We’re hiring an Associate Editor to work out of our NYC headquarters overseeing LiveWire and breaking news. Listing after the jump …
In recent years, we’ve seen a topsy turvy battle over the expansion and restriction of early voting and other reforms intended to make it easier for people to vote and thus expand the number of people who vote. Democrats (favoring more voting) and Republicans (favoring less) each act out of a certain self-interest. But contrary to articles like this one that present this as a mere battling for partisan advantage, the two sides aren’t equal. In a democratic society, efforts to expand the franchise have an inherent political morality on their side. And sites like TPM have routinely and rightly condemned various state GOPs who have gone to great lengths since 2010 clawing back early voting opportunities (and pushing other voting restrictions) to reduce voting by the young, the poor and the non-white.
Fascinating, sweeping new study showing how Fox News is perhaps the biggest force of organized and intentional distribution of ignorance in American society. We’re inured to how shocking this is.
Where did Jerad Miller and his wife get their firearms? Jerad was a felon and thus not legally able to buy weapons. It turns out he was on Facebook in the lead up to the attack asking for help getting guns. From a Facebook post a month ago: “So, if anyone can send me a rifle to help stand against tyranny, let me know. Revolution is coming and we are not prepared! Help! … I want an AK so bad.” See more here.
Here is part of a letter written in 1684 …
“I desire to take boldness to propose a request. A vessel carried away a great number of our surprised Indians, in the time of our wars, to sell them for slaves; but the nations, whither they went, would not buy them. Finally, she left them at Tangier; there they be, so many as live, or are born there. And Englishman, a mason, came thence to Boston: he told me, they desired I would use some means for their return home. I know not what to do in it; but now it is in my heart to move your honour, so to meditate, that they may have leave to get home, either from thence hither, or from thence to England, and so to get home.”
This is the final portion of a letter written by John Eliot, who the Massachusetts Puritans somewhat grandiosely called “The Apostle to the Indians”, to Robert Boyle in November 1683. Boyle was one of the founders of modern chemistry and a pioneer of the scientific method. He also took an interest in the Native Americans of the English colonies. And here, in a final passage of the letter, Eliot reveals a nugget of information that was a matter of deep fascination for me when I was writing my dissertation in the 90s. New England was engulfed in a brutal, catastrophic war in 1676-77, one that led not only to massive loss of life on both sides but the death and expulsion of most of the Indian population within the core English area of settlement.
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Both weird and chilling. It seems the couple who killed the police officers in Las Vegas yesterday and the “sovereign citizen” guy who tried to storm a courthouse in Cumming, Georgia on Friday had the same plan: to take over a courthouse and start executing public officials or (possibly in the Georgia case) holding them hostage.
The crooked bargain, in which Virginia State Sen. David Puckett (D) resigned in order to block Medicaid expansion allegedly in return for a state job and a judgeship for his daughter, seems to have fallen through. Medicaid’s toast. But everyone seems to be running for the hills. Puckett now says he doesn’t want the job. And the job doesn’t seem to want him either.
The level of apparent corruption here is as comic as it tragic for the Virginians who are now robbed of health care coverage.
Initial reports out of yesterday’s police ambush in Las Vegas suggested that the alleged perpetrators – now identified as Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda Miller – were neo-nazis and/or white supremacists. But Sheriff’s Department officials now believe that the couple placed a swastika on one gunned down police officer’s body because they believed police were part of Nazi-like oppression.
Pro-Bundy, extreme pro-gun, anti-government, filled with conspiracies about rising totalitarianism in America, symbol of extreme fringes of the Tea Party movement. The whole enchilada. Meet the couple that allegedly ambushed those police officers yesterday in Las Vegas.