Declare Festivus and Go Home?

Patriot group issues "call to action" to air "grievances" at Oregon wildlife refuge.

The Cruz Weasel Magna Carta

I wanted to follow up on my debate take from last night. As I said, following the debate, the Trump festival and the video out of Oregon all together made it hard for me to follow as closely as I'd have liked or take it in as coherently as I'd wish. And it seems the initial reaction from commentators is that Cruz did worse than I suggested. My general sense is that it wasn't that Cruz got attacked or that the attacks on him did any particular damage. It was that the spotlight was inherently bad for him.

Here's what I mean.

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Body Image Victory For The Ages!

Barbie goes curvy.

Making Sense of This Weird, Weird Night

As I noted earlier, the multiple events we were trying to cover tonight - especially what amounted to a Republican debate and a simultaneous counter-debate - prevented me from giving the kind of focus to the debate proper which I normally would. So my impressions will be more tentative than they normally are.

Let me start with the debate itself.

At the outset we had the round of questions and snarks about Donald Trump. And for the first half hour or more the debate had some of the feel of community access television. There was even some odd tone to the sound system, at least on my hearing. But mainly, I think it felt disjointed and a little odd because the major center of gravity in this battle, Donald Trump, wasn't there. You had canned, awkward jokes and a lot of off-balance tension. But the big takeaway for me was that after a half hour or so of that, they were done talking about him.

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Rick Hasen will be chatting with Prime members today at noon

Professor Richard L. Hasen will stop by The Hive to chat with Prime members, Today at noon EST. Get your questions in here! He'll be chatting about election law and his book PLUTOCRATS UNITED, which explores how both left and right wings avoid the key issue of the new Citizens United era: balancing political inequality with free speech.

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Okay This Debate Won't Blog Itself Blogging

10:48 PM: Cruz: "I will tear down the EPA's blend wall."

Debate and EveryFrigginElse Blogging

We are currently covering the debate, the Trump speech and the breaking news out of Oregon of the FBI release of the fairly detailed video of the death of militant LaVoy Finicum. I'm hoping back and forth myself between each of the three. And I confess it's made my blogging lighter and less coherent than I'd like it to be. But we've got members of our team working each story.

* First, watch the FBI video. It's 26 minutes long. But the key events take place over about a minute starting just before 8 minutes in.

* On the Trump front, I was only able to watch live the early part. It started with this weird portion where Trump rattled through a list of his rich pals who wrote big checks for the fundraiser. And it was big money. A million a piece from a few people, including a million from Trump. It was also genuinely surreal, sort of a mix of Jerry Lewis telethon and oligarch variety hour, a view from a different world of rich real estate magnates in the tri-state area who can help out with a check for $100,000 or $1,000,000 for a friend and a good cause. It was weird. All quality people.

* The basic decency and seriousness of John Kasich is a truly discordant note in this debate.

And Now This Debate Thing

9:12 PM: As we're watching the early moments of the GOP debate, here's some video that captures what Donald Trump has done to Jeb Bush.

9:27 PM: "I know you like to argue about the rules but we're going to have a debate." Chris Wallace gets frustrated with Ted Cruz's nonsense.

9:29 PM: Cruz gets boo'd by the crowd. (Some disagreement among the editors here about whether crowd was booing Cruz or booing in support of Cruz. What'd you think?)

9:41 PM: Once again, listening to Kasich, it's not that I necessarily agree with him. But he's really the only one up there that is acquainted with a pretty broad range of policy issues and has pretty reasonable views. That's opposed to people who either have no acquaintance with any of these topics or who are simply taking dictation from the neocons who ran things under President Bush.

10:01 PM: Jeb Bush has become a reasonably funny insult comic against himself.

Breaking

We're just getting word that federal law enforcement in Oregon is holding a press conference where they are going to release a video of the shoot out in which the ringleaders of the Oregon militia stand-off were apprehended. This is presumably to clarify how militant Robert "LaVoy" Finicum died. More shortly.

And here's the video.

And Here We Go With the Trump Interview

* So Trump starts with basically saying, he was mistreated by Fox so they needed to be punished.

* Now he's explaining how they spent the day begging him to be nice to them, show up at the debate. Says he got an apology from Fox.

* The gist of Trump's comments are: Fox apologized but it was too late. I already have my veterans event.

* "I wanted to fight for myself, just like I'll fight for the country."

WTF Overview

So a little overview of how we're going to approach this very weird debate night. By schedule the Donald Trump counter-event is supposed to start at 8 PM. And that will be preceded by an "exclusive" interview with CNN - probably a chit for their being the first network to announce they'd cover his speech live. The Fox debate gets underway at 9 PM. But of course, it's already 8:15 PM. And the 'exclusive' interview hasn't even started yet. So there's little doubt that Trump plans to let his extravaganza roll right into and maybe right through the gutted Fox debate. We will be covering both events, simultaneously, whenever they happen.

Just in Awe

This would appear to be what we're in store for tonight ...

Donald Trump says Fox News is calling him every 15 minutes. He had a conversation minutes ago with Roger Ailes.

— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) January 29, 2016

I hedged a bit on whether Trump could pull this off in my post last night on Trump's mastery of dominance/aggression politics. But I think this is going to be a long night for the folks at Fox News.

It Just Might Be Working

It's a pretty safe bet that by seizing the opportunity to decapitate the leadership of the Oregon occupiers, federal authorities were hoping the remainder of the ragtag outfit would just shrivel and go away. It sounds good in theory, but it's still a roll of the die. The risk, obviously, is that you end up with a more emboldened, more radicalized, and more paranoid rump group left behind that is nervous, twitchy and less predictable.

I would say the signs over the last 15 hours or so are looking pretty good for the feds' strategy. Here's why.

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The Trumph of the Will

I wanted to make a couple related observations about this Donald Trump debate drama.

First, an admission.

When I heard last night that Trump was pulling out of the Fox News GOP primary debate I was quite certain he had every intention of finally attending tomorrow night's event. The point was simply to engineer 48 hours of cable news drama, begging by Fox News, all topped off by Trump finally deigning to attend the event after all the other players had been sufficiently humiliated. But unless the man is managing a far better bluff than I can imagine, that is clearly not the case. It also seems clear it was never the case. I see no evidence that Trump fumbled this gambit or boxed himself into a non-attendance he didn't intend. Being a no show was the plan.

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Violence, Tragedy and Nonsense

As luck or fate or random chance would have it, as the news about the Trump debate drama and the arrests of the Bundy-ites broke last night, I was out for a celebratory dinner with our New York City editorial staff to gear up for the many late nights of the primary season proper. So the DC team carried the ball and we here in New York tried to follow the sketchy developments as they emerged from Oregon on our iPhones. By the time I got home, we knew that one militant was dead and, a bit later, that it was Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, one of the most high profile of the militants and the one who'd openly said he'd prefer to die rather than be taken alive. Here's a look at who Finicum was.

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