I-580 RW Shooter was Headed to ACLU and Tides Non-Profit to Kill People-Beck Railed Tide

OAKLAND, CA (KGO) -- The Tuolumne County man accused of shooting at CHP officers on Interstate 580 in Oakland over the weekend was headed to San Francisco to kill people at the ACLU and the Tides non-profit organization. He made his first court appearance Tuesday.

Byron Williams, 45, has a 2 p.m. arraignment in Oakland. Police say he will be charged with attempted murder for his role in the Sunday morning shootout that closed the freeway for most of the day.

Williams was shot multiple times by police, but was wearing a bullet proof vest and survived. He was recently released from a hospital and is expected to use a wheelchair to attend his court appearance, according to a spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff's Department.

Authorities say Williams was armed with a number of high-powered weapons and ammunition during the shootout, which lasted 15 minutes. He and officers fired more than 150 rounds at each other.

Williams' mother told reporters the two-strike felon was angry with left-wing politicians.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=7565389

Tides Center - I'm guessing this is the place since San Francisco address is on their website.

The Sponsor of Social Innovation
With a 30-year history in progressive social change work, Tides Center is the nonprofit sector’s leading sponsor of social innovation.
Tides Center provides back-office services, a legal framework, and capacity-building support for projects that share our vision of a just, healthy, and sustainable world. Tides Center accelerates social change by enabling new and effective approaches to some of our society’s most pressing issues.

As the country’s leading fiscal sponsor, Tides Center has set the benchmark in providing infrastructure and services to hundreds of nonprofit projects nationwide. To learn more about what Tides Center provides for fiscally sponsored projects, see our Services section.

Tides Center and our projects believe healthy societies rely fundamentally on respect for human rights, the vitality of communities, and a celebration of diversity. Projects work to effect change in the areas of social justice, economic development, civic engagement, environmental sustainability, environmental justice, human rights, community development, international affairs, and nonprofit capacity building, among others. Varying in size from a single dedicated volunteer to a staff of hundreds, Tides Center projects are located all over the nation. For information on individual projects, see our Project Directory

http://www.tidescenter.org/about-us/index.html

This shit's got to stop. When the left gets angry they don't arm themselves to the teeth to go and kill people they don't agree with.

Faux, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, and the local loonies on talk radio.

ACLU evil, evil, evil. They only stick up for criminals and minorities. Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Hitler, Nazis, Facists, Commies, etc.

The Oakland Police are reporting that Byron Williams, the man charged with triggering the massive Sunday gun battle on Highway 580, was traveling to San Francisco to kill people at the ACLU and Tides, a San Francisco environmental and progressive organization.

Tides' senior vice president, China Brotsky, told SF Weekly she was "absolutely baffled." She said her organization would have a statement to release to the public within the hour. Calls to the ACLU were shunted to the organization's communications director.

Williams is a two-time convicted felon with a lengthy criminal past and an apparent hatred of liberal activists. It is unclear if he has had any prior contact with Tides or the ACLU -- or how he chose the organizations, especially Tides, as his alleged targets.

Tides, which has an office in the Presidio and in New York, is a 34-year-old organization that describes itself as a "values based infrastructure for progressive nonprofit work." They have supported causes ranging from gay rights to immigration rights to climate change to youth arts. According to the most recent financial report available on its website, Tides in 2008 made 3,732 grants for $108 million

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/07/byron_williams_tides_aclu_580.php

OAKLAND — The body armor-clad man who kept a dozen California Highway Patrol officers in a prolonged gunbattle late Saturday night was on his way to San Francisco with a plan to "start a revolution" by attacking two liberal organizations, court documents state.

Although details of Bryon Williams' plan were not released, authorities said they had gathered enough information to conclude that the 45-year-old was destined to create havoc had he not been stopped by CHP officers on westbound Interstate 580 just north of the Grand Avenue exit.

"His intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and ACLU," a probable cause warrant submitted to the court states.

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Court documents state that Williams had a number of high-powered weapons and ammunition including a .308 shotgun with ammunition designed to pierce both body armor and vehicles.

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Although police and prosecutors continued to keep the contents of that binder secret, they said Tuesday that it included details of a plan to attack organizations in San Francisco that Williams believed had a liberal bias.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15559695

He can rot in prison.

I bet he gets life. Keep a watch on RW mother as well who stockpiled guns cause she thinks the revolution is coming.

July 29, 2009

BECK: OK. And then we have Wade Rathke — Wade Rathke, who is the founder of ACORN. He was on the board of directors, if I'm not mistaken, of the institution that is funding and paying for Apollo, right?

KERPEN: Yes. He's on — he was until this year on the board of the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center, which are the parent organizations that host the Apollo Alliance.

BECK: OK. So, Wade Rathke, ACORN, Tides Center, they decide that they're going to fund and create Apollo. One of the founders is the guy who went to jail — this is during the Rodney King thing — he went to jail and he was just a black nationalist. He came out a communist and he also then started looking into the green movement and he is the guy who said, hey, if we tie labor and ACORN and Greenpeace together, we've got a super-powerful group: Apollo.

BECK: OK. America, I would like you — I just like to ask you, Barack Obama keeps trying to separate himself from all of these organizations. He's telling us — he's giving speeches and saying, "I'm one of you, guys; I really am one of you." But then these organizations he'll always distance himself over and over and over again from the individuals.

But let me ask you this: John Podesta, Van Jones — who is now his green jobs 'czar,' an avowed communist — we've got the SEIU, who's in his office once a week talking about labor. They're the ones who were negotiating with all of the health care industry. He's in the Obama's office all the time. Wade Rathke, former founder of ACORN. It all ties to the Tides Center.

But who's really at the top of all of this? Who's the one that's trying to stay away from all of it and say I have nothing to do with it? Obama.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,535284,00.html

Sept 29

BECK: The Apollo Alliance — OK. Oh look: It's ACORN. ACORN founder Wade Rathke is former chairman of Tides Center. That's weird: Rathke was on the Tides board. ACORN, Tides, Apollo, Van Jones, Jeff Jones, Weather Underground — uh-oh.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ACORN, SEIU, Tides — all of those connections alone and seeing how they are all intertwined and related are eye opening. But, when you combine that with what they are being mobilized to work for, it's frightening — unless you love France.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,553382,00.html

"ACORN, SEIU, Tides — all of those connections alone and seeing how they are all intertwined and related are eye opening. But, when you combine that with what they are being mobilized to work for, it's frightening — unless you love France." --from the OP

-----------------------------------

What's this thing the nutball right has about France? Can anybody explain it to me? Germany and England--and, for that matter, Canada--are arguably more socialist, not to mention Norway and Sweden! Why is France a push-button brainfuck for them?

It's probably useless to ask for a REASON. Which brings me to my second point. The awfulness here is not that we have a few ignorant, belligerent assholes in our population. I'm ancient and I can tell you that these types have always been with us. But decent people didn't pay much attention to them. They were a tiny minority, sometimes with an organized group, the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan, sometimes just individuals with obviously defective brains. How is it that these weird, brain-damaged, untypical sociopaths are now national commentators? Why is this insulting garbage being hurled at us? I don't for a minute believe that it is "mainstream." But I do think that it is deliberate. Is the purpose demoralization of the great progressive majority? Is it prep for a Diebold/ES&S installation of Hitler II? Is it merely to make us swallow the Forever War, and items like health care which requires us to give money to multinational corporations, if they come in a "Democratic" package--i.e., to make us think that that is the best our government can do, the alternative being the unprecedented crime, looting and malfeasance of a Bush Junta? Is it to make us accept less, or is it prep for worse?

I have little doubt that having this far rightwing, psychotic crapola shoved down our throats comes right from the top of our corporate ruler class. It is no accident. It didn't "just happen." These aren't just the old Bible-thumper con jobs that we've also seen throughout our history (Preacher-man puts on a good, foaming-at-the mouth diatribe "for Jesus" while fleecing the flock and diddling the women), and it has a quite different character than the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, which was more a shared delusion. This is a form of psyops being used against our people.

I know that the Project For A New American Century operatives wanted to rid us of "the Vietnam Syndrome" (our loathing of unjust war), and that Grover Norquist & brethren also formed overt plans to dismantle the government, especially its functions of protector of human/civil rights, protection of "the commons," and regulator of "organized money" (as FDR put it). Is there also a chapter of this fascist takeover playbook about making Americans think ill of each other--making us think that a lot of other Americans are stupid, foaming-at-the-mouth knuckledraggers, and so, why bother with political and grass roots organizing--the country isn't worth saving?

Anyway, to my mind, THAT is the problem. Not the maniacal fascism of a Beck or a Limbaugh, but the corporate commandeering of our PUBLIC airwaves and filling them with this trash. We are better than this, believe me. We are a better people. We deserve intelligent commentary and it is deliberately being denied to us.

So much disinformation in such a short time.

Only Glen Beck could tie "black nationalists" to Greenpeace.

Shit. :-(

:shrug:

My consolation is I shot a handgun for a better score than him in a couple of matches this year.

He goes to tea party rallies with his AR-15 on his back, his handgun strapped openly to his hip and his bible in his hand.

or home entertainment...

or a social life...

Honestly -- Bayonets?! Seriously?

money. I should say that the RW went after Teresa Heinz Kerry for fulfilling a grant to Tides.

That's the beauty of the ACLU. Too bad asshat can't see it.

than Lindsay Lohan drive to prison.

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother's Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco on Sunday with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the ACLU and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

Williams, an anti-government zealot on parole for bank robbery, had hoped to "start a revolution" with the bloodshed at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, authorities said.

But before he made it to the city, Williams was stopped by California Highway Patrol officers for speeding and driving erratically on westbound Interstate 580 west of Grand Avenue in Oakland.

Police say he then initiated a chaotic, 12-minute gunbattle with officers, firing a 9mm handgun, a .308-caliber rifle and a shotgun. He reloaded his weapons when he ran out of ammunition and stopped only after officers shot him in areas of his body not covered by his bullet-resistant vest, authorities said.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/20/MNMN1EHB37.DTL#ixzz0uHC8sTsb

GROVELAND — Until he "snapped" and entered the public eye by way of a gunbattle with California Highway Patrol officers Saturday in Oakland, almost no one had heard of the town Byron Williams called home — and almost no one in town had heard of him.

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The man was such a hermetic presence in the town that almost no one noticed when he was arrested for robbing a bank in Chowchilla in 2002 and went to prison until his release three years ago. Sheriff's deputies finally found him and served that failure-to-appear warrant in 2008 and didn't hear from him again until last year, Wilson said, when Williams started and promptly lost a bar fight at the local pub, the Iron Door Saloon.

"He got drunk, got in a fight with somebody, and he got his butt whooped," Wilson said. "He's not very good at this stuff."

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(A neighbor) "He was (angry) about the new president," Funk said. "He said the world's going to hell in a handbag because we have a black president and he didn't think black people deserve to be president. He was just bitter."

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His apparent racism, combined with comments his mother has made to the media that she owned the guns he took from her because she believes a "revolution" is near, may paint a picture suggesting Williams was part of a white supremacy group and could have been acting on their behalf Saturday, but local sheriff's deputies said they've seen nothing to suggest he was connected to such a group. Authorities in Oakland believe he acted alone.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15560859


Looks like he took some buckshot or glass to the face in the battle.

Funny thing is the police have a gang charge on him in this case.