of opposites, we can restore the sex symbols. Our culture depends on it.
Photo: Gab founder and CEO Andrew Torba. The above piece is attributed to someone calling himself Kilts Khalfan.
This is the "thought out conclusions" of a right leaning Christian academic. What is being shown on Gab and other far right media sourceshttps://t.co/YD30sDulKv
Idiot! Having children or not is a very personal choice. There’s no law that says that you must have children. We chose to have them. We worked hard providing for them and making them good, caring people. Not everybody does that.
The birth rate had already been steadily declining for most of the 20th century. Then during the 1970s it leveled out. It has been remarkably steady since. Rising or falling by only a few percentage points for the last 50 years.
Like the gun issue where they blame everything but the guns these people refuse to acknowledge that “low birth rates” are a direct result of 40+ years of failed conservative economic policy. Happy, well off people have kids. Miserable people, in debt, who own nothing, waiting out the latest boom-bust cycle do not.
Gender isn’t going away. We’re just having more people express gender as they see fit for themselves. You know, embracing freedom and self determination.
If we restore the culture of opposites, we can restore the sex symbols. Our culture depends on it.
Translation from MAGAt Incel to English : “If the ladies don’t cater to our libidos and go all “Lysistrata” on us, then how will we grab pussies when we are horned?
Our ‘culture’ is about getting laid, because we find submissive rapeable women hawt.”
large families were for the mills, the farms, the factories … large because the graveyards were full of infants, toddlers, and older kids who didn’t survive .. and thus couldn’t “contribute” ..
Russia is intensifying its push to capture a key Ukrainian city in the eastern Donbas Region. CBS News foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tyab speaks with CBS News’ Lana Zak on the fighting in the Donbas, and whether civilians have been able to evacuate amid the intense conflict.
Hello Ali. Great points. What it comes down to is making the US schools a prison to send the kids to for 8 to 10 hours not for education, but so their parents can go to work to make profit for businesses. The kids will suffer in a stifling environment so the one problem that can be ignored is the love of easy access of guns in the US. And why is that easy access fought for and pushed, because it makes the gun industry a lot of profit. Thats the ask why three times answer. In the US it comes down to profit. People’s health doesn’t matter. Scared to go out in public, buy another gun to give the gun industry more profit because the politicians know we have to go out no matter how bad it is, we need supplies. We have to go to work. Kids have to go to school. But it doesn’t matter if some die. The profit must continue. We don’t have healthcare because it cuts into profits. We don’t have decent safety nets because it cuts into profits, we don’t have food or housing security in the US because it cuts into profit. The politicians and greedy wealthy owners of stock and companies don’t care because they know they won’t be shot, their kids won’t be shot, they won’t ever be hungry, homeless, in need. So they are humans in their minds, we are not, we are just to make them profit and disappear when we cannot function to make that profit anymore. And yes I am angry. Vote blue and vote progressives. Hugs
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