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Nikolas Cruz pleads guilty to murder charges and apologizes for Parkland high school massacre
Nikolas Cruz, the gunman who carried out the massacre of students and faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018, pleaded guilty in a Florida courtroom Wednesday to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder.
Cruz, 23, faces a minimum of life in prison and maximum of the death penalty, which will be decided by a jury in the upcoming sentencing phase of the trial. The prosecution has said they plan to seek the death penalty.
See also:
Gunman Pleads Guilty in Parkland School Shooting
Nikolas Cruz pleads guilty to all charges in 2018 Parkland massacre
5 things to know before Parkland school shooting change of plea hearing
It is good that the perpetrator of such a crime may be brought to justice.
I remember after the Columbine school shootings when it was promised that this would never be allowed to happen again. Unfortunately, our country strives to make it easy for children to access firearms unsupervised.
Second
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., mocked a Florida school shooting survivor as an "idiot" who "only talks when he is scripted" in a 2019 interview with a Georgia gun group, according to a previously unreported video obtained by NBC News.
"He is very trained. He's like a dog. He's completely trained," Greene said of the survivor, David Hogg, now 20, in an interview with Georgia Gun Owners Inc. in April 2019, less than two years before she was elected to Congress.
Videos of Greene, a freshman Republican, berating Hogg in Washington surfaced last week after she was appointed to the House Education and Labor Committee. House Democrats are pushing to bar her from serving on any committees, citing in part her previous statements suggesting that the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, were hoaxes.
How do people like this come to power? Where do they find voters who will vote for such people? Does this only happen in the USA? I feel confident that the good people of her voting district in Georgia will continue to re-elect her.
I like her "Trump Won" mask, now that it is abundantly clear he did not win after many lawsuits and audits later.
It is amazing to live in a time when people will believe the most ridiculous outlandish things without any critical thought. People can no longer tell fact from fantasy. Or facts simply do not matter.
Update: A prediction: Trump will win in 2024. Yes, really.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DannyB on Wednesday October 20 2021, @06:44PM (19 children)
When I was a kid, journalists seemed to take journalism seriously. Being objective. Keeping their own politics out of the story. When I got older I was surprised to learn that some journalists I respected had politics I disagreed with -- but I didn't know that before because they didn't bring their politics into their journalism. So even once I learned of their politics, I respected them as journalists even if disagreeing with them on other issues.
When did real journalism and objectivity get thrown out the window?
I remember in August 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. CNN was the go to news source. This war is what propelled CNN to being well known and popular. Somewhere between then and 2013 (when I quit CNN) it had changed.
What about Fox News? I don't know. Were they ever about objectivity?
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday October 20 2021, @06:59PM (16 children)
Were they? Did they advise against making war? Or did they help spread the lies [ozy.com], like the rest of mass media? I also remember them being pro-war after 9/11 too.
The only difference between then and now is the social media narrative added to the old timey propaganda. Nothing really has changed, all the same people are still in power.
Fake news from the state and its lapdog wire services are what fuel the fake news from everybody else
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @08:14PM (11 children)
turns into
You're such a troll.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday October 20 2021, @09:01PM (10 children)
Whatever, that doesn't explain what made CNN the "go to news source", or why they were "propelled". They are 24 hour "news" channel. That's what made them popular, the convenience. Doesn't mean they were any more truthful than they are now. You make no sense.. surprise surprise
What changed was that every headline became a screaming editorial on all the news channels, imitating FOX
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday October 20 2021, @09:16PM (4 children)
What made CNN the go to news source was because they had gotten reporters in the hotel on the night that the bombing began. They had battery operated satellite phones and were able to report along with some actual video. No other network news organization had this. I remember other channels, such as NBC, saying things like: "CNN is reporting blah blah blah". That is because the only facts they could get is that it was a fact that CNN was reporting some specific thing -- whether it was true or not.
The first gulf war is what made CNN popular. It had already existed as a 24/7 news channel. It became very popular because it was in the right times and places in the gulf war.
It's not about "truthful". It's about reporting simple facts and nothing more. This is what many news organizations did back in 1990. It was a different time. Journalism was still taken seriously. You may not be old enough to remember.
Other print news organizations got reporters in and reported similar facts. I remember reading things like Time, Newsweek, and others at the time. All of the news painted a coherent picture, consistent with what the Republican administration was itself publicly reporting.
You just cannot accept that news organizations may once have been something different and better than they are today.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @09:32PM
That would require actual critical thinking and would interfere with their political narrative.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday October 20 2021, @10:18PM (2 children)
Well, yeah, if they are the only ones there, you go to them, you go to anybody with a mic and camera. Doesn't make them any "better" or more credible. It's just serendipity... The magic worked. Like I said in the other post, only their tone changed, nothing is said without an opinion. I tuned out for the same reason, it's impossible to listen to.
