A few days ago I saw a former employee muse on social media that the only plausible explanation for this election cycle was that I had found a golden lamp and summoned a genie with it. It’s an interesting theory I’m not in a position to comment on. But looking at today’s historic Palin endorsement of Donald Trump, I think, forces us to rethink the last half dozen years and understand Sarah Palin not as a disgraced has-been but as a Republican innovator who arrived before her time.
The CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, Dr. Robert Jones, will be stopping by the Hive for a live chat on the intersection of religion and public policy in America.
The night before Sarah Palin’s historic endorsement of celebrity businessman Donald Trump, her son Track Palin, 26, was arrested for domestic assault after allegedly punching and kicking his girlfriend and then threatening to shoot himself in the head with his AR-15 assault rifle. At one point, according court document, Track was “holding onto a gun, yelling ‘do you think I’m a p—y?’ and ‘do you think I won’t do it?’”
You may have noticed that over the weekend I flagged this odd, possibly disturbing news that one of the top Oregon militants, spokesman LaVoy Finicum, is mad that Arizona child protective services has removed four foster children (all adolescent boys) from his custody back at his ranch in Arizona. The removal is apparently tied to the stand-off because the timing coincides. But there’s no direct evidence of that and no comments from the state authorities. Two things jumped out at me: first, you’re not supposed to live off your foster kids, certainly not as your sole source of income, as Finicum himself suggests they are. Second, something I didn’t mention in my initial post: is Finicum using these boys – seemingly between four and as many as eight or more at a time – for free labor on the ranch? There is no evidence that this is happening and Finicum has a large family of his own which presumably does a lot of work on his ranch.
The CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, Dr. Robert Jones, will be stopping by the Hive for a live chat (sub req) on the intersection of religion and public policy in America.
With all the news afoot, I wanted to remind you that we are actively hiring for two staff positions – a social media editor in New York and a Story Editor in DC. See the listing in the link and please apply and/or spread the word.
Early on Sunday, a man believed to be one of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge militants, was driving on Greenhouse Lane near Hines, Oregon when he “failed to navigate a 25 mph curve in his white 2003 Ford van. He traveled off the road and crashed through a barbed-wire fence, ending up about 150 feet off the roadway.”
Happily, Darrow Burke, 57 of Ukiah, California, was uninjured. The van didn’t seem to come out of it as well as the picture above attests. Hines is the town immediately adjacent to Burns, the town just outside the wildlife refuge.
Burke was cited for driving without a license. But you don’t get arrested for that, just cited, so he was allowed to hitch a ride back into Hines with the tow truck driver and apparently back to the stand off.
My first response to this debate is just how wildly different the Democratic debates are from the Republican debates. Some small part of that is tied to just how many Republican candidates there are. Some of it turns on the especially incendiary personalities of some of those candidates. But most of it turns on relative primacy of factual discussion in the Democratic debates and the lack of the bellicose often verging on apocalyptic rhetoric that has become the baseline of the Republican conversation.
Put simply, the Republican debates are great in publishing terms. I’ll grant that they are high drama. They’re toxic in civic terms.
10:42 PM: If Gov O’Malley is converting to Islam that’s huge.
10:43 PM: Hillary really would have been well served by more debates.
10:44 PM: “That questions annoys me.” (As well it should.)
10:25 PM: Interesting response from Clinton here about the “red line” and chemical weapons. This would be an obvious place for her to distance herself from Obama and from all accounts she was more hawkish on Syria than Obama. And yet she’s making a very subtle and I think right-thinking point. We hear a lot about the red line. And I think there’s real merit to the criticism. But there’s this other side too: you don’t just start killing people just because of something you said in the past. And we did get an agreement that with the Russians got chemical weapons out of the hands of the Syrian regime. I was surprised and impressed by that answer.
10:28 PM: I could come up with some arch way of saying this. But I just have this strong and I think accurate sense that whenever Gov O’Malley jumps in it’s generally some opportunistic comment that is not only basically off point but also something he probably wouldn’t be saying or care about if it didn’t seem to make sense in the context of the political debate.
10:32 PM: Hillary Clinton’s answer on Putin is one of those answers – smart, comprehensive, knowledgable – that make me think she’d be a really good president.