I confess: I’m kind of surprised. This situation in Oregon with these militia goofs occupying a federal building and threatening violence against federal law enforcement is usually the kind of story that we have mainly to ourselves here at TPM – maybe a bit of national coverage, a lot of local coverage and us. And we definitely do plan on being all over it. It’s exactly the kind of white privilege performance art we love as a news story, right in our bailiwick of the bleed-over between domestic extremism and conventional politics.
Statement released about a half hour ago …
Statement from Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward: “After the peaceful rally was completed today, a group of outside militants drove to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, where they seized and occupied the refuge headquarters. A collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution. For the time being please stay away from that area. More information will be provided as it becomes available. Please maintain a peaceful and united front and allow us to work through this situation.”
In a surreal scene mixing elements of Stormfront, Aryan Nations and Waiting for Gufman, the son of Cliven Bundy, a hodgepodge of rightwing and anti-Islam activists and local Oregon militia members have occupied the sleepy visitors’ center at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon in an apparent bid to provoke a confrontation with federal law enforcement.
The center was closed for the weekend.
Hillary Clinton said that it is O.K. to ban Muslims from Israel by building a WALL, but not O.K. to do so in the U.S. We must be vigilant!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2016
Approximately 18% of Israeli citizens are Muslims.
In retrospect, Jeb Bush’s decision to go with “Jeb!” (exclamation point included) as his campaign slogan turned out to be perfect metaphor … no, not even a metaphor, simply a guide to his campaign: taking something fundamentally uninteresting and repeating it with escalating emphasis and frequency until it becomes interesting. Now apparently his campaign is considering a last ditch plan to add a second exclamation point. But is that going to work? I doubt it.
Wayne Barrett, author of the book “TRUMP: The Greatest Show on Earth: the Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention” will stop by on Monday May 23rd to chat with TPM senior editor Catherine Thompson about the updates to his book and the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump. Follow along with Catherine and Wayne’s chat and submit your own questions too.
This latest news about the implosion of the Ben Carson campaign is almost enough to convince me that Armstrong Williams is really a nefarious Svengali figure cynically manipulating the actions of a hapless Chauncey Gardner type candidate, all to the end of getting rich quick selling mail order candidate-signed Carson/Jesus velour paintings.
TPM is pleased to announce the winners of the Ninth Annual Golden Dukes recognizing the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior, The Crazy and betrayals of the public trust. The awards are named in honor of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who epitomizes the iconic modern scandal.
Going back to my post yesterday about the US murder rate, I wanted to go back and consider the regional and international terrain. As we’ve discussed before, there really is no such thing as a US murder rate. The US has always had a few geographically distinct murder rates. Murder in New England for instance is not that much more common than it is in Western Europe, whether today or 25 years ago. But the South has always had dramatically higher murder rates than the rest of the country. And even with the South, Louisiana has long had a murder rate wildly higher than even the rest of region. But even for all that, we tend to look at the US murder rate and compare it to Europe. But that obscures what is in many ways a much truer, historically meaningful and telling comparison: high murder rates as a phenomenon of the Americas.