And please, 1990 was hardly a different time (though your comment is amusing). We could still see people like Trump a mile away moving up the ranks, Bill Clinton, for instance, joined at the hips, helped Newt Gingrich (you remember him, don't you?) become speaker of the house a few years later. The far bigger change until they gave it up for Trump was in '68, lit the fuse... made Trump inevitable, a natural progression from Nixon and Reagan Gingrich, et al and all the democrats that assisted, like evolution itself. You may not be old enough to remember. I do, watched it live, Mayor Daley sure showed them...
Wait, what? being consistent the administration is "better"? And what was "coherent" about it? Yeah, okay, they finally came around and criticized Vietnam and made a small stink about the CIA (but that was well before 1990), but basically they remain the same mouthpiece as always. What has changed is their presentation, the story line hasn't.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @02:10AM
That sure took you a while to come up with, pretty lame for all that effort. Of course it was super simple for a sigma brain like you, sorry to insinuate you had to tax your grey matter!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @06:57AM
I used to like Canada's Naked News. It was probably more objective than most other news networks because the news was mostly incidental to the reason people watched it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @03:58AM (4 children)
Do you remember Headline News? CNN operated that channel, which ran the news 24/7 on a 30 minute loop. If you turned it on any time of the day or night, within 30 minutes, you could learn about the top stories of the day. It didn't allow for in-depth reporting, but it also didn't focus on one or two politically charged stories. It was about informing views of the top news stories, not persuading them. No such channel exists at all on cable now. HLN nominally exists, but it's not a news channel any longer.
For that matter, CNN ran programs like Crossfire, which were opinion-based, but weren't biased. It was a debate between Democrats and Republicans, where both were represented equally. The viewer could hear both sides of an argument and decide which was more compelling. That program hasn't existed for several years, instead replaced by shows where the host tells the viewers what they should think instead of requiring viewers to think for themselves.
Those are two ways where CNN used to be much better than it is now.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 21 2021, @03:22PM (3 children)
I fondly remember Headline News. In 20 minutes I could get all the major news, skipping the sports nonsense.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday October 21 2021, @07:21PM (2 children)
"Hollywood Minute" was the best segment. When there was no TV, I had news radio "Give us 22 minutes, and we'll give you the world"
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @11:10PM (1 child)
So, that's what you Ruskies listen to? Interesting!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @12:36AM
I'm sure there were "Russkies" listening to 1010 WINS [youtube.com] in New York City. We have lots of different folks here, including Russians.
That Fusty the Moron™ is aware of that station gives me a sinking feeling that he may be geographically closer to me than I'd like. But given his idiocy, I'd guess he was from Stagnant Island [wikipedia.org] or Suffolk County [wikipedia.org], where the brain-dead usually end up.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 20 2021, @09:08PM (3 children)
Yes. They were. Even according to George H W Bush's Republican administration. They watched CNN. And said so.
You just don't like it. You are probably unfamiliar with the CNN back then vs what it is today.
They didn't 'advise'. They reported. That is ALL they are supposed to do. You've been watching too much of either current CNN or Fox News.
It was the R's who were for the war and the D's against it. Because the R's were in power. If the D's had been in power and the exact set of events took place and we were prepping for war, the D's would be for war and the R's would be against it. Got it?
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday October 20 2021, @10:36PM (2 children)
They read government press releases in front the camera, sometimes even when under fire. That's all they did for Trump too, in a funny kind of way... How long has that been standard practice? [courier-journal.com]
Where did I ever say that isn't so? What does that have to do with the press? You see some kind of substantive change where there is none, and I have already acknowledged the change in style that makes them so repulsive, and even that is driven by ratings... what was the question again?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 21 2021, @02:15PM (1 child)
There is a substantive change.
Once upon a time CNN was about journalism and reporting facts.
Now CNN is about politics, opinion, talking heads, and spreading a certain narrative. Just like Fox News.
I remember when CNN closed all of their foreign bureaus. At that time I thought "how are they going to report foreign news?"
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday October 21 2021, @07:27PM
All of mass media is following the same format. There is nobody to single out. Even NPR went Hollywood during the Lewinsky thing, had to wait all day to get regular news. Obviously they know more than you and I do about getting ratings
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 20 2021, @09:51PM (1 child)
No, I don't think so. Oh, they claimed to be "fair and balanced". But, they were a stalking horse from as far back as I can remember. The only "balance" was to balance some of the left's excesses.
But, yeah, what you said about CNN rings true. They were so new, so refreshing, so open and honest, they reported the stuff no one else would report. How did they go so horribly wrong in their later years?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday October 21 2021, @02:20PM
Greed. Profit motive.
Reporters and foreign news bureau offices in other countries are expensive.
Talking heads that spout unsubstantiated opinions are inexpensive. And get better ratings.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